A Clearly different banking experience

Mike Cunningham, chief executive officer of Clearly.

Mike Cunningham was very clear in his vision when he blended his banking experience with the latest disruptive innovations to offer customers a different digital banking experience.
The proof is in his startup - Clearly - that empowers traditional banks by creating a digital bank within itself and handle the pain points for both banks and customers.
"At my previous employer, I had been charged with driving innovation and shaping the digital agenda for the bank. As part of this I looked at what the competition was doing and all of them were focused on incremental changes that were merely some 'lipstick on the gorilla'. Sure, they made it look a little prettier, but none of them were trying to tackle the true issues faced by the banks today," said the Dubai-based chief executive officer of Clearly.
"They [banks] all focused on the front-end - the presentation layer. It was as if digital had become the new 'toy' and everyone wanted to play with it. I wanted to do something truly transformational that would not only improve the experience for the customer, but also address the key issues around costs of acquisition, service and distribution, and high customer attrition rates and poor cross-sell. I realised that the only way I could do this was to re-build the bank and that I was never going to get that opportunity internally, so I had to go outside and do it for myself. I had already built three banks from scratch, so felt confident that I could do it again, albeit in a very different way," said the former executive vice-president at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank where he led group strategy and innovation.
Cunningham firmly believes that as an entrepreneur, self-belief, tenacity and resilience are everything.
"I base the future success on three things, our model is one of disrupting from within - we've built digital 'bank as a service' and help legacy banks transform rapidly and at a low-cost; we've built a full stack digital bank from front to back and not just focused on the lipstick; and we've pulled together a team of seasoned bankers, fintech experts, digital bank builders and customer experience obsessives."
So what makes Clearly different from its peers? Customer experience is the winning differentiator, says Cunningham who is equipped with 20-plus years of financial services experience.
Before founding Clearly, Cunningham worked for Barclays in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East where he led the de-novo market entry and establishment of Barclays in India, Pakistan and Namibia.
"People may come to you for price, but they stay with you for experience. The key tenet at Clearly is loyalty - we believe loyalty (be it team or customer) is what underpins sustainable businesses that are able to continue to grow organically. So how do we build loyalty? We sell the same products that banks sell today, yet we do it in a very different way by making use of unstructured data, which means our customers will get things when they need them as opposed to a blind email marketing flash. We also put our best people as close to the customer as possible. Loyal customers stay with you longer, buy more from you and tell their friends how great you are."
"When a customer calls the Clearly contact centre it could be one of our leadership team that answers the call - each one of the leadership team (including me) has to spend at least one day a month in the contact centre taking calls from our customers. Otherwise, how do we know the issues our staff face on a daily basis or the problems our customers need solving," adds Cunningham.
The company is building a digital banking service for anyone, but it may not be for everyone. While most state that digital banks are for millennials, Clearly believes that if you build a value proposition that is easy to use, represents fair value and is rich in features then it will appeal to all. The company's research also discovered that it is Generation X, not Y, that wants more mobile and digital banking products.
"Our sweet spot for customers is the same as every other bank - the mass affluent and the affluent. These two segments represent only 20 per cent of the population, but represent over 50 per cent of the profit pool. It's a crowded space and one that is fierce with competition. That said, the Clearly model allows us to deliver banking services in a low-cost and efficient manner across all strata of the population - we've even got a proposition for the unbanked too," said Cunningham.
Funding is always the toughest point in a startup and Cunningham and his partners bootstrapped Clearly to begin with. The second stage was a seed round where the company raised money via friends and family. Currently, Cunningham is backed by a New York-based investment bank called Atlantic Pacific Capital and is in series A round [Series A round is $5 million with a pre-money valuation of $15 million].
Andrew Bainbridge, a director on the Clearly board and also chairman of GuarantCo, said: "What attracted me to Clearly was the compelling proposition, supported by the great team that Cunningham had assembled. I really liked what the Clearly team had gone about establishing by creating a client-centric proposition and then working out how to use technology to deliver that, rather than the other way round."
-sandhya@khaleejtimes.com