FCA Bank: Loans go Digital
Success Stories: Experiences in the Digital Sphere told by Businesses Themselves
Launching a digital transformation means more than integrating new features or going paperless: digital transformation is a journey, made up of analysis, design, not to mention financial and other investments.
The ultimate benefits must, of course, be responsive to the initial need, but they will also have a ripple effect on other company processes, and therefore on the evolution of the business itself. The collaboration between FCA Bank and Intesa (IBM Group) is a prime example: here’s FCA Bank’s success story.
Customer Experience: What you Get is More than What you See
FCA Bank began its journey in 2018. “The right solution at the right time,” you might say – beginning in April 2020, FCA Bank began offering its customers a fully digital loan application, which can be started and completed online by the customer independently, no customer-service agent or banker required.
Customer identification is a key step in the application process. Customers are prompted to take a few very simple steps: scanning their ID using their device’s camera, and making a few small movements with their head in order to identify their face and profile. Behind those simple actions, and a breezy customer experience, is a technological infrastructure predicated on artificial intelligence, ensuring unambiguous identification that:
– Verifies that the documents scanned by the user are real and valid
– Compares the face of the person submitting the application with the photo on the ID using biometric facematching
– Runs a “liveliness” check to make sure that the applicant is a human and not a bot
But the benefits don’t stop there. In a recent interview with AziendaBanca*, Luca Pollano, Head of the Digital and IT Department at FCA Bank, noted: “The entire procedure is automated, and completed remotely and seamlessly in just a few minutes. There’s a dual benefit: improved customer experience, and back-office optimisation both on the dealership and on the bank sides. This ensures process security and tracking, as well as compliance with Italian and EU banking regulations.”
Microservice Architecture
The platform is presented to the customer as a single, stand-alone interface, but the back office is made up of tiers of microservices that can be used one at a time by various bank departments. This ensures scalability and integration with other systems, available services and markets. In so doing, FCA Bank can extend the platform to loans for pre-owned cars, as well as to the French, Spanish, English, and German markets.
Advantages Across all Levels
The microservice structure serves to streamline back-office operations for dealers and bank alike. The bank can count on digital documents that are more accessible and easier to file.
Another extremely positive impact of FCA Bank’s digital transformation came in the compliance arena: the self-onboarding platform complies with the very detailed rules for the KYC procedures.
From customer experience to back office to regulatory compliance: for FCA Bank, this digital transformation is just the start of a more significant trajectory to move car sales, which as yet continue to require a dealer, to an e-commerce model.
During that same interview as cited previously,* Pietro Lanza, General Manager of Intesa and Blockchain Director for IBM Italia, noted: “We are starting on this path towards innovation side-by-side with our customers. We aren’t just looking for the best solution for the here-and-now, we are designing for the future evolution of their core business”.
* Source: Need a car loan? Now you can get one online, AziendaBanca
