THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

While digitalization has caused many brick-and-mortar bank branches to close, family-owned Delen Private Bank continues to open its doors wide, ushering in customers with digitally inspired offerings such as “Life-as-a-Service.”

In banking, the difference between making digital services available and embracing digital transformation is the difference between companies that will be left behind and those that will emerge as winners. It’s not enough to offer customers a menu of digital services they can access online. The leaders will be the financial organizations that can harness the power of digital technology to offer their customers an unparalleled experience.

At Delen, we’ve always put our customers first. As a family business, we provide services the way a good, old-fashioned mom and dad would want it.

We also prefer to keep IT operations and strategy inhouse. We own our infrastructure, information, and security. We developed our IT system in-house and programmed a backend tailored to meet the needs of our business and our customers. Our developers write all core apps inhouse, and we integrate APIs or SKDs in a defined build or-buy strategy.

Our IT teams also mix with the business, so they understand our business and what we need before they program anything. Sometimes IT meets with customers too. Shortening the chain between developers and customers creates intangible value.

Performance Through Digitalization

Efficiency in our processes is key to Delen’s success. We believe in the Keep It Simple Strategy and the Minimal Viable Product, and we digitalize the backend wherever we can. We’re driven by the belief that every repetitive task that takes more than 5 minutes a day should be subject to a change.

So, we use digitalization to eliminate mistakes in processes, streamline them, and improve them. Our aim is to make the life of our customers and relationship managers easier and the assets planning process better. Integrated digitalization also makes the bank more agile, improving our ability to respond quickly to dynamic industry and market conditions while coping with regulation requirements.

Digitalization also helps facilitate transparency in our fees and in the way we operate, which is what customers want from a personal bank. We strive for providing transparency at our customers’ fingertips and in our branch locations.

We look to controlled processes, our IT system, and digital applications to deepen our relationship with customers. Digitalization is a way for us to serve our customers better, but it’s not a substitute for maintaining human relationships. While most of our customers access their accounts via digital platforms, the bank branches are still the pillar of our customer relationships and why we continue to strategically invest in our local offices and local relationship managers.

Our online presence is a support function of the relationships we cultivate with customers in person. For instance, our IT system provides customers easy access to their account information and financial data, and it also enables relationship managers at our local offices to have discussions with customers about their portfolios and pull data in real time.