Monday morning - 18 November - opened with 60 members and other interested parties joining us for a UK Finance breakfast roundtable on ?meeting customer needs?. Stephen Jones, CEO, UK Finance set the context as one in which there was a growing appreciation amongst politicians, policymakers and the public - and the business community itself - that firms will increasingly be judged by reference to longer-term drivers of value as opposed to purely more traditional financial metrics. In the case of banking and finance, this includes how a firm serves its customers, the communities in which it operates, the more vulnerable in society and its own employees and families. 

The exam question for the morning was what ?meeting customer needs? means as we look ahead to the 2020s, with Stephen observing that an organisation is not going to get far in embedding 'strategic purpose? into its DNA if it does not think very carefully about what this means for its customer offering. He then invited a panel of senior practitioners to set out what ?meeting customer needs? meant from the perspective of their firm:

•  Nick Bennett, COO, Tandem
•  Susan Allen, Head of Business Banking, Santander UK
•  Matt Hammerstein, CEO, Barclays UK
•  Stella Demandes, Director, Product, OakNorth
•  Jeni Munday, Regional Managing Director, Visa UK & Ireland

The organisations represented differ in their customer offering, with the larger firms utilising multi-delivery channels, including their high street presence, and the smaller firms operating principally through a digital platform. The larger firms have a broad service offering, based upon a core product suite appealing to the broad demographic of their customer base, whereas the smaller firms represented profile a defining characteristic of their service. Tandem, for instance, uses its digital platform to help customers manage their finances, offering auto-savings steps, while OakNorth places emphasis upon timely credit decisions including for those with atypical earnings. Visa provides a business-to-business service but thinks about expectations for its service from the perspective of the end user. This includes facilitating real time payments, while at the same time putting a little friction into the process to provide a visible level of security.

Common themes that emerged from discussion included:

• The value of brand and reputation for service reliability
• The extent to which data privacy and security are fundamental to customer trust
• The threats and opportunities that customer data represents with data security synonymous with deposit security
• The prospect of AI driving a more personal experience, appreciating that it ought to guide rather than lead 
• The ongoing relevance of personal engagement in support of lending decisions
• Service quality being the key to customer retention

While individual firms make a contribution to financial education, there is more that could be done on an industry basis.

This was the third event in our autumn series on strategic purpose, each focusing on issues from a different key stakeholder perspective: the first, back in September, on diversity and inclusion issues impacting colleagues; the second, on 5^t November, on the challenges presented for banking and finance by climate risk, green finance and sustainability. 

Across the three events, UK Finance welcomed 250+ delegates from 130+ organisations exploring 'strategic purpose? through these three lenses. What was striking was the extent to which representation for all three events was from across different functions within firms and not limited to more direct, niche functionalities than previously might have been the case. We plan further analysis and for now consider this to be indicative of the extent to which firms within banking and finance are embracing the concept that performance should be assessed by reference to a broader set of criteria than more traditional financial metrics.