Hatim Chebti, CEO Franx: “Blanco is as customer obsessed as we are.”
Hatim is the CEO of ABN Amro subsidiary Franx: the startup that offers SMEs a digital platform for currency transactions and international payments. The onboarding and KYC process is a notorious ‘drop out’ moment for potential clients in banking. After all, legislation and regulations oblige financial service providers to request a great deal of customer information, which is considered annoying by customers. Building an innovative KYC Suite together with Blanco proved to be the solution.
Hatim, why did you choose Blanco to work with?
“At Franx we’re driven by the vision that tech companies that go for the most user-friendly interface and the very best customer experience are the winners of the future. We’re also a fintech startup ourselves and develop our own technology entirely according to this vision. That’s why when developing a digital onboarding process we first asked ourselves: buy or build? In our eyes the onboarding should feel like a warm welcome for our customers. But at that time we didn’t know any other party in the field of onboarding and KYC that is as focused on client satisfaction as we’re. So for a moment, it looked like we had to develop it ourselves. The only thing was that this would take far too much attention away from our developers and our core product: our currency & international payment platform. Fortunately, we came across Blanco. That clicked immediately because they turned out to be just as ‘customer-obsessed’ as we’re.
Blanco was open to building a KYC Suite for business banking together — this allowed us to ‘buy’ a KYC Suite externally, which we partly developed ourselves in order to meet our high demands in terms of ease of use. At Blanco, they were smart enough to see that our collaboration would give them a business banking KYC Suite that they could use further: our collaboration turned out to be a real win-win situation.”
Can you give an example of the ease of use and how you have improved this together?
“The digital onboarding platform isn’t only user-friendly for users, but also for our KYC team: the software is fully web-based: at the back, all customer data is exported and delivered to Franx on a silver platter for processing in our own systems. Easy does it.
During our collaboration, it turned out that Blanco’s people thought just as deeply about what the customer exactly wants, as we do. In a development process, you are constantly confronted with issues, but together we always went the extra mile to find the best solution. A real ‘can-do’ mentality arose. A good example of this is the solution we found for the LEI code that business banking customers need in order to do a derivatives transaction.”
Your onboarding flow is now live. Are you happy with the result?
“Definitely! Our new digital onboarding has been live for 2 months now: we show that ‘being compliant’ can go hand-in-hand with pleasant user experience. Where a customer used to spend a whole day onboarding with us, he or she can now do so in ten minutes. Moreover, the ‘straight-through process’ percentage (a prefix that expresses how many customers complete the onboarding process in one go) has increased from 0% to 60%. And we’re simply getting more customers: where previously 12% dropped out during the onboarding process, it’s now only 5%. And last but not least, our NPS score (a prefix in which customer satisfaction is expressed) has risen from 23% to 51%. A fantastic result, partly thanks to the people of Blanco!”
