UBX: Empathic customer experience is the future of open finance

UBX, the leading open finance platform in the Philippines, has planted its customer experience on the value of empathy, as it continues to promote innovation and advocate for financial inclusion.

During the Customer Experience Asia Week 2022 held in Singapore, UBX Chief Operations Officer & Chief Customer Officer Iris Yacat said the key ingredient to a great customer experience is the marriage of online and offline approaches to creating meaningful solutions.

“The pandemic has greatly disrupted how we interact with our customers, resulting in the heightened need for understanding behaviors both offline and online. This means that we have to focus on embedding more services in the online experience by leveraging data to capture and measure feeling and sentiment more quickly and accurately. We then follow through offline by guiding our people on the ground to provide an empathetic experience for our customers,” Yacat said.

Studies have shown that ​​perceived value, customer support, assurance, speed and “firm innovativeness” are major factors for positive customer experience, particularly in fintech. UBX considered these factors by modeling its platform from different perspectives: the customers and the businesses.

“At the individual level, we prioritize human-centered design principles and simple language to create frictionless customer experiences. For businesses, the value of participating in open ecosystems means transforming many aspects of their organization from the systems, processes and culture; this does not happen in an instant and hybrid journeys can be a bridge. To quote our CEO, sometimes you have to do non-digital and non-scaleable things, to bring them to scale,” Yacat explained.

Yacat added that empathizing with customers and acting with agility is the secret to success in the digital age. According to McKinsey & Co., agile business units that follow this method outperformed non-agile competitors 93 percent of the time and have higher rates of customer satisfaction.

A big part of providing services requires the understanding of customer perspective and in the age of information, UBX makes it a point to meet their demand by prioritizing data security and privacy, which at present, is the primary concern of both corporations and individuals Yacat added.

“In open finance, trust is at the heart of everything we do. Empathizing with customers means that their safety and security remain to be our top priority. Hence, UBX always makes it a point to be compliant with the latest rules and regulations” assured Yacat.

Only recently, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas mandated banks and financial institutions to strengthen their policies on customer confidentiality. Now more than ever, major financial service providers are required to band together with the public sector to achieve this goal.

“While UBX prides itself to be the leader in open finance in the Philippines, sharing the secret to our success just goes to show how committed we are to including everyone. At the end of the day, all like minded individuals and institutions who are just as committed to financial inclusion as we are, should be dedicated to putting the human experience at the core of their services,” said UBX President and CEO John Januszczak.