“Culture is the cornerstone,” Antony stresses. RAKBANK codifies this into its Four Cs Framework – Connect, Communicate, Collaborate and Celebrate. “Here in the UAE, banks are pivoting from a model of ‘we know everything’. We are recognising that one of the best ways to deliver continuous change and value to customers is through partnerships with startups and FinTechs. It’s no longer banks versus startups. It’s banks and startups, working together for the customer. This shift is especially meaningful as banks expand beyond traditional services to focus on customers’ broader financial lives.”
Delivering Measurable, Meaningful Digital Change
Three years in, RAKBANK’s digital transformation journey is delivering significant results. “We have tripled our profits in three years,” Antony proudly notes. In the 18 months since joining the Bank, Antony has built upon the existing momentum and worked to accelerate the transformation.
The change is visible at every level: The agile team has matured the bank’s delivery model. The EPMO now operates as a value-based governance enabler. The innovation team is delivering a step change through AI. And the design function is now at a global standard. With the help of Antony’s team, waterfall delivery is migrating to agile practices, and disparate digital efforts are coalescing into unified customer journeys.
“We are fortunate enough to have a really strong CEO vision that sets a unified direction for us to align around. Transformation is executed in a distributed manner at RAKBANK. Technology and the individual business digital teams are at the coal face driving the change while the Digital Transformation team works to enable and align them. We now orchestrate change with purpose and empower our people with the right tools, frameworks, and autonomy,” he adds.
Customer-Centric Innovation: UX as a Competitive Advantage
In a banking world increasingly commoditised by rates and fees, RAKBANK is differentiating through user experience. Antony emphasises the importance of getting the basics right while layering on personalised, seamless services. In a multicultural society like the UAE, this also means designing for a user base spanning over a hundred nationalities.
“From multilingual videos explaining products to hyper-personalised app dashboards, we’re building experiences that resonate with every segment of our population,” he explains. These efforts not only reduce friction but foster deeper, longer-lasting customer relationships.
“We’ve made significant progress in our core transformation where our tech team has done an amazing job of enabling this change” enthuses Antony. “You can see the results today. Our personal bank digital team have migrated around 98% of our transaction volume to digital. And our business bank digital team has delivered the best-in-region digital onboarding journey. This is thanks to the right ingredients and empowering the squads to succeed. We need to go to that next level, so we are doubling down on our customer journeys. We’re doing that front to back and journey by journey.”