In conversation with Eric Caen, Chief Digital Officer, Credit Agricole
Championing the human connection through digital transformation
Eric Caen is the Chief Digital Officer at Crédit Agricole and has more than 37 years of experience in the digital space. After founding a multi-million-euro video game company and helping corporations such as McDonald’s and CMA-CGM accelerate their digital transformations, he is now modernizing the digital banking experience.
In 2007, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and forever changed the world, whether we like it or not. Nowadays, most of us are devoted to our devices, but I don’t believe this is necessarily a bad thing. We are so much more efficient with the connective power of a smartphone in our hands than we are without. For banks, however, it does pose a potential problem. If a bank wants to remain current and modern, it now has to provide an excellent, intuitive digital experience for customers.
How can a legacy sector’s technology be modernised?
Technology can be a difficult area for legacy banks. They’re old institutions that have been around for centuries, in some cases. They struggled evolving towards the way the modern customer does their banking. It is only in the last decade that banks have been expected to make their services accessible via a tiny device. Banking is also a highly regulated sector, so we are always fighting to balance accessibility and user experience with complex compliance rules.
People are important to banking. How can the sector utilise their strengths?
It is disappointing when companies waste their employees’ time and energy on something that could be automated. As professionals, they are worth so much more than these manual, laborious tasks. As bankers we were made to interact with other people and use our nuanced understanding of emotions to come to a resolution. Imagine a customer currently going through a traumatic life event. If we present them with an unsympathetic robot instead of a real, empathetic human, we are not utilising the human side of banking properly.
Being a banker is not a robotic job, as you need to understand the context behind every conversation. If we completely get rid of human bankers, then we will kill the relationship. It means we are just a commodity, rather than a trusted source of advice and guidance.
What has your previous experience helped you understand about banking?
My background is in video game development, which is an incredibly competitive market. People only have loyalty to the huge franchises, and they’ll stop playing your game very quickly if it’s poorly designed or not functional.
The experience has taught me two things. The first is that unlike the videogame industry, in finance, monopolies do not really exist anymore; even fiat currencies are being challenged by cryptocurrencies. The second, and perhaps the most important, is that you will never win or retain customers if your digital experience is poor. Now, I constantly ask myself if the experience we’re offering is the very best it can be, and how easily we can improve it.
How will better technology in banking improve your customers’ lives?
With new technologies such as AI, and with appropriate consent and cybersecurity measures, we’ll be able to make an even greater difference to how our customers do their banking. We can analyse how people are spending and saving, and help our bankers recommend the right products and give each customer tailored advice. For example, if the data tells us that someone’s spending habits are unsustainable, or that they could be saving more each month, AI can help us understand exactly what each customer needs.
The customer is the key to your success. How are you prioritising their concerns?
At Crédit Agricole, asking for (and listening to) our customers’ opinions is built into our processes. In the past, an expert has told me that we shouldn’t ask our employees what they think about our products. The problem is that our employees are experts, so they can’t give us an opinion that’s representative of how a genuine customer feels. It’s like asking Rafael Nadal what he thinks about a new tennis racket – he’s going to have a very different perspective than someone who just plays tennis on the weekends.
How can technology and humans work in harmony?
We are taking the approach of offering a digital experience that’s enhanced and supported by human expertise. Our job is to make banking simple and remove the stress and complexity for our customers. And to do so, we need to take a digital-first approach that is strongly supported by real human connections.
If a customer wants to speak to their bank teller, we remove the unnecessary barriers and facilitate that face-to-face interaction or phone call. But if someone doesn’t feel the need to speak to a banker, the digital channels are right there too. You need to diversify digitally without compromising the quality of your face-to-face service if you’re going to thrive in the modern world of financial services.
You can find more resources on how to thrive in the increasingly digital world of financial services on the dedicated LinkedIn Sales Solutions hub here.
Recommended Resources
Customer Stories
Learn how LinkedIn Sales Solutions helped global brands achieve their goals.