Last Friday Max and I visited together with
two members of Team Royal Mess the local Aktia Branch in Turku to get some
deeper insights and help with our task.
First the regional branch Manager, Christian
Holmqvist, gave us a tour through the different departments, starting with the
Real Estate department, to the Investment and Company part and ending in the
private customer area. During the tour he described us how they are working in
the different departments.
Afterwards he invited us to ask him any questions
which he answered as good as possible, to summarize it:
One strength of the Aktia bank is that they
are small, what enables them to have a much closer customer relation which is also
based on a long time partnership, due to this the bank has a better knowledge
about their customers than the main competitors. One thing which shows this is that
Aktia is not using a call center, but the customers always call the local
branches. Furthermore it is common practice to call the customers annually to
be informed about their needs and there are also customer events for the same
reason. Another tool used to have this close connection is that every
customer is assigned to a team of employees.
The main competitors are Nordea, Dansk. One
of the weaknesses, compared to these competitors, is the size, because
innovations are quite often too expensive for such a small company and they do
not have as many offices as the other banks, an example would be an app for
banking which is already offered by many competitors but not Aktia. Still the
bank tries to have the “best service in Finland” in 2015. The strengths,
regarding the departments, are located in the very good asset management but
the real estate department is performing quite poorly.
About the strong connection to Swedish customers:
many people think that Aktia is a Swedish bank which is not true and it even
tries to get rid of this wrong stereotype. Still in the Turku branch 60 % of
the employees are bilingual and approximately 50 % of the customers are Swedish
speaking.
In my opinion the visit was very good and
important, I by myself feel now much more connected with the project because I
can see how “real” it is and that there is interest in the bank for
innovations.
Johannes
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