Barclays Africa Craig Corte Takes The Group On A Digital Safari

The group head of design and customer experience at the Africa-based financial services firm plans to create aspirational journeys on a par with those from Amazon and Google.

Barclays Africa is one of the continent’s biggest financial services companies, operating across 10 African countries.

The group is currently in the middle of a digital transformation. Foremost, it is rebuilding the entire digital real estate for its South African subsidiary, Absa. The Absa app relaunched earlier this spring, its new website was launched in July, as was a ChatBanking for Facebook Messenger option, and its online banking platform will launch by the end of the year.

Craig Corte is group head of design and customer experience at Barclays Africa, and the man charged with creating the customer experiences delivered by the new platforms. The design function he heads is a recent addition to Barclays Africa, so I asked him to explain how marketing is structured at the group, and how his role fits in.

Corte: We have a group marketing function, which is responsible for stakeholder management, brand, and corporate communications. Then we have vertical marketing teams dedicated to our retail bank, our insurance business, and our corporate and investment bank.

Design sits across the business horizontally. There are specialised teams for our retail bank and our investment bank, and a new team that we’re building for our insurance business. And we partner very closely with the digital teams inside both the retail and investment banks to deliver new digital experiences.

CMO.com: Is that structure historic or strategic?

Corte: It’s a strategic decision for two reasons. One is that our design capability has only been in existence for a year and a half, and it’s still pretty small, only about 45 people, working with different vendors to deliver an overall human-centred design approach. We’re mostly focused on digital at the moment, but it’s not only digital.

The second reason is that you mimic the organisation. Especially when it’s a new capability, it’s very difficult to build a disparate design team individually in different places. You need to build critical mass in the middle so that you can attract people. The biggest challenge is persuading design-oriented people who are much more at home in places like advertising or design agencies to come to a bank.

CMO.com: What are the business challenges the bank faces?

Corte: South Africa, and Africa for that matter, is very much a nascent digital market. We’ve reached critical mass in smartphone penetration, particularly in South Africa, and we’ve got a very big online population. More and more, people are used to the kinds of digital experiences that you get from an Uber or an Airbnb, both of which are local in this market. They’ve set the bar very high.

So you’ve got this very stretched market, which at the top end is digitally as sophisticated as you’d find in the U.S. or the U.K, and at the bottom end you’ve still got a proliferation of feature phones.

So how do you start building digital? Where do you peg your investment? Do you create aspirational digital experiences that are on a par with what you’d see from an Amazon or a Google, or do you dumb it down? That’s been the biggest dilemma for the business over the last couple of years, and relating that back to the business case for building sophisticated digital experiences.

In the last couple of years there’s been a non-investment mindset, with people thinking: “What we have digitally is enough. We’re not going to continue to invest in it at a big scale because we can’t see the ROI.” But there have been some big changes, particularly in the South African market. You’ve seen the deployment of fibre. You’ve seen the costs of bandwidth dramatically decreasing as new competitors have come into the market. You’ve seen the emergence of the $30 to $50 smartphone, which has fundamentally changed how people are accessing digital experiences. All of those, on top of the banking disruption that we think is going to come from new and emerging fintechs, have repositioned digital in the business as a key strategic area for investment.

CMO.com: Talk me through the transformation strategy.

Corte: The current digital strategy is in its first year. We’ve repositioned digital from being an order-taker to the business—in other words, responding to requests for this feature, that feature—to delivering six things that we believe are important strategically.

The first of those is a complete rebuild of our end-to-end digital real estate, starting with our mobile app all the way through to our main retail sites and then extending into our online banking platform. We’re currently about two-thirds of the way through that, so we’ve got new apps going to market and our main site, www.absa.co.za, went to market mid-July. These are really big milestones and they are fundamentally different customer experiences to anything we’ve put out in the market before.

CMO.com: And is this the first part of a much bigger transformation?

Corte: Very definitely. Phase one is getting what we think are the table stakes in place. Let’s get our customer experiences to the point where we’ve got a beautiful, compelling, useful set of experiences that works for everybody.

The second phase is to start customising those experiences on an individual basis, getting into far more direct and focused experiences for each user. Particularly as you come back and we know a little bit more about you, we can start building profiles and using our data sets to start customising experiences behind your interaction.

The third phase is starting to end-to-end our marketing all the way through the acquisition funnel to conversion—looking at how we’re creating demand, how we’re pushing that demand onto our retail site, driving those users through a very customised experience and to the point of conversion and sale.

Then there’s a very big push to look at new ways of working. Particularly in technology and operations, we’re shifting from project-oriented approaches to a product management approach, which will allow us to build sustainable cradle-to-grave teams that live, eat, and breathe their particular product.

Everything is a product, even a channel. The teams will be very focused on optimising that product or that channel to make sure it’s consistent with everything else we’re doing but also that it’s solving customer problems and, in doing so, solving a business problem.

It all comes back to maximising our opportunity with our customers and non-customers as they touch us. We have a billion touch points a year across branch, ATM, call centre, and digital, and each one needs to be optimised to get the best value for our customers because if we get that right, we’ll get the best value for the bank.

CMO.com: How big a problem are legacy issues in delivering that?

Corte: Legacy can be both a weakness and a strength. The fintechs will argue that legacy in a bank is a weakness. They’ll argue that we’re slow and it’s going to be really difficult for us to pivot and do those interesting things. Largely, they’re right, but legacy is also a massive strength because banks fundamentally work on the basis of trust. Building the tech is relatively easy; getting customers to trust you with their money, and scaling that, is the really hard bit.

That’s why banks haven’t been that concerned about fintechs. I think that’s a mistake. Users change and they can change much more quickly than we could anticipate, so preparing ourselves for that future is part of the digital transformation. How do we create teams that work in an agile way that can pivot based on customer data, on market data, and can iterate consistently with velocity, which is the kind of thing that fintechs peg their competitive edge on.

That’s what our technology consultancy partner Cognifide helped us to do with our new site. We made the shift from legacy systems and internal teams to a global collaboration using an agile methodology. That meant we were able to deliver the site within six months. It also means the business is now working in a fundamentally different way, giving our marketing team the ability to self-publish at scale instantly across brand assets and digital channels. And we can iterate based on analytics, experience, feedback and future services.

CMO.com: Can you talk about your design process? I know you’re working hard on involving customers in creating experiences.

Corte: We co-created our new mobile banking app with our customers. We built UX labs on the back of that. We’ve had extensive testing through every cycle, not nearly at the level of maturity that we want, but certainly up from where the bank had been before. We think the future is definitely a collaboration between customers and business to deliver something that makes sense and is useful and solves customer problems.

CMO.com: What did the process actually look like?

Corte: It’s the principle that our opinions don’t count that much and that data and customers really need to drive where we go next, how we build, what we prioritise, what feature comes next or what feature we retire. It’s a discipline that most big corporates haven’t got right, particularly banks. A lot of times we’re very quick as businesses to create a solution to a problem we don’t understand or, in fact, have misdiagnosed as a problem in the first place. Tech is good at that.

We’re trying to bring a very sophisticated, first-world approach to solving customer problems, and we’re learning that it doesn’t matter whether our customers want to interact with us over feature phones or whether they want to interact with us over a connected experience of apps, connected television, social media, ATM. The same level of scrutiny and rigour has to be applied in understanding that customer and building both for the customer you have and for the customer you want in the future.

CMO.com: How do you approach innovation, not just within the organisation, but working with partners, looking at where ideas might come from?

Corte: We have a massive open innovation programme which is part of Barclays called Rise. We have a Rise installation in Cape Town and we’ve just taken our second cohort of 10 Africa-based startups through that very successfully. It’s resulted in 10 proofs of concept and one commercial deal.

It’s massively important for us to engage with an ecosystem of startups that are trying to solve problems in new and unique ways. African problems are very different to first-world problems, and the solutions will largely come from African startups. So how do we philosophically play in that ecosystem of VC, incubators, accelerators to add value both for ourselves and for the ecosystem?

Internally, innovation is about definition. The biggest mistake organisations make is trapping innovation in an innovation centre or giving it to a small discrete team. Instead, there are some very dramatic things where we’re trying to change culture. We’re saying anybody can be innovative and there are a number of avenues for you to express that creativity. And creativity is increasingly one of the things we look for in our leadership. It’s about building an innovative culture.