With more than 10 million customers, Banco Davivienda is one of Colombia’s most successful banks. In recent years, it has expanded from its roots as a mortgage lender to offering 100 percent digital products, including the award-winning Daviplata mobile money transfer platform. It now has more than 5 million mobile banking customers – equivalent to about 37 percent of the Colombian mobile banking market.

The digital products have helped Banco Davivienda earn a reputation as a banking innovator, alongside its established image as a trusted financial services provider. However, Banco Davivienda was aware that, when it came to the ease of interacting with the bank, its customer ratings had room for improvement. This was largely the result of the bank’s continued reliance on manual processes.

“We had become known as a digital bank by our customers, but we weren’t as digital internally,” says Monica Andrea Diaz Pinzon, Chief of Digital Transformation (Special Projects) at Banco Davivienda.

Delivering at speed

For the bank’s Executive Vice President of Operations and Technology, Patricio Melo, there was another crucial advantage: Google Workspace was ready to deploy. “We didn’t have to spend time developing a costly application. Instead within a couple of weeks of deciding to use Google, we had over 50 people in our first pilot,” he explains.

Throughout the rollout Banco Davivienda maintained a rapid pace. Under the guidance of a dedicated Transformation Office, over the next 8 months, it migrated over 19,000 employees across 800 offices and 6 countries onto Google Workspace. “It was achieved in record-breaking time,” reflects Monica. “And the reason we could do that was Google’s proven implementation methodology.”

While those figures are impressive, they were not the main measures of success for the bank. Instead, Monica and her team were required to report on the progress of the transformation, such as how swiftly tools were adopted and what impact that adoption had on the six core transformation projects.

Driving commercial growth

The answer was massive impact, as the results of the commercial action model project demonstrate. The aim of this was to digitize commercial activity across the bank, introducing collaborative tools to record and securely share information about customers and prospects and help ensure more consistent follow-up processes.

Google Workspace tools replaced the notebooks and scraps of paper that had previously been used by the bank’s 6,000-member customer-facing commercial team. By requiring each member of the team to record a standard set of data about each customer interaction on shared spreadsheets, Banco Davivienda was able to go further, creating a bespoke application using Google Cloud Platform to manage the valuable data generated via these interactions.

“We now have information on more than 37,000 prospects, which commercial staff can securely access,” Monica confirms. More importantly, quality data is leading to higher sales, with prospects being managed and followed up in a more coordinated way. “Already, we’ve seen an increase of 15 percent in revenue compared to the situation before introducing digital collaboration.” In financial terms, that includes over US$80 million of new loans authorized in the first quarter following implementation.

Improving reporting and performance measurement

The impact of the transformation is evident in other areas too. The number of meetings related to follow ups and tracking customers has dramatically decreased because essential information is already available. “We don’t have to gather people together to check on performance because everything is online and updated daily,” says Monica.

To facilitate that, the bank has created custom reports and dashboards using Google Data Studio. Patricio has been impressed by the ease of this, both from the development perspective and the user standpoint. “Within four hours of starting to build them in Data Studio, we can publish dashboards online, so managers can get the information they need without searching for it, which saves them time,” he explains.

Simplifying day-to-day collaboration

As well as the enhanced tools and processes, core Google Workspace apps are proving their value. For example, Banco Davivienda has introduced Team Drives to replace shared folders as a preferred way to collaborate. “A lot of people already are using these to be more collaborative and more efficient; it’s cutting down on duplication of work too,” Monica says.

However, Monica and her team wanted to go further – not just offering Google Workspace but actively encouraging its usage, to drive collaboration. To that end, with the core implementation complete, in April 2018 the bank contracted a Google Professional Services Technical Account Manager (TAM) to support its goal of accelerating transformation.

The TAM works alongside the Transformation Office, providing best practice tips on the use of Google tools, leading internal projects that aim to increase the collaboration and helping build use cases that support business processes.

Enhancing internal processes

As part of the Transformation Office, more than 200 initiatives are now underway to transform how people work across the business, highlighting not only the cultural shift but also the ease of using Google Cloud solutions. This is further reflected in a lighter burden for the IT team, particularly in terms of maintenance and fault tickets.

“We’ve calculated that all these improvements to our processes with Google Cloud will save us 13,000 hours a year, which adds up to US$3 million in OpEx savings,” says Patricio. “That would be an impressive transformation in itself. When added to the sales growth, it amounts to a stunning return on investment.”