Absa Bank has been awarded a Celent 2013 Model Bank Award for the best use of technology for its recently-launched transactional offering, Absa Value Bundles.
The bank, which recently exceeded its expectations with more than 150 000 Absa Value Bundles within six months of launching, has also been selected as a finalist for the overall Celent Model Bank award for 2013.
The Model Bank Awards are conducted by Celent, a US based global research and consulting firm with a team of banking, securities, investments and insurance analysts that focuses on the evaluation and application of the best information technology in the global financial services industry. The awards recognise excellence in banking technology.
Absa’s head of retail markets, Arrie Rautenbach, says he is thrilled with this announcement especially after a recent Finweek Bank Charges survey which found Absa’s Gold Value Bundle to be the best priced bundled offering in the market.
“Customers are appreciating the simplicity of the offering, the value for money and most of all the fact that they are being rewarded for their loyalty,” he says.
In 2011, Absa commenced the development of a customer-centric pricing and billing capability, with Suntec FZE as the system provider. SunTec used its Transaction Business Management Systems for Finance (TBMS-F), a price modelling product, to establish a centralised view of the customer and provide dynamic pricing structures on a customer-by-customer multi-tiered basis.
“Relationship-based pricing can be a valuable tool to engender customer loyalty whilst rewarding deeper share-of-wallet and cost efficient transaction behaviour,” says Rautenbach, adding that in Absa’s case, it brought together a number of loosely connected systems, integrating them to push customer-centricity and enhance product adoption.
“With Value Bundles, we have a platform that will allow us to continue to grow customer relationships. The agile platform improves our ability to innovate for customers on an ongoing basis and also reduces our lead time to market,” he concludes.