“OUR RESILIENCE AND PREPAREDNESS WAS THE RESULT OF MANY YEARS OF WORK”
Wednesday 29 July 2020
Daniele Tonella, UniCredit Group CIO, recently spoke at a Bloomberg industry roundtable about what the future of banks may look like from a digital perspective
“Coronavirus has truly demonstrated the value of the ‘invisible’ work of our IT teams. We were ready for the crisis, but our resilience and preparedness was the result of many years of work,” said Mr. Tonella during a Bloomberg industry roundtable entitled The Future of Finance: Leveraging Digital Transformation for Business Continuity.
UniCredit has been investing in digitalisation and its multi-channel offer to clients long before the coronavirus. Under the bank’s previous business plan, Transform 2019, €1.7 billion was invested in business related and operational IT systems to facilitate the Group’s digital evolution as well as meet and anticipate customers’ changing needs.
It was thanks to this significant pre-work that UniCredit was able to very quickly adapt to new ways of working at the very outset of the pandemic with proven operational flexibility. “We very quickly ramped up our connectivity from a few thousand people a day to more than 60,000, which normally doesn’t happen with the flick of a switch,” added Mr. Tonella.
The bank’s customers have also rapidly and increasingly embraced digital solutions as a result of the coronavirus. The crisis is changing the behaviours of individual and corporate clients alike with an accelerated adoption of the multi-channel service model across: mobile banking, internet banking, call centres and paperless branches. UniCredit sees this as an important opportunity to further accelerate the bank’s digital transformation and will continue to invest in its IT as well as staff training to fully support such evolution.
“What Covid has shown us is that digital is not just a tech game. It is a people story, which means if you want to become more digital, you need to think about the end-to-end customer experience relentlessly and in a different way than before,” concluded Mr. Tonella.
Watch the full panel discussion here.