Success Stories

Metro Bank

Seamlessly integrating Bricks and Clicks

London, UK

At a Glance

• 89% of retail customers open their bank account in less than 30 minutes straight through

• Cards are issued and personalized in 3 minutes

• 63% of SME customers open their bank accounts in less than 60 minutes

• Rapid growth in a mature market from 9000 customers in 2010 to 848000 in 2016 – CAGR of 113%

In 2010, Metro Bank was the first retail bank in 100 years to open its doors in the UK. It became one of the first Challenger Banks before people were even using the term Challenger, Neo Bank or Fintech.

The Bank was founded by Vernon Hill, the American who took Commerce Bank from being a small one-branch bank to becoming the eighteenth largest in the US. His vision was to repeat this success by disrupting the status quo dominated by the Big 4 in the UK by putting effectively the retail back into Retail Banking.

A passionate and fanatical believer in turning customers into fans, even writing a book in support of this philosophy, Vernon has established a Digital Bank with a human face providing customers with choice as to how they want to interact with the Bank. Metro Bank’s 55 stores are open 7 days a week from 8am to 8pm while customers can also use mobile or the internet 24 hours per day. Whether face-to-face, assisted over the phone or self-service Metro Bank understood that the competitive landscape had already moved from better products to better customer experience.

Making it Real

In 2009, Temenos was selected from a group of potential software suppliers because it could provide an integrated front-to-back core processing solution that was proven in the UK market. This, together with the ability to provide the software on the cloud, aligned with the bank’s investment in IT and the possibility to scale to any size.

Integrated technology is front and center in executing the Bank’s strategy of turning customers into fans. From the outset, the ability to see a real-time single view of a customer’s complete relationship with the Bank together with the ability to quickly create products and services to deliver differentiated Metro Bank’s value to their customers and were key drivers for the Temenos decision.

Not only can Metro Bank operate at a significantly lower IT cost base and so achieve minimum efficient scale sooner, but its IT infrastructure facilitates its superior customer service. The Bank immediately began disrupting the “norm” by enabling customers to open an account in 15 minutes, including a new personalized debit card and checkbook.

Establishing the Bank’s Growth Engine

Metrobank’s success is based on people, a laser-like focus on exceeding customer expectations delivered by passionate employees who care. But the Bank also understood that without arming these employees with world-class integrated application technologies, without providing customers with a choice of self-service, assisted or face-to-face, they would fail in terms of their primary objective of much better service at a much lower cost.

The bank chose Temenos Transact from Temenos as its core processing software, integrated with Temenos Front-office and channel applications, resulting in a modern, fully integrated, and upgradeable solution that affords the bank a complete and real-time view over its business, its customer relationships, and across all channels and does so at a fraction of the cost of running legacy or other 3rd party applications.

Accelerated Delivery

Temenos proposed a Model Bank process-led implementation approach, a pre-configured UK version of the software. This would minimize the need to customize the software but also provided prescribed processes and pre-configured functionality, including UK business and regulatory practice, which accelerated the implementation process significantly.

The bank opened its doors as a full commercial bank within nine months after the kick-off of a tripartite collaboration between the bank, Temenos, and Deloitte Consulting.

Metro Bank’s Success to Date

In 2017, 7 years since opening its doors, the Bank has acquired 1,217,000 customers from an initial 9,000 in its first year. This is a compounded annual growth of 85%. Its growth trajectory in terms of assets continues to outperform with a 63% year-on-year increase in assets to GBP16.4B.

Vernon Hill puts Integrated Technology as a critical success factor in delivering real value to the Bank’s customers. It is a weapon of choice that differentiates the Bank from the Big 4 who struggle to deliver both value and superior customer experience because of the complexity of their underlying legacy environments – disintegrated siloed applications and data.

It is because of this that Vernon states that “the big banks can imitate our model, but they can’t copy it.”

Metro Bank continues on its journey of building trust and delivering value to customers, with Temenos being a core component of this journey in seamlessly integrating bricks and clicks.