Efma and Accenture announced the winners of their fifth annual Distribution & Marketing Innovation Awards for retail banking at the DMI Awards ceremony in Rome. The program brings together projects, innovators and institutions from around the world to celebrate the industry’s most innovative distribution and marketing initiatives.
A total of 183 financial institutions from 59 countries submitted 467 innovations for the 10 award categories: Best New Product or Service; Big Data, Analytics & AI; Customer Experience & Engagement; Digital Marketing; New Business Ecosystems; Phygital Distribution; Wallets & Payments; Workforce Empowerment & Behavior; Global Innovator Challenger Player; and Global Innovator Established Player.
The winners were selected through a combination of votes by a panel of judges comprising senior retail bankers from around the world and by Efma members and non-members from financial institutions online. Each entry was assessed using three criteria: its originality; its strategic capacity to generate long-term competitive edge and return on investment; and its adaptability for use in other markets and countries.
The winners of the 2017 Efma-Accenture 2017 DMI Awards are:
• DenizBank (Turkey) won the Best New Product or Service award for Augmented Agricultural Banking App. This award was voted on at the awards ceremony, after six finalists pitched their innovations live to gain votes from attendees onsite and online.
• Sberbank (Russian Federation) won the Big Data, Analytics & AI award for Tips in Sberbank Online, an artificial-intelligence-based tool that can help users change their financial habits for the better, saving them money, time and effort.
• KBC Bank (Belgium) won the Customer Experience & Engagement award with My car, which uses blockchain technology to create a seamless experience in car loans, from the instant the customer signs the order to the moment they drive their car off the dealer’s lot.
• DBS Bank (Singapore) won the Digital Marketing award with its DBS Sparks mini-series, which was inspired by real client stories. DBS Sparks provides digitally oriented content marketing instead of relying on traditional advertisements and promotions to foster brand love.
• mBank (Poland) won the New Business Ecosystems award for mPower Business Starter, which integrates government, bank and accounting services to create an easy and intuitive user experience, enabling customers to become entrepreneurs.
• Idea Bank (Poland) won the Phygital Distribution category with Idea Hub Express, a unique mobile co-working space.
• Barclaycard (UK) won the Wallets & Payments category with Barclaycard Grab+Go, which transforms a shopper’s smartphone into a ‘pocket checkout’ so they can scan the items they want to buy as they pick them off the store shelves, enabling them to complete their purchase with a single click.
• Intesa Sanpaolo (Italy) won the Workforce Empowerment & Behavior award with its ISP Digital Learning portal and smartphone app, which increases employee engagement and entices them to learn anytime, anywhere through a Netflix-inspired digital learning service.
• N26 (Germany) was named Global Innovator Challenger Player for bringing innovative services to market over the last year, including N26 Business, an account that enables freelancers and self-employed workers to navigate both their business and private finances, and a new digitized insurance service in partnership with Insurtech Clark.
• BBVA (Spain) was named Global Innovator Established Player for the innovations it brought to market in 2017. These include the BBVA API Market open and global API platform, which enables companies of all sizes to access a secure and powerful set of financial tools to help them innovate.
“It’s exciting to see so much innovation from companies around the world,” said Vincent Bastid, Efma’s CEO. “The spectrum of innovations that we’ve seen this year has never been so diverse, with major developments in 2017 including blockchain progress, advances in personalization, encouragement of entrepreneurship, expansion of hubs, evolution of banks in motion, empowerment of customers through self-service and self-shopping, and the combination of AI and Big Data. As institutions push the boundaries, they are creating new and exciting ways to engage with customers and provide the products, services and experiences for a digital-first world. Congratulations to all of this year’s winners for their achievements.”
Piercarlo Gera, global managing director of Accenture Distribution and Marketing Services, said, “We continue to be impressed with how DMI Award winners leverage digital technologies to create innovations that generate value for clients—in terms of customer experience—and also for banks, to help gain market share, drive revenue growth and deepen client relationships, while reducing costs. Digital industrialization in managing the underlying processes in customer engagement is rapidly increasing year after year as customer experience is increasingly critical given the competition that retail banks are facing from non- traditional competitors. While the majority of this year’s winning banks are from Europe, they represent numerous countries, showing that innovation knows no boundaries.”
To learn more about these innovations, visit www.efma.com/innovations. Continue following the conversation on Twitter at #DMIAwards2017.
