Elevating their Digital Identity: Nedbank & Adobe Experience Manager

Nedbank is a bank that specializes in financial services in South Africa that also does retail banking and insurance. Today it has become one of the leaders when it comes to delivering top experiences and personalized content.

There are 11 official languages that are spoken in South Africa and so delivering consistent brand messaging can be difficult. Within the industry banks have been working on this very issue for a very long time.

For Nedbank, however, that’s one of their strengths. “We’re the fourth largest bank in South Africa,” said Lizelle Vaughan, program director for digital experience management at the bank. “But we’re more interested in being the most admired. Our path to getting there is paved by a common language of data, focusing on customer needs, and finding better ways to do business.”

A major part of the rise of Nedbank has been the online experience that it provides in addition to its adoption of usability on mobile devices. In fact, 27% of its customers reach its website on mobile.

“Creating an online identity is a challenge,” added Lizelle. “Then throw in different screen sizes, operating systems, and interfaces, and it dramatically complicates how experiences are created and delivered.”

Meanwhile, its internal team all work independently. Its digital team had the goal to centralize the way in which the company built new experiences and forms – with the intention to unify the whole brand. While at the same time, Nedbank saw an opportunity to improve its view of its customers, how they interact with each of the bank’s teams, and ways for cross-selling services and products.

“Adobe Marketing Cloud provides the foundation for strategies and delivering new experiences,” said Lizelle. “It shapes design, how we talk with customers, where we invest resources, and more.”

Adobe

Today, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Experience Manager are located at the core of Nedbank’s digital strategy. “As our business and digital presence has matured,” said Lizelle, “we’ve expanded our uses of Adobe solutions to maintain our edge.”

To begin the journey, the bank took control of Adobe Analytics to broaden their view of their customers and give them greater insight into the features and channels that they are using the most, as well as which forms they’re using more.

“Adobe solutions provide the foundation for strategies and delivering new experiences,” said Lizelle. “It shapes design, how we talk with customers, where we invest resources, and more.”

Diving deeper into audience insight, Nedbank found a few interesting nuggets of information, such as a low level of clicks and application completions relative to the traffic that was arriving on the credit card page. This led to them figuring out that this was due to the credit cards being listed alphabetically rather than popularity and customer interest.

In response, their digital marketers shifted the most popular credit card choices towards the top as well as credit cards that were likely to be of interest based on customers’ own profiles. This resulted in a significant upward shift in the number of applications being completed.

Digital elevations like this early on ensured the rise of Nedbank and helped build momentum and confidence in their use of Adobe.

So they decided to transfer their content over to Adobe Experience Manager, along with its in-built Forms, Sites, And Assets capabilities.

Consistency

Adobe Experience Manager gives the bank robust abilities. Its centralized content management system gives it access to brand assets, templates, images, and forms, and is able to create great online experiences on desktop and mobile.

“Interacting with the various Nedbank digital offerings in some of the multiple roles our clients assume,” added Lizelle, “you’d see the same Nedbank logo, but essentially experience seemingly different companies.

“Our customers now have a richer understanding of who we are. And if they have multiple types of accounts, they are getting a consistent experience as they do business with each group.”

Applications

Another challenge for banks as well as customers is applications – they’re generally created spontaneously and jumbles together with little organization. In fact, in the past, Nedbank had more than 224 different forms that included duplicates.

With the help of Analytics and Adobe Experience Manager, the bank found that just 20 forms took up 96% of its total form volume. The bank also found out the sections of the forms where customers abandoned the most.

The bank completely streamlined the process of form fields, and shortened the number of forms down to 38 as well as integrated auto-populating fields. “Adobe Experience Manager Forms was a major force in simplifying how we interact with customers,” said Lizelle.

“We can cut seven-step processes down to four steps with more control over each form. Additionally, we output completed forms to PDF, giving the customer a copy to help ensure accuracy and add a layer of hands-on service.”

Nedbank’s new mobile-friendly forms have also helped its customers fill out forms on the device they use the most. The result ended in an incredible increase from 33% to 80%.   

A unified bank

Flying into the future, Nedbank plans to bring a better personalized banking experience using Adobe Experience Manager and Target. Squeezing greater use out of Analytics will enhance the visibility of audience segments. As one idea, they would be able to see savings accounts and then use Target and Adobe Experience Manager to provide personalized content offering relevant services like investment.

“We’ve come a long way since we started our transformation,” stated Lizelle, “from operating in silos to becoming a unified banking team under one flag. Adobe solutions enabled us to build a stronger digital foundation on marketing best practices, data, and customer-centered experiences that will help us become the top bank in South Africa.”

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Adobe Experience Manager integrators. Contact us to see how we can work together.