A tech-driven approach to connect with customers

Who are Metro Bank

The Metro Bank Story

Metro Bank was launched to reinvent the rules of banking. The first new high street bank in over 150 years, its meteoric rise is unprecedented.

Its ‘Banking but Better’ ethos aims to make every customers’ banking experience simple and straightforward.

This means having a deep understanding of their business, their aims, pain points and future needs, and above all, it means putting people and the delivery of personal service first.

Metro Bank needed a solution that would support its personalised approach.

Gathering and tracking intelligence on both existing and new customers to deliver targeted products and solutions had worked well for Metro Bank, enabling them to provide great customer experience opportunities.

But they needed a solution that would enable them to scale.

Delivering a differentiated experience

Metro Bank selected Artesian, concluding that the platform was a “differentiated product worthy of investment”.

Kevin Barrett, Regional Director at Metro Bank explains: “Artesian will help give us the edge when it comes to using technology and insight to deliver great customer experiences – helping us bring personal service back to banking.”

Initially conducting a pilot exercise in early 2019, Metro Bank were impressed with the results delivered in such a short space of time.

Following a six-week trial, Metro Bankrolled Artesian Engage out to 120 Relationship Managers in order to:

• Gain quicker and greater insight into their customers, demonstrating that they know them, understand their needs and that they care
• Have value-added, insight-driven conversations about their business, not just how Metro Bank can help
• Better anticipate and proactively respond to future needs
• Achieve efficiencies in meeting preparation, with real-time intelligence delivered via the Ready mobile application
• Ensure they feel confident and prepared, and that the focus of the meeting is on the customer and their exact needs at that moment in time

Bringing Risk Decisioning & KYC to the Front Line

Based on the success of Artesian Engage, when Artesian approached Metro Bank later that year with a vision for technology-driven compliance and KYC management, and the opportunity to accelerate onboarding by bringing risk automation to the frontline of its business and commercial banking function, it was quick to sign up as an early adopter.

Mark Stokes, Managing Director Commercial Banking at Metro Bank commenting “Metro Bank is the revolution in the commercial and corporate banking space, providing unrivalled customer experience in terms of speed of decision making and action – something we pride ourselves upon. We are excited to work with Artesian to take such a revolutionary tech-driven approach to bringing compliance and KYC into the forefront of our business and commercial banking activities. Artesian will help us know more, know sooner and save valuable time we can invest in building great customer relationships.”

It was a decision that quickly paid dividends, with early results indicating that Artesian was 100% accurate in comparison to its existing analogue process – finding 14% more critical risk issues and reducing the average-case time from 200 minutes to 8 minutes (a 96% improvement).

Realising the Know-How Advantage

Fast forward to 2021 and the relationship between Artesian and Metro Bank is stronger than ever. When Artesian launched Artesian Connect in January 2021, Metro Bank was once again unveiled as an early adopter of the platform.

Artesian Connect combines everything Metro Bank knows about its customers, business and market, and leverages an advanced rules-engine that ingests millions of structured and unstructured data points to layer on top of that know-how, quickly delivering impactful insights and risk intelligence needed for next-generation prospecting, customer monitoring and engagement, advanced onboarding, and ongoing assessment of portfolio risks and opportunities.

Metro Bank has reported that using the Artesian Connect platform it has been able to automate many aspects of its operational process for onboarding new customers or screening the back-book in a fraction of the time – at scale.

Speaking about the experience at the launch of Connect, Ronan Heeran, Financial Crime Risk & Control Manager at Metro Bank commented:

“We started working with Artesian to explore ways we could introduce greater efficiency to the customer onboarding journey. We loved the idea of being able to aggregate data from a number of different sources and map our risk appetite to Artesian’s rules framework to flag issues immediately. The result meant we could deliver a process which in some cases was 94% quicker than our existing process.”