Beyond Bank levels up frontline ops with refined data strategy

Beyond Bank is advancing a data strategy to give frontline staff real-time insights to respond faster and with more personalisation and precision.

Stevie-Anne Dovico, Beyond Bank

The customer-owned bank is aiming to uplift its knowledge management, marketing technology and data governance capabilities in a broader effort to improve both digital self-service and support for frontline agents.

Speaking to the iTnews Podcast, Beyond Bank’s group executive for technology and chief information officer Stevie-Ann Dovico said the strategy would better equip staff with “insights that you need to have really good conversations”.

“ What I want to do is be able to give [our] people a superpower like eating a mushroom in Super Mario,” she said.

“They're able to anticipate needs, have those conversations and get to the needs of the customer faster.”

Dovico, who joined Beyond Bank from NAB in March 2024, said the bank had previously not used "the data that we have about our customers as well as we could have, in real-time, in order to have these conversations that anticipate their needs”.

Referencing the bank’s ethos of long-term, personal relationships with customers, Dovico said: “You can't be the best relationship bank unless you have your data in order.”

Another core focus of the data strategy is also uplifting Beyond Bank’s self-serve channels such as its mobile banking app and its chatbot.

“That will be a really good, personalised way of scaling what we do best across all the channels that we have,” Dovico said.

Having better conversations

Beyond Bank’s data groundwork is underpinning some of its current forays into using generative AI.

According to Dovico, the process started with the “easiest” use cases that can generate the most return in terms of efficiency and employees’ time.

These early use cases include drafting emails and putting them into a wider context. Another is streamlining information sharing in Teams chats using Microsoft Copilot.

“I'm a big believer in like measuring what you put in, even if it's a small thing like here with Copilot,” Dovico said.

Following this, Dovico turned her attention to boosting employees’ internal information gathering and “knowledge management more broadly”.

This, she said, could have just been an upgrade of the bank’s intranet, something both time-consuming and offering only a low return on investment.

Instead, she said: "How about if we use this same kind of functionality [and] instead of going and redoing every page and every user interface... for the intranet, why don't we use AI to be able to just ask the question to the page?

“Let's just have a killer search.”

This is currently in trial phase, but Dovico is confident of some of the big returns for the bank and its employees.

Citing navigating the contract management system as an example, she explained: “ I didn't have to go and design the UI for the contract management system. That's just a waste of time. I put in a search, and people could just ask what they want.”

Although not “exciting” on the surface, the use case serves a “really helpful” purpose in offering significant time savings for staff, she added.

In addition, Beyond Bank is also experimenting with using generative AI to assist call centre agents by providing them with all the material required to assist customers quickly and effectively.

Focusing initially on low-risk use cases, the trial aims to help agents “have better conversations with customers”, according to Dovico.

If successful, she hopes the bank will then be able to use these use cases to assist its frontline banking.

Stakeholder engagement

Experimenting with emerging technology is naturally fraught with risk in an industry as highly regulated as banking.

As a result, close engagement with multiple stakeholders is essential for Dovico, who, while agreeing that “technology is the biggest enabler for [the] bank,” is mindful that buy-in requires a more considered conversation.

Indeed, “[you] achieve buy-in by showing that this isn't just another tech thing,” she said. “I am not a fan of just doing another tech thing.”

Part of the conversation involves not only conveying a tech investment’s importance in “explainable, business-focused" language, but also being cognisant of stakeholders’ different expertise.

“There are really a few factors that will make the investment important,” she said.

“ We're worried about managing our risks, so how will this investment help us to make better risk-weighted decisions? We want to make sure our customers are happy: how will this make sure that our customer satisfaction remains high or increases?”

Staying focused on the business’s strategic objectives is critical, according to Dovico, even though “it's really easy to get excited by technology”.

“I consciously say to myself: ‘This is a really cool thing, but will it solve these problems?  If yes, then it's a good idea, and then how do we do this most efficiently? But if it's not, then it’s probably not a good idea.”

Looking ahead, Beyond Bank still has a number of initiatives in place around its core technology stack, including migrating parts of it to the cloud.

Dovico will also be focused on uplifting the bank’s cyber resiliency and service management capability, including observability.

“There is never a dull moment,” she said. “I love it, but it's sufficiently hands-on.”