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Gartner Announces Asia Pacific Winners of the 2017 Gartner Financial Services Eye on Innovation Awards

Announcement posted by Gartner 31 Oct 2017

Winners Selected at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017, October 30-November 2, Gold Coast, Australia

GOLD COAST, Australia, October 30, 2017 — Gartner, Inc. has announced the winners of the 2017 Gartner Financial Services Eye on Innovation Awards for the Asia Pacific region. The awards recognise innovative use of technology-enabled capabilities to highlight "best-in-class" financial industry initiatives launched within the past 12 months and to offer insight as to developments in digital innovation.

The finalists presented their case studies during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo and winners were selected by the audience.

Most Innovative Digital Business Model:

Winner: O-Bank (Taiwan) – Restructured from the Industrial Bank of Taiwan into a commercial bank at the beginning of 2017, O-Bank needed to gain a competitive edge quickly to ensure success after its transformation. It built a flexible, digital-native environment, which it claims is the fastest and most convenient system in Taiwan for customers to setup an online banking account. The platform maximises consumer convenience and provides omnichannel consistency. It enables the bank to provide a variety of financially innovative products that helps differentiate it in the market and acquire new customers.

Finalist: Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co. Ltd (Japan) – Invented a unique and secure method to share medical information on blockchain, in collaboration with Fukuoka City and Planetway Corporation. The secure data exchange platform (Avenue Cross) enables information to be shared quickly and efficiently between the insurance company and hospitals, reducing the time and cost of handling claim paperwork, as well as the risk of fraud. It also improves the customer experience by reducing the time, cost and effort to get certificate documents from medical institutions and file claims to the insurance company.

Finalist: Maybank (Malaysia) – Introduced Maybank’s Sandbox Initiative in June 2017 to provide a single ecosystem that includes all five essential building blocks for fintech: sandbox, data, API, tools and collaborative platform. The bank offers this initiative for free to fintech developers, to help support the development of fintech ideas in Malaysia, particularly with emerging technology trends such as digital, Internet of Things, social, cloud and open source. The bank believes this is an essential enabler to leapfrog Malaysia’s fintech industry to be on par with Europe and the US.

Most Innovative Digital Cost-Saving Initiative:

Winner: E.SUN Bank (Taiwan) – Launched a digital Intelligent Loan Platform in February 2017, to fully automate the process of credit review, loan approvals and disbursement for customers. The platform integrates big data, risk measurement, analysis and cloud computing, with the bank’s front-end digital loan platform and back-end loan approval management system. The platform works without constraints of time, location or technology, enabling customers to receive instant credit limit and interest rate quotations after applying online, with the whole process taking three minutes. It simultaneously lowers the cost of manual operations and provides customers with a friendly financing environment, thereby realising financial inclusion. This greatly reduces the complexity of loan processing for both the bank and customers.

Winner: Cathaylife (Taiwan) – Introduced a system integration solution to combine three systems working concurrently, which resulted from mergers with Global Life (GL) and Singfor Life (SL) in 2015. Cathaylife completed the system integration in January 2017, resulting in lower operational costs (US$10 million saved per year), improved efficiencies (GL and SL’s operational efficiency increased by 65 percent) and enhanced client services (182 service centers and 62 services were added for GL and SL clients, with client satisfaction reaching 99.5 percent). The integrated system now supports future company growth and digital innovation.

Finalist: Taishin Bank (Taiwan) – Introduced a digital innovation initiative in 2016 that analyses customer data to reduce costs. It built predictive analytics models that integrate customer information from all digital and physical channels, to enable the bank to deliver targeted products and services to customers. As a result, the bank established the Opportunity–Based Call Distribution (OBCD) system to determine the attributes of incoming phone calls from customers in advance, which are either directed to specialised or regular representatives. After a successful trial period, it applied the system to its other channels such as ATMs, to provide different offers to potential customers based on what they need. The company saved 47 million NTD by implementing a cloud-based platform; introducing a self-built recommendation system in ATMs; effectively making offers to potential customers; and reforming the workflow of personal loan applications.

Most Innovative Digital Customer Service or Product:

Winner: Hua Nan Commercial Bank (Taiwan) – Launched an online account service in Taiwan in July 2016 to attract a younger customer base (20-40 year olds) and provide digital convenience. Its SnY Digital Service provides customers with a comprehensive financial management account with digital dividend, combining AI and big data analysis to deliver exclusive mobile financial services. It simplifies the process for customers, enabling them to go online to obtain an account and make immediate transactions. The number of newly opened accounts for six months equals that opened at a physical branch over 22 years. The number of young customers acquired equals the same number of customers acquired over two years at 186 physical branches.

Finalist: E.SUN Bank (Taiwan) – Launched AI Chatbot, a service powered by an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to provide conversational commerce on Facebook Messenger and Line social media platforms for mortgage, foreign exchange and credit cards. This has enabled E.SUN to successfully build a new channel for banking services geared toward non-customers. After going live in April 2017, online credit card applications increased by 44 percent; online mortgage volume by 74 percent; digital foreign exchange volume by 74 percent; and the average cost per acquisition for credit cards decreased by 92 percent.

Finalist: ANZ (Australia) – Introduced a digital advice platform (Grow for Advice) in January 2017 for ANZ Financial Planners, which transforms the way customers receive financial advice. The main purpose is to reduce no-show rates for customer appointments; increase advice conversion; provide more collaborative and interactive appointments; save a significant amount of time; and demonstrate leadership in digital advice tools. The platform automates advice and product selection decisions previously made manually by planners, and integrates a customer facing iPad app with a back-office product research system and advice generation software.

From the four winners in the three categories, attendees chose O-Bank of Taiwan as the overall winner of the 2017 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award for Asia Pacific.

Award submissions were assessed using a robust and dynamic framework to ensure that the assessment process is pertinent and objective. The Gartner Awards Framework (GAF) is utilised as a structured model of assessment that enables the participating organisations to be benchmarked against world-class performance standards. The GAF consists of specialised assessment modules pertaining to the evaluation criteria for each of the award categories. The criteria and sub-criteria provide a robust set of requirements that are used as the methodology for benchmarking and learning among the participating organisations.

The identification of a Gartner award winner or finalist is not an endorsement by Gartner of any vendor, product or service.

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