Transforming the bank…

Police Bank has been on a necessary journey of renewal. While the first phase was to stabilise and then improve the culture, financial performance, and risk management practices of the bank, it also included planning for the transformation of the bank’s technology systems and offerings.
The technological transformation remains critical because even though banking is a human business, our members are increasingly choosing contactless or digital channels.

Indeed, of the almost three million transactions we do each month, between half and two-thirds are undertaken using the bank’s payments tools. Another chunk of the bank’s transactions are via the mobile app, which does around 15% of the bank’s total volume. Internet banking is responsible for around 3 to 5% of transactions, while around 0.07% of transactions are undertaken in branch.

Overall, we are becoming a modern digital bank – because that’s how our members want to manage their money.
Critically, the channel choice most of our members have used for years is our app. Members told us we needed to get better at our technology if we are going to remain competitive – if we are going to be sustainable in the years ahead and continue to contribute to our Police community, to help members and their families get into a home or save for the future – we had to rebuild all our technology.

While the primary focus has been on the core banking system and our loan and deposit systems, we also had to update our mobile banking app due to the provider withdrawing the platform from the market.
If we could have dictated the timeline, we would have changed over the mobile banking app in around 12 months when we changed our core banking system. But we had no choice other than to launch it in September.
As a purpose-driven organisation driving long-term communal goals for our members, we must work with partners who provide capability that Police Bank otherwise doesn’t have.

We do that across so many parts of the bank, and it usually works, but when it came to the mobile banking app we could not seamlessly deliver with our partner – what was released didn’t match either the promise of what we had planned, or the performance in user-acceptance testing.
That has been frustrating and disappointing. At the heart of our transformation are our members and our team, and as a bank we let both you and our team down.

We have worked hard to fix the bugs over the past eight weeks and while there is a little more work to do, the vast majority of issues are now resolved.
Over the next 12 months, the bank’s modernisation will continue.
That will provide us the opportunity to offer better lending and higher deposit rates and will help Police Bank continue to serve our members the way they deserve, and in keeping with the way you, our members, serve our community.