Citi Malaysia's aggressive digital plans to lure tech savvy consumers

Citi Malaysia, as a part of its "Go digital" transformation initiative, plans to set up four digital branches to grow its consumer business. This is in lieu with changing consumer demands and preferences. The new branches will offer customers self service channels as a part of the company’s smart banking strategy.The transformation widely includes the adaption on touch screens and media walls, which, the company stated will attract the digitally savvy audience. This move ensures that the company’s clients are provided with products and services by means of a digitally on demand method.In a statement to Star Online, Lee Lung Nien, CEO of the bank said that digital banking has changed the way an efficient client service can be meted out to clients. He explained that the shift onto a platform that embraces digital makes a “good business sense” as a growing number of clients are opting for digital banking.A+M has reached out to Citi Malaysia for more information on its digital plans.The bank's website also states that having launched voice biometrics in 2016 to verify clients through unique voice prints, the bank has seen a 66% reduction on the time spent verifying client details.Currently, according to its website, Citi Malaysia claims to have over 15 million consumer banking customers in the region, and the bank expects to have at least 1,000,000 customers actively using voice biometrics authentication in the next 12 months. Within three years the bank expects the number of users to grow to 3,000,000."The voice biometrics authentication capability underscores Citi's focus on technology to better serve our customers. We know that remembering different PINs and answering multiple questions can make the process frustrating. With this new capability, we offer our customers a faster and more secure authentication for a better customer experience," Anand Selva, APAC head for consumer banking, Citi Malaysia said."Biometrics will play a critical part in the future of banking, and we are excited to be paving the way for Citi globally. Today, our call centers in Asia Pacific receive about 35 million calls annually, of which a large portion are manually verified. With voice biometrics authentication, we will make the verification process easier, faster, and more secure for clients," Rahul Joshi, APAC head for consumer banking Operations, Citi Malaysia added.Last month, the bank also launched MobilePASS, a digital solution that eliminates the need for corporate users to carry physical tokens for logins. It is an app-based soft token that enables users to leverage their own smartphones to generate dynamic passcodes without any network connectivity to log into Citi's e-banking platforms.(Photo courtesy: 123RF)