Client Situation
Our client bank was incorporated in 1976 and is majorly owned by the Government of Ras Al Khaimah. It operates more than 30 branches and 290 ATM’s in the UAE. In 2001, the bank underwent a major strategic transformation with a shift in focus from Corporate Banking to Personal and Business Banking. Cedar has previously worked with the bank on multiple occasions. In the case of this project, Cedar worked with the bank to conduct a diagnostic review of their collections and recovery framework.
Cedar’s Approach
In this program, Cedar was mandated to provide a detailed diagnostic review of the bank’s collections framework across the product areas of Cards, PL, AL, Mortgage and SME Financing.
- Undertook an overview of the UAE market, focusing on key areas of retail portfolio, such as personal loans, cards, auto-loans, and mortgage.
- Conducted 16 internal interviews and external SKIP agency (collection agency) meetings as a part of Cedar’s internal and external assessment processes.
- Developed a deep understanding of the internal data trends with regards to loan outstanding and days past due across multiple retail products.
- Undertook an extensive internal assessment covering areas of the organisation like customer, product, technology, process, and organisation.
- Conducted secondary research on best practices in the areas of relationship debt management, analytics, and processes.
Outcome
The program resulted in Cedar providing a diagnostic review, along with strategic recommendations in the form of 19 initiatives to be implemented.
- Identified key industry challenges in the form of a challenging market, with an uncertain economic outlook and limited regulatory assistance.
- Recommended analytics-based customer segmentation and collections scorecard along with consistent data capture to improve collections recovery by 15-20%
- Assisted in identifying an analytics and performance tracking mechanism-based system as key to increasing call efficiency by 12-15%
- Formulated a list of key incentive and performance related initiatives from an organisational perspective to reduce employee churn by 8-10% and enhance productivity by 10-12%
- Recommended implementation of an omni-channel framework related initiative for the same period with benefits of a 10-12% reduction in operating cost owing to technology upgradation.