Covid-19 expedited migration towards online, mobile banking in UAE: Al Ghurair

The coronavirus pandemic has increased migration towards online and mobile banking among UAE consumers as the overall trust among the residents in the local banking sector also continues to improve for the second consecutive year, said Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, chairman of the UAE Banks Federation.
"Covid-19 will help, and have already helped, migration from ATM to online and mobile banking. Eventually, we expect call centre role will also diminish because customers will only need to place call when they have transaction issue. Therefore, we see less dependence also on phone banking segment," Al Ghurair said, while announcing the 2019 Trust Index Survey conducted by the UBF in cooperation with RFI Group.
"With more digital transformation in the last three months, we have seen more and more customers digitally - be it large corporate or government entities. Since customers want to shift digitally, this will require more investment from banks to improve their digital experience and banks will have to drop services which used to be available manually or traditionally through branches," he added.
The 2019 Trust Index found that 77 per cent of consumers in the UAE used digital channels monthly, falling short of the global average of 87 per cent.
The survey index revealed growing customer confidence in UAE banks, with 76 per cent of respondents having high trust in the banking sector last year, up from 74 per cent in 2018.
The survey highlighted that the UAE banking sector has a higher trust score than many other developed nations, including the USA, UK, China, Japan, France and Germany, with 82 per cent of UAE consumers strongly agreeing that their bank is honest, trustworthy, and fair; substantially outperforming the global average of 66 per cent.
"While we are delighted to see such positive results, we accept that there is still room for improvement. Despite banks increasingly offering digital customer service options, for example, there is still a reluctance among some consumers to adopt them. We will continue to leverage these findings to steer the UAE banking industry towards greater resilience and competitiveness for the benefit of the wider country," Al Ghurair added.
waheedabbas@khaleejtimes.com