july- Sept 202319Neo banks, with innovative features, cutting-edge technology, and strong customer service, are very focused on their ability to serve their customers more efficiently in some areas than traditional banks. They mainly seek to enhance the user experience by building products and services application layer on top of existing banking productscutting-edge technology, and strong customer service, are very focused on their ability to serve their customers more efficiently in some areas than traditional banks. They mainly seek to enhance user experience by building the products and services application layer on top of existing banking products. Traditional banks, however, have legacy, funds, an extensive customer base, and physical presence that provides assurance to our customers. Nevertheless, the challenge and opportunity is to always learn from the market and combine emerging relevant innovation with our traditional offer in a way that provides benefits of leaner and simpler operations to our clients and other stakeholders. Closely connected to this, I deem necessary to mention, is Banking as a Platform, which refers to a model in which the bank adds digital services from third parties to its portfolio, offering these on its channels, or vice versa, offering own services via open APIs to other third parties which are embedding those on their respective platforms. However, to do this, banks must design their software and its delivery using a different approach, built on APIs, with composable applications and customer experience at its centre. 2. What keeps you up at night when it comes to some of the major predicaments in the Banking space? (292)Besides the various challenges related to the current macroeconomic and geopolitical situation, what keeps me up at night would be mainly three topics. Always ensuring the strongest level of cyber security, resilience of digital operations, and continuing to attract and maintain the best people in my team. This is because one can design the best customer experience, but it will fail if cyber security is not a core part of its design, or the service is not resilient over time. Meanwhile, when it comes to people, returning to normal after the pandemic, finding the right talent and keeping existing team members as well as newcomers engaged, is more key than ever before. Our people must be interested in what we are doing for our customers and at the same time, we must ensure to offer them relevant paths for their professional development and progress. This requires a lot of time and effort. Our UniCredit Digital University, which offers all colleagues options for training and development based on their role and seniority is a great example in this regard. In addition to constant learning, the management team is personally dedicating time to onboarding our newcomers and supporting them from the start when they join the company. Working in the digital area of a bank vs. technology company, requires different processes, which fit the strict standards of a regulated industry. We need to continuously work with our talent in this context to strike the right balance of agility, openness and the highest standards of security, which respect all necessary regulatory restrictions.3 Can you tell us about the latest project that you have been working on and what are some of the technological and process elements that you leveraged to make the project successful? (366)Last year saw a step-change in our digital transformation journey; to deliver new common customer experience across different products, channels and regions, based on composable platform design. UniCredit Customer Experience serves our existing and new customers with an E2E unique, digitally native and consistent experience across different devices and all channels, to meet their needs for simplification, interoperability, and automation. We started with a focus on customer onboarding and cash loans, including credit protection insurance. Digital and business colleagues worked together to design common processes and customer experience for these products and services, which create a baseline for their application in different countries and regions. Based on common process design, we have analysed on the software delivery side, what are the components that can be generalised and re-used. Those were then developed as global components integrated on our common software platform via APIs for individuals' core banking systems and touch points.
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