OCBC Bank, An NCR APTRA Case Study

The customer

OCBC Bank has been trading since 1932 and is Singapore’s longest established local bank. With assets of US$79 billion and operations in 14 countries, OCBC is one of Asia’s leading financial institutions.

OCBC offers a wide variety of retail and commercial financial services. The bank has a fleet of more than 360 NCR ATMs that primarily offer consumers cash withdrawal, fund transfer and bill payment transactions.

The challenge

OCBC Bank has been extremely successful in migrating transactions away from the branch teller. 70%–80% of all OCBC customer transactions are now carried out on the ATM channel. They recognize that this makes the ATM a vital customer touchpoint with millions of self-service transactions being carried out every month.

To take advantage of these high transaction volumes, OCBC made a strategic decision to extend the functionality of their ATMs to use the channel for customer communication and interaction. Patrick Chew, Head of Delivery at OCBC, explained, “We believed that CRM was the cornerstone to providing this differentiated service.”

OCBC aimed to provide an improved level of customer service at the ATM through personalizing the consumer transaction. The bank also wanted to alert OCBC customers to products, services and information that would interest them. Through providing these services, OCBC aimed to increase customer loyalty.

The main challenge of this project was to integrate NCR APTRA Relate into OCBC’s existing CRM system. The customer information in the CRM system was required to drive personalization and targeted marketing campaigns on the ATM. This integration had to be done in such a way that it would not affect the operation of the transaction, and would appear completely seamless to the consumer.

OCBC was concerned about consumer acceptance of personalization and CRM at the ATM channel. Patrick Chew said, “The challenge we faced was that we did not want to increase the total transaction time just because we have increased the interaction with the customer.”