Raiffeisen Planning Digital Services Expansion

The Swiss cooperative bank plans to spend a significant portion of its 500 million Swiss franc strategy budget on digitization by 2025.

Over the past several years, Raiffeisen Switzerland was replacing outdated banking systems which had taken up numerous resources. With that project now completed, the bank can proceed with its digitalization plans.

Raiffeisen has attached great strategic importance to digitalization even before the group strategy. Our digital channels, especially our e-banking, have enormous significance. However, we want to position our digital solutions more broadly and continue to drive digitization as a complement to our physical branches, interim CIO Robert Schleich said in an interview with inside-it.ch

With the foundation now in place for implementing digital products, Raiffeisen has reached a comfortable starting position from which digital services can be expanded, Schleich said.

But the bank is not starting completely from scratch. Its mobile e-banking app has over one million users and, according to Schleich, is gaining ground among competitors. He admitted the bank was lagging behind competitors, but now that the core banking system has been renewed it can be built upon.

Process efficiency is also an important element, Schleich said. For the core mortgage lending business, it’s not just about digitizing the existing process, but also improving it. That means the ability to conveniently apply for mortgages online and to be able to check the application more quickly.

We’re spending 500 million francs on the entire group strategy by 2025. There’s more to it than digitization. For example, new customer business or the diversification of income. However, a significant portion of the overall budget is reserved for digitization itself, Schleich said.

Schleich will be handing the CIO reins to Niklaus Mannhart in September 2022 at the latest, but cannot discuss issues with him since he is still under contract at his current employer.

For now «I’m concentrating fully on the interim management of IT at Raiffeisen Switzerland. We are currently discussing what will happen after that. There are more than enough exciting tasks at Raiffeisen,» he said.