PTSB Digital Transformation Qorus Reinvention Awards - Europe 2025 - Winner

In early 2021 the impending changes in the Irish banking landscape with the planned exit of 2 Retail Banks, provided PTSB with a unique opportunity to significantly grow its presence in the market. This coupled with recognising its own shortcomings in its then suite of digital solutions, the Bank initiated its Digital Transformation Programme.

Its ambition being to transform the Bank’s digital offerings placing PTSB in a position where it was recognised for delivering a truly ‘Tech & Touch’ customer experience. The Programme has delivered a portfolio of significant customer-impacting digital initiatives, including:

Digital Current Account - allows customers to complete the end-to-end journey to open a new account on the PTSB Mobile App in a matter of minutes replacing a previous 45-60 minute branch appointment. This has streamlined the internal account opening process and removed a significant volume of paperwork from the customer journey with c. 65% of all current accounts now opened on the App.

Own-A-Home – Digital Mortgage Application Journey - Developed in conjunction with Irish FinTech CreditLogic, our digital mortgage application portal enables customers to complete their mortgage application, to upload their supporting documents and includes secure messaging between the customer and Bank specialists. Fully integrated into core Bank systems, Own-A-Home has significantly reduced manual effort, eliminated c. 250 pages of paper per application from the process, reduces the risk of operational errors while also reducing processing time driving faster customer responses.

Customer Correspondence - aligned to our Core Banking Platform Strategy and aim of 'hollowing out' aspects of our core banking platforms, we completed a programme of migrating all customer correspondence from our core systems to a new state of the art Customer Correspondence Management system. This has delivered significant business benefits including simplifying our core banking platforms, significantly improving the change cycle associated with customer correspondence, reducing correspondence costs and also enabling the digital distribution of correspondence to customers.

New Online Banking Desktop & Mobile App - Known internally as ‘Service-A-Need’, our most ambitious and impactful initiative has been delivery of a new secure, resilient and scalable digital servicing platform (Finacle DEH and Online Banking), while providing customers with a new look digital interface and new servicing journeys. This was a technically complex programme, a replacement of the legacy online banking platform on a phased basis and its replacement with Finacle Online Banking and Digital Engagement Hub. The complexity was increased when one takes into account the significant integrations with the Bank’s broader eco-system including core banking systems and our Secure Customer Authentication functionality which is a critical component of our everyday banking experience. PTSB partnered with Finacle for an agile implementation, wherein the Bank was able to quickly deploy only the components they needed at first and enhance them later as required. It also provides the capability to do continuous integration and continuous deployment.

A first step and our key ‘moment of truth’ for the overall transformation programme, was the implementation of a new Digital Banking Platform and customer-facing Desktop solution. This included refreshed digital customer servicing journeys and a new modern look and feel to enhance customer experience.

This was followed recently with our new PTSB Mobile Banking App for our 650,000 active users. Supported by a new technology stack and infrastructure, this introduced a new look and feel, improved customer navigation and our first suite of new-to-mobile digital customer servicing journeys. The coming months will see the phased introduction of a further suite of new mobile servicing journeys.

The transformation journey, has enabled PTSB to dramatically improve its digital offerings also leaving behind an enduring internal digital capability that will continue to deliver into the future. The focus on digital transformation has been rewarded with significant growth in customer adoption of our digital channels with a 30% increase in the number of active digital users in the past 2 years while digital activity has increased by 36% in the same period. Customer satisfaction with our digital platforms and solutions has also grown dramatically highlighting that this significant transformation journey has truly delivered on meeting real digital needs of our customers.