FBA – Different and Better
The First Bank of Australia (FBA) acquired various European Banks from 2007 as part of its vision to be a major global player with a banking presence in all the major financial centres. All the European banks were re-branded as FBA Europe in late 2015.
FBA operates three main businesses – SME (Commercial) Banking, Personal (Consumer) Banking, and Insurance. It maintains financial centres in Europe (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands) and the USA, (New York, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada); more than 1200 branches and 6000 ATMs are distributed throughout these regions.
Our Product Lines
Personal Banking
FBA is a full-service consumer bank, providing current accounts, savings accounts, loans, mortgages and credit cards. FBA also has a growing wealth management offering, including special bank accounts, wealth planning, investments and borrowing products. Our growing wealth management services offer specialist advice and are available online and in person at branches.
Small And Medium Enterprise Banking
FBA has specialised in small and medium banking services – it’s one of our fastest growing segments and our ambition is to have the broadest range of business banking services available in the market as well as access to 3rd party products and services required by the modern enterprise of today. As well as a wide variety of business accounts and account services (e.g., payment services), we offer savings accounts, flexible and long-term borrowing options, and business management services and insurance (as below).
Beyond our products and services, our specialist business advisers are here to help you grow your business and our emerging SME Hub is a wonderful source of information and other services.
Insurance
FBA provides a range of personal general insurance (buildings, house contents, motor, travel, pet and others) and certain Life and Protection products, and a wide variety of business insurance products. Most insurance products are designed and under-written in house, although some specialist products are re-sold from other providers.
The overwhelming majority of personal insurance customers also have an FBA current account; however, many FBA banking customers are not yet insurance customers.
Providing Digital Banking Services
FBA is proud of its award-winning ‘JOY’ mobile app for personal banking. Through the app account holders can manage all of their personal accounts, transfer between accounts, and manage personal loan payments. Today approximately 65% of FBA account holders (up from 55% a year ago) have installed the app and use it on a regular basis.
FBA considers our branches to be important to serve customers and to our brand but recognizes that the purpose of branches and their role and importance to our customers is changing. We closed 170 legacy branches last year and opened another 90 new branches. Newer branches are typically quarter to half the size of a legacy branch with less emphasis on teller and back-office capability in favour of financial and mortgage advisory, personal wealth management and insurance services. FBA will continue to evolve branches in the coming years.
Other accomplishments in our digital initiatives include the adoption of a CRM system to connect all customer touchpoints (products, services, call-centre, marketing campaigns, complaints etc.) providing a single, consistent and unified view of each customer. Coupled with new policies and procedures this new capability removes blind spots for our team, wherever they fit in the customer journey, significantly improving efficiency and satisfaction – a benefit for the customer and for FBA.
The creation of our ‘Athena’ digital innovation and capability centre has fostered and energized creativity, experimentation, leadership and collaboration among our development teams. We will be expanding the scope of Athena to every unit of the company – from marketing and sales through infrastructure and operations. We are excited by the potential of unlocked talent and intend to use Athena as a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining the best talent.
It is clear from the competitive landscape and in feedback from our customers and associates that we must do more to facilitate frictionless digital financial transactions at the point and time of need.
To that end FBA has created a €250m fund and created the 4 Pillars Transformation Programme to accelerate our digital transformation. The programme puts the customer experience and financial well-being at the centre of everything we do. We will be modernizing our infrastructure – where appropriate we will buy, build or consume services that move FBA to fully open banking, vastly improving our ability to rapidly create and deliver tailored products and services and create new channels. Much of this will be driven by cutting edge AI. As we make these changes it will become feasible to streamline internal processes – removing layers of manual processes, forms and approvals.
Collectively these and other elements of the 4 Pillars programme will allow FBA to expand the number of and delight the customers we serve, directly and through channels. Our brand will be strengthened while simultaneously reducing our cost to serve. The transformation change FBA is contemplating is daunting and will impact every facet of the company. But it is necessary, and to mitigate risk FBA will be selecting a limited set of strategic partners that share our vision and have the technical and process excellence, bench depth and proven digital transformation success methodologies to assist us on this journey.