May 202019If our past experience with digital has taught us anything, it's that the road won't always be smooth. In an earlier version of our mobile app, we eliminated a feature that we were sure was only of interest to a small segment of customers. Well, those customers made their opinion of the change known very quickly and vocally--and we had to backtrack.We just don't accept that kind of give-and-take as a reality in digital, we embrace it. It's why we build our applications in an environment that allows for agile development, revision and deployment. Early on in our digital transformation, we realized how important that ability would be. So we took steps to bring our front-end and back-end systems together in a new, cloud-based platform. (A platform that, it's worth noting, lets us develop for iOS and Android simultaneously).It's also why we use our own people as beta testers. Four months before we deployed our new app, it was in the hands--and on the mobile devices--of 25,000 Scotia bankers, including thousands of people in the branches and call centres. That accomplished two goals at once. First, it alerted us to any performance issues we'd missed--and there are always those. Second, it turned each one of those people into digital ambassadors. By the time the app was released into the wild, they could easily talk with customers about it.Our mobile app went live in May. As I write this, its rating is at 4.5 for Android and 4.6 for iOS. So that's an immediate, tangible sign of success. But what's really exciting and potentially gratifying is what mobile is on the verge of accomplishing. And that is the transformation of our relationship with customers into one that doesn't take the place of the retail experience, but rather, transcends it. A relationship that is more responsive, more seamless, and ultimately (and counterintuitively) more human because it's woven into everything they do.That's the true promise of mobile. BCPeople are complex, so we don't entirely know what the future of retail banking will be--which is why I don't spend any of my time gaming out scenarios
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