Our clients

NEDBANK RETAIL

 

‘UNDERSTANDING OUR CLIENTS’ NEEDS AND MEETING
THEIR SERVICE EXPECTATIONS WITHIN NEDBANK RETAIL’

Nedbank Retail provides transactional, card, lending, investment and insurance products and services designed to meet the banking and finance needs of individuals and small businesses across the five client segments of high-net worth, affluent, middle market, mass market and small business.

The Nedbank Retail operating model is organised around our product and client segment areas, overlaid by servicing and delivery channels. Three support services divisions furthermore underpin our business operating model.

• Client segments: Private banking (includes both Nedbank Private Bank and BoE), consumer banking (includes the mass- and middle-market segments) and small-business services.
• Products: Cards, home loans, personal loans, bancassurance and wealth, vehicle and asset-based finance and transactional banking.
• Retail Shared Services provides support, including human resources, finance, projects office, strategic planning, credit lab and business intelligence services.
• Retail Risk is responsible for the monitoring of compliance and risk as well as providing legal services to the cluster.
• Retail Marketing provides marketing support to the business divisions and assists in coordinating marketing activities across the broader Nedbank Group.

Solid progress has been made over the last few years in rebuilding and repositioning Nedbank Retail, which now has a focused strategy, highly performing and motivated staff, a competitive product set, much improved distribution and very competitive pricing structures, and is voted as having the best service levels for the second year running in the 2008 Ask Afrika Orange Index.

The division’s response to the challenges of 2008 was to focus on efficiencies, credit risk and collections, the integration of certain businesses (Old Mutual Bank and Go Banking), pricing, and managing the business for economic profit.

We will continue our client focus and management through the current challenging economic cycle with particular emphasis on the following:

• Conservative credit policy and focus on collections and impairments.
• Execution of ‘manage for value’ strategies in home loans and vehicle and asset-based finance.
• Investment in our businesses that contribute most to economic profit with a specific focus on bancassurance and wealth.
• Transformation.
• Stringent expense control with headcount kept constant.
• Entrenchment of our leading service position and rollout of the service culture.
• Building our primary client base through focused strategies in each segment and targeting our major channels on primary client growth.
• Increased efforts in contributing to the national agenda, particularly in the Imbizo process and employment equity, and supporting black small businesses and low-income housing.

While 2009 will be tough we believe that we are wellpositioned to meet the challenges and that we will emerge stronger and better positioned as the economic environment improves over the next few years.

2008 DELIVERY AGAINST OBJECTIVES

Accelerate transformation

Transformation remains a key focus area for Nedbank Retail. We acknowledge that building a great place to work and a great place for clients and staff to bank requires a successful and sustainable transformation programme. During 2008 we rolled out our transformation targets using our recruitment ratio framework. With the exception of the black female senior management category, Nedbank Retail has met its targets.

 

Win the war for talent

The Culture Values Assessment instrument is an effective means of measuring and mapping corporate cultures from a human, organisational development and business perspective. A total of 8 118 Retail staffmembers participated in the survey (a 53% increase from 2007). The Nedbank Retail score improved from 16% in 2007 to 13% (a lower percentage represents an improved score in this assessment).

Over the past three years there has also been a significant improvement across all cultural and operational categories measured in the Nedbank Staff Survey.

Enhance productivity and execution

Project Vuselela in our branch network focused on enabling and empowering staff to deliver on our worldclass service aspirations. Responding to early indications that the introduction of new roles across the business (services banker and floor manager) would have a real impact on the way clients are managed, these positions were created and rolled out across the business. Additional signage and shorter account-opening processes in the branch also contributed to this experience and a significant lift in client and staff satisfaction metrics was noted.

Project Siyakha is focused on delivering a step change in the systems with which our sales and service staff interact to ultimately improve client service and staff morale. Existing inefficiencies in the nature of the systems required to sell and service a client and the way the systems interact with one another have resulted in significant time taken to recapture information and train new staff. Siyakha Phase 1 is a four-year programme, which began in 2007 and we delivered most of the business benefits to the sales process by the end of 2008, with remaining systems migrations happening thereafter. The result will be one frontend for sales, in addition to streamlined and reengineered processes to minimise the impact on both clients and bankers.

Additional productivity and execution highlights include the following:

• Simplifying and enhancing the sales and service process for transactional and investment products to improve the overall client experience and enhance productivity and execution in the branch.
• Redesigning the vehicle and asset finance operations process to deliver an efficient solution for dealerships via a range of channel interfaces to ensure ‘best in industry’ turnaround times and service delivery.

Operation Bear Hug is a programme aimed at executives and senior management to encourage them to be more in touch with our frontline staff and share their experiences. In 2008 the Operation Bear Hug programme expanded to include more branches, the Nedbank Contact Centres in KwaZulu-Natal and Johannesburg and a number of Private Bank contact suites. In its fourth year more than 300 visits took place and well over 1 000 opportunities were identified to improve the client experience. Operation Bear Hug has become an institution in Nedbank Retail and continues to be successful in narrowing the gap that often exists between headoffice and frontline client-facing channels.

Client value management

We have seen a lot of progress in our journey to be worldclass at client service, both in our internal measure using the CMAT™ framework, and also in external surveys. We again won the banking section of Ask Afrika’s poll of service excellence, the Orange Index, and have opened up a significant gap between our competitors and ourselves.

Lastly, Nedbank continued to build on its AskOnce service promise. Phase 2 of the programme saw the extension of the proposition to include specific service promises like improved branch queue management and timeous card delivery.

Expand distribution

Over the last three years Nedbank Retail has invested significantly in a range of banking channels, most notably ATMs and low-cost physical distribution points. This has led to a considerable improvement in the reach of our footprint and provided improved accessibility for our clients to Nedbank.

 

Competitive risk management

Our biggest challenge in 2008 has been the increased credit risk environment. A number of mitigating actions have been taken to lessen the impact, including our ‘manage for value’ initiatives, scorecard and loan-to-value tightening, investment in our collection environments and application and collection process redesign.

 

NEDBANK RETAIL CLIENT AND CHANNEL BREAKDOWN

	The net gain in the number of clients for 2008 was 591 683.
	Total clients			4 368 552
	No of internet banking clients			388 000
	Total assets			165bn
	No of branches (including personal-loans branches)			470
	No of Nedbank in Retailer outlets			42
	No of AtMs			1 746
	No of SSts			374
	Number of clients	2006	2007	2008
	High-net worth	2 996	4 233	5 538
	Affluent*	97 915	93 691	57 829
	Consumer banking	2 935 718	3 387 553	4 059 852
	Small business	125 150	144 891	160 956
	Other (secondary segment)**	311 586	314 408	84 377
	Total	3 473 365	3 944 776	4 368 552

*	Nedbank Private Bank restructured its business model, and as a result some clients have been migrated to other segments in Retail to ensure that the most appropriate services are rendered to clients.
**	The sharp drop in the number of clients is a result of the collapsing of the Old Mutual Bank brand into Nedbank. These clients have been merged with Consumer Banking.

 

NEDBANK RETAIL PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

During 2008 Nedbank Retail continued to focus on client centricity and improving competitiveness across multiple dimensions and product sets, including the following:

 

Old Mutual Bank

The Old Mutual Bank (OMB) into Nedbank integration of was successfully completed before the target date of 30 June 2008. Highlights of the integration included the successful redeployment of all staff, indications by 97,4% of clients that they would continue banking with Nedbank and the addition of 14 OMB branches that were rebranded as Nedbank branches and are now part of the new Green Zone outlets.

 

Go Banking

With effect from 1 August 2008 Go Banking was integrated into Nedbank’s core offering. Go Banking has always been wholly owned by Nedbank, operated as a division of Nedbank and managed as a separate business in association with Pick n Pay. Despite being a highly innovative business, Go Banking has not been able to grow its active base of around 90 000 customers to a sustainable level. This led to the decision to integrate.

Sales of the Go Account have been halted, but existing customers will continue to enjoy the features and benefits of the account. It is intended that Nedbank clients will also have access to the unique tillpoint transaction benefits that were previously available only to Go Banking customers.

Nedbank in Retailers

The Pick n Pay/Nedbank association continues to offer excellent expansion opportunities through the Pick n Pay Group infrastructure. In 2008 Nedbank’s footprint and reach was extended by the opening of a further 22 banking outlets, bringing the total count to 53. Sales performance within the outlets continues to exceed expectations, and the convenient banking approach is enabling and fulfilling customers’ service and experience requirements. Pick n Pay Group stores, in turn, benefit from increased customer volumes and enhanced loyalty.

 

Great-value banking

Nedbank continues to offer great-value banking through affordable, transparent fees. In 2008 Nedbank Retailsimple and launched two new initiatives to assist clients in choosing the products that best suit their lifestyle and budget.

• Our innovative and easy-to-use online bank fees calculator not only helps clients to narrow their search to a handful of relevant transactional products, but also allows them to compare the monthly fees related to those products based on their own transactional profile. They can even compare Nedbank’s fees with those of other banks.
  
• Bank fees specialists have been placed in the Nedbank Call Centre to help clients with their fee-related questions.
  

The reduction in retail bank fees in 2006 and 2007 and the below-inflation average increase in 2008 makes Nedbank very affordable particularly in the lower-income and mass-market segments.

 

Cellphone banking

After the successful launch of Nedbank’s two cellphone banking channels, namely WAP in 2006 and SMS in 2007, the channels saw significant growth in the year under review. These channels form part of Nedbank’s self-service banking offering and allow clients to check balances, transfer funds, make payments and purchase airtime from anywhere in the world at any time of the day. Because cellphone banking is not restricted by a physical footprint, the channels are well-positioned to facilitate access to banking services to all South Africans.

 

NPay

Nedbank Head of Corporate Card Services Pamela White.

In 2008 Nedbank Retail significantly upgraded its product strategy to address the needs of approximately 25 million debit cardholders in South Africa who were not previously able to purchase goods or services on the internet because of PIN requirements.

Working together with strategic partners iVeri, Nedbank Card Division developed an IT solution that allows debit card acceptance on the internet. The system has been registered internationally and is one of the first of its kind in the world.

Current services offered via NPay are airline tickets, airtime topups, electricity topups and web ticketing. There are 55 host sites at 3@1 outlets and one outlet at the Mango ticket counter at the OR Tambo International Airport departure terminal. More services and outlets are being negotiated.

Retail also continued to drive environmental responsibility via a number of initiatives. Card Division recognised the need to reduce the carbon emmissions created by the amount of plastic in our natural surroundings. As a result, this year saw Nedbank Card piloting the use of recycled and alternative materials to make cards in order to reduce the carbon emmissions associated with traditional plastic cards.

 

Electronic statements

During 2008 Nedbank Retail focused much energy on increasing the use of technology in the fight against environmentally unfriendly business practices. In 2009 Nedbank Card will be distributing electronic statements to its clients across corporate, merchant and consumer card sectors. While clients will still have the option of receiving their statements electronically or via post, Nedbank is actively encouraging them to receive the secure electronic version only.

 

Green offers in Greenbacks

Nedbank Greenbacks Reward Programme continues to grow by providing exclusive and attractive special offers to cardholders. In an effort to support the move to sustainable energy sources, special redemption offers covering solar heating and light bulbs were presented to clients in 2008. Greenbacks will continue to introduce green redemption options in 2009.

 

Retail Greening Programme

Please refer to the ‘Access to financial services’ section for details regarding the Mzansi accounts and the role of Nedbank Retail in extending its social reach.

At Nedbank, we recognise that each and every employee has an important role to play in reducing our carbon footprint. Since Nedbank Retail represents the largest percentage of the total group staff numbers, the cluster carries significant responsibility in terms of making a difference in both the work environment and at home. For further details please refer to here.

Nedbank Retail’s full product and service offering is available on www.nedbank.co.za