National Bank of Abu Dhabi: An NCR APTRA Promote Case Study

The customer

The National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), the number one bank in United Arab Emirates (UAE), was founded in 1968. Today NBAD has a network of 85 branches and 274 ATMs. The bank also has an overseas network of 42 units in 9 countries, which is the largest of all UAE banks.

NBAD has won various awards, including “Best Bank in UAE” from Euromoney and The Banker publications, the “Middle East e-Banking Award,” the “Outstanding use of IT in Financial Services” Award and the excellence award for “Best use of Technology” from Banker Middle East.

The challenge

With a focus on providing customers with the best service, the bank invested in one of the largest ATM networks in the country. NBAD’s strategy means that the ATM channel is viewed as a key touchpoint to reinforce the bank’s branding and communicate its values.

The ATM is NBAD customers’ preferred delivery channel, delivering over 12 million transactions each year. Given the popularity of this channel it is not surprising that NBAD has described the ATM as a “mini-branch.” Thanks to its growing ATM fleet, NBAD was able to extend its reach to locations where physical branches wouldn’t be feasible, such as malls and busy residential areas.

With such dependency on the ATM, the next logical step for NBAD was to leverage “face time” with its ATM customers to further the relationship. NBAD wanted a simple yet powerful way to use their mini-branches as a communications channel, not only to reach its customers but also to reach the increasing number of non-customers using its ATM network.

They saw an opportunity to deliver messages to strengthen their brand, advertise new products/services and demonstrate its commitment to social responsibility. The question, of course, was how to achieve this and also segment self-service users to deliver targeted promotions and advertising accordingly?