Pearl Tak

This role required me to use all of my prior experiences in banking (business markets, personal markets, card and payments, transactional products, lending, small enterprise), financial analysis and programme management to:

• Lead the execution of strategic projects within BCB, partnering with senior leadership to translate strategic objectives into actionable plans across markets
• Conduct market and competitive analysis to identify scalable product opportunities
• Identify opportunities for product profitability optimization and monitor product economics (includes pricing and margin management) across products and countries
• Develop business cases to ascertain commercial viability of new product opportunities informed by in-depth research and analysis and support the introduction of products into markets
• Oversaw governance of business solutioning committees and reporting of business solutioning into other group committees

In addition, this role has allowed me to refine my approach to execution through an extended value chain and create meaningful, execution-based leadership plans to embed leadership accountability.

This was a short-lived role (4 months) but whilst in the role, I designed customer experience processes for end-to-end assisted and unassisted digital onboarding as well as retail (off the shelf) onboarding for the Merchant Solutions Business.

In addition, I set up and coordinated cross-functional teams to align project objectives and deliverables, developed a workstream catalogue and progress tracker, facilitated stakeholder meetings to gather requirements and provide project updates, and present at governance forums for approval.

This role expanded on my previous CVP foundations and allowed me to explore how customer lifecycle management brings the CVP alive. I was invested in creating powerful messages and experiences for customers throughout their journey with Standard Bank Card, it was my responsibility to manage a team that created a Customer Lifecycle Strategy and executed across Personal and Business Markets. Through creative AB testing on channels, messages, offers, customer cohorts and timing, we delivered attractive outcomes for the business:

• Consistent 40-45% reactivation of dormant customers
• Successfully onboarded new vendor to reduce execution time on campaigns from 2 weeks to 3 days
• Implemented successful Credit Limit Increase campaigns that continues to see an average of 92% lift in take up rates
• Improvement in Credit Card Activation rates from 80% to 85% through EMOB tactics
• Successfully converted 90% of card customers from postal to e-statements saving Card R7m per annum
• Found an innovative way to correctly identify the first cohort of clients with high propensity to take up Shari’ah banking

• In this role, I was responsible for defining, owning, and continuously evolving the end-to-end banking experience for small businesses transforming the bank from a mere custodian of money into a business partner that helps SMEs grow.
• As a result, I was accountable for the development and implementation of sector propositions and its implementation (across sectors including Tradesmen and Schools) and created a holistic Small Enterprise Customer Value Proposition for SA.
• To do this, required leveraging data, research, and analytics to identify unmet needs and value drivers for small businesses, collaborating with product, digital, and marketing teams to ensure CVP alignment across product features, pricing, and digital/physical channels, and owning performance metrics, including customer acquisition, retention, and profitability.

• In this role I was tasked to strategically manage, drive and grow the economic profit of Business Transaction Products in accordance with and alignment to the greater PPB strategic objectives of Business and Commercial Banking. This included the risk, legal and compliance parameters of the portfolio.
• Through my time in the role I designed a creative Attorney Package to capture large, high-margin deposits, designed a financially viable way of allowing Airport Lounge Access to all Corporate cardholders, and designed an effective business rollout strategy to migrate customers (that were incorrectly segmented) to the SAP core banking platform.
• Prior to that I launched the BizLaunch package for start-ups in the market in April 2012 and implemented cheque deposit fee and monthly management fee into market in January 2011. In addition, I implemented SuperSpar and Pick n Pay franchising campaign to capture key business from competitors on sensitive cash deposit fee rates and blended card commission rates.

• This role required the development of a deep understanding of Business Transaction Products by providing continuous analysis on the performance of the Business Transactional Products portfolio and identify key opportunities that will improve operational efficiencies on these products.
• Some of the noteworthy outcomes were a reduced account opening time for branch-based relationship managers from 7 days to 15 minutes, reduced SIIC codes capture errors by replacing a 600 page United Nations ISIC file with a 4 page easy-guide.