Approximately 80 colleagues attended the first ever Vanquis Digital BETA Summit in Chatham this month, from front line colleagues, right through to our Managing Director Chris Sweeney and our Chairman Jonathan Roe. The event highlighted recent successes, current commitments and the future of digital at Vanquis Bank, including the use of new technologies such as Alexa to improve customer engagement.
The day was filled with talks from leaders within Digital and live demonstrations of our digital products in action. It showcased the progress of our digital projects, commitments to achieve in 2018 and 2019, a glimpse into the future of robotics and AI in changing the way we use technology, and how Vanquis aims to harness the power of innovation. The day culminated in an exciting ideation workshop, where colleagues worked in teams to design and 'story board' the next big concept for the Vanquis app.
The digital team has experienced many changes and successes recently. For one, the Vanquis app rating has improved from its previous 2.2 stars rating to 4.8 stars on the app store thanks to the team's effort towards developing and releasing an in-house app. One of the team's recent milestones also includes surpassing 700,000 customers using our app!
The team has also grown and evolved hugely during this time. Mike Iyare, Cloud Engineer, shares his experience since joining the digital team:
"I've been on the team for about a year now doing so much fun stuff. There's so many ideas buzzing around the team and we have future plans that will hopefully take over the world! I love being part of the Digital team."
At the BETA summit, the team demonstrated the use of Alexa as an example for communicating to customers the latest information about their Vanquis card. New technology investments could bring us toward a shared view of the customer at the Group level with a new digital identity.
The digital team has even bigger plans for the next 18 months. With support from the business, the team is committed to building an online banking service to match the mobile app's success, improving test capabilities in order to release features faster and with better quality. They are also designing smarter ways to manage service incidents using the cloud to make sure our digital products are available for our customers to use anytime and anywhere.
With the future in mind, colleagues took part in a workshop and came up with some big ideas to improve the customer experience at Vanquis and to give Vanquis a unique edge. The top two most voted ideas are now being prototyped by the teams and tested from the initial concept. Both ideas included some gamification and positive behaviour reinforcements to help customers manage their account and build their credit score.
Esther Coleman, Head of Digital, had this to say about the Digital BETA Summit:
"The Digital Beta Summit was just super – everyone brought a huge amount of energy. It was great to see people from the team showcasing their work and talking passionately about improving our customer's experiences. Working together in mixed teams during the ideation workshop was my highlight – we've got great people at Vanquis and it was awesome to hear the ideas that came out of just under an hour of ideation."
Overall the day was a roaring success and the goal moving forward is to hold more BETA Summit days in order to collect ideas and encourage engagement from every corner of the Vanquis and Group businesses.