I don’t bank with ASB Bank in New Zealand, and neither of the two banks I do business with offer this capability, but I was thinking about (okay, passionately arguing to myself about) one of the digital transformations introduced to the customer experience by ASB Bank while I was driving to a client’s site this morning.
That transformation is ASB Card Control, the ability within the ASB Bank mobile app to turn on/off your credit card, set a spending limit, turn off/on specific types of transactions (international, online), and more. Known as something of an innovator within the New Zealand context, ASB Bank has mixed together a set of ideas and developed an easy and creative solution. Those ideas would include:
– People are increasingly using credit cards to buy stuff. We want to encourage this.
– People have advanced mobile phones in their pockets, providing mobile computing and real-time communications capabilities like never before.
– Fraud with credit cards is annoying and costly, and a customer bitten by fraud will be less likely to keep using their card into the future.
I wonder what we could do about that?
And so Card Control was created at the intersection of concerns and opportunities, giving a simple way for every credit card user to have nuanced control over what their card can and cannot do. By comparison, the only control over my credit card offered at my business bank is to call them and get the card cancelled. That’s a very blunt status field – cancelled or current.
Where other banks see a mobile app as a way to report on the current balance of your credit card, ASB Bank has taken a transformation approach to the issue, in effect asking “What possibilities exist in improving the customer experience based on what is generally true now?”
Whether applied to customer experience (the outward facing digital transformation opportunity) or the employee experience (the internal facing digital transformation opportunity), that’s the key question to start asking. And trying to answer, in whatever tentative and experimental ways are available to you.