COVID-19 and UK Banks –Responding and adjusting to seismic change

The banks are encountering loss of their own people to sickness, loss of their overseas operations to rapid lockdowns, customers desperate to ensure their financial security, Government instructions to give payment holidays, new business lending schemes to implement, branches to remain open despite the lockdown, reduction in interest rates and therefore profitability, and much more… the list goes on. They include new IT solutions for remote working and new equipment to support this, new processes to implement, new risks to assess and mitigate, financial forecasts and capital requirements to be reassessed, worried investors to manage, scaling operations to meet customer demand at short notice, staff to communicate with and to safeguard, urgent and comforting messaging to be delivered to customers at scale, additional security measures to implement, cash to continue flowing to branches and ATMs, and of course customers and clients all over the world to support through major financial distress. However, history tells us that major incidents which have had similar characteristics, have usually moved through distinct phases from a business perspective. We’re a few weeks into this phase, with many organisations focused on enabling customer requests and contacts to be handled effectively through at least a ‘minimum viable service’. Many are promoting increased use of self-serve digital channels and/or automation for both sales and service to reduce the sheer volume into direct contact. Some banks are still trying to find adequate solutions – which doubtless will provide multiple agenda points in future incident reviews over the coming months. A full set of resources and a simplified and more automated offering will be one thing, but medium to longer term working from home will see a dip in productivity and morale amongst workers who are still being asked to directly support customers. It will be key that there is a plan now for how the banks will lead, manage and motivate a dispersed workforce over a potentially extended period of remote working, when this will be a highly unusual and challenging environment for them. In an environment where the profitability of the banks will have been severely hit, what new initiatives will be required to more rapidly step-change both improved customer service and reduced cost? Quite frankly the banks can’t afford to get this wrong – both in terms of their own reputation with their customers, but also to prove the ability of the UK as a collective, to financially negotiate this crisis.