BNP Paribas has launched a series of online, mobile and social media services to cater for increasingly tech-savvy consumers. The bank’s head of e-banking explains how its new digital focus has strengthened BNP’s relationship with its customers. 

Designing and implementing a cohesive and effective online, mobile and social media strategy can be tough for banks. It is probably fair to say that the financial sector has been somewhat tardy when it comes to embracing the latest wave of consumer technology trends, but its hesitance has been understandable given the myriad data security issues involved and difficulty in maintaining a consistent standard of service across multiple channels.

Now, however, their inertia is bordering on untenable, and banks which fail to cater for tech-savvy customers risk missing out on new business. For BNP Paribas, putting interlinking mobile and social media strategies into practice has been a major priority of late, and one which head of e-banking Virginie Fauvel says is vital in reinforcing the relationship between bank and customer.

And even though many of its initiatives are still relatively new, the results have been dramatic. Where a customer might visit a physical branch and speak to a teller once a month, users of the bank’s online services contact the bank an average of nine times a month. Add in mobile channels and the figure doubles.

Orange appeal

The bank’s most recent and most advanced foray into the mobile sphere is the result of a partnership with telecoms giant Orange to offer a package of mobile banking and payments tools via smartphones supplied by the company. Services range from the relatively common, such as mobile banking services for managing and viewing accounts, to the more advanced, such as provision to contact BNP Paribas advisors online and the ability to make peer-to-peer payments.

Perhaps the most important service, however, allows customers to pay for goods and services with the merest touch of a handset. The smartphones supplied by Orange’s come equipped with near-
 field communication (NFC) chips allowing users to make contactless payments at
 any compatible point-of-sale terminal.

Contactless mobile payments are already available through the Cityzi NFC scheme in Nice, Strasbourg and Marseille, and are being rolled out across France throughout 2012, with Caen set for a launch in the second quarter, and Lille and Bordeaux to follow later. BNP Paribas is supporting this process by supplying NFC payment terminals to its retail clients as they are renewed, and issuing all of its credit cards with contactless technology.  

The partnership with Orange was crucial to BNP, says Ms Fauvel, and the bank never considered the stop-gap method employed by some banks of supplying customers with external stickers loaded with an NFC chip to be applied to their phones. “To have a superior customer experience you mustn’t put something on your phone. People like their phones, it is something very important for them,” she says.

It is a major operation, and it will not be achieved over night, says Ms Fauvel. “As of 2012, there is a big movement in France, but it will take two or three years to equip merchants and customers with NFC solutions… It’s a big change in the day-to-day activity of French people.”

Staying social

Mobile technology is essential for other reasons, Ms Fauvel adds, not least for communicating with customers through social media channels. In response to their increasing popularity, BNP Paribas has significantly expanded its presence on Facebook and Twitter, to the point where a portion of its call centres have been converted to responding to customer enquiries on the two sites.

This was a transition that required some thought, particularly when dealing with Twitter’s limit of 140 characters per message. To maintain a professional image, the bank did not want to employ text-style contractions and abbreviations, but it still had to be accurate and communicate the desired information. “We trained our staff to use social media as bankers, but to tailor the approach to Twitter or Facebook,” says Ms Fauvel. “It is very important for the people in my team to known how to answer queries quickly and precisely.”

This is especially important when much of the interaction between bank and customer on social media channels is publicly visible. “When we answer questions and problems through Twitter it shows the broader community our strength as a bank, and that we can be reached in the branch, through our call centres, via e-mail or on Twitter and Facebook. Wherever customers want, we are, and the answer will be the same.”

In a further step, BNP has become the first French bank to list itself on location-based social networking site Foursquare, allowing customers to ‘check-in’ online at physical branches. For Ms Fauvel it neatly represents the partnership between the bricks and mortar of traditional banking and the online world that it is expanding so quickly into. “Foursquare is important for us. We want to be powerful in the physical world, but also online and with mobile applications. Foursquare is the perfect unification of the physical and the electronic.” 

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