How a financial collaboration can facilitate and accelerate a client centric strategy
The example of Advans Myanmar and its partnership with the SPTF, an international NGO
Helping clients mitigate the negative impact of a challenging environment
In 2021, maintaining a close relationship with clients proved to be challenging for Advans Myanmar due to the ongoing pandemic and political situation. Looking to keep in touch with its clients and improve customer experience, the MFI wanted to deploy a new digital solution, Juakali, already tested with success in 6 other subsidiaries of the Advans group.
Identifying a financial partner to support Advans Myanmar client-centric strategy
In a tough financial context, identifying a partner such as the Social Performance Task Force (SPTF) to make the deployment of Juakali possible was key. The SPTF rapidly understood Advans Myanmar’s challenge.
The SPTF is a non-profit membership organization with more than 4,400 members from all over the world. Their members have a strong experience in inclusive finance. The SPTF engages to develop standards and good practices for social performance management (SPM), such as defining and monitoring social goals, developing client-centric products and services, treating clients and employees responsibly, and more. The SPTF was therefore an ideal partner to this project.
Once the deal was settled, Advans’ own knowledge of Juakali made the rest. Peer learning was facilitated, and group experts were able to best support Advans’ youngest greenfield in the implementation of the solution. The SPTF grant was deployed over a 3-month period and financed the technical implementation of Juakali, as well as the coaching & training of local staff.
Adapted solutions to respond to clients’ critical needs
The project targeted Advans Myanmar’s entire portfolio, over 60,000 clients, while onboarding and training all of the MFI’s 270 commercial employees and deploying the solution in all its 17 branches.
"Using the Juakali solution saves me a lot of time and reduces manual paperwork, especially when it comes to loan restructuring process. Juakali provides me with easy access to the complete loan information of clients and is in this way very useful in getting in touch with them and offering solutions tailored to their needs. The tool helps us provide excellent customer service while it’s very easy to use anytime and anywhere.", Min Chit Thu, Loan officer from Madaya Branch.
The project aimed at proposing a repayment solution that best suited the specific needs of customers which translated into 3 main key actions: payment reminder, overdue follow-up and finally loan restructuring. Clients were therefore given the choice of adapting their loan repayment schedule in the case where their repayment capacity was challenged by the negative impacts of the crisis such as prolonged shut down of their activities, reduced number of customers, reduced opening hours, resulting in a sensible drop in revenue. Furthermore, being contacted on a regular basis, with a solution-oriented posture, made clients feel cared for and understood.
Creating value for clients through digital and more efficient processes
SPTF’s support helped Advans Myanmar prevent over-indebtedness while responding better and faster to clients’ evolving needs and improving their overall customer experience. During the project’s duration, each month between June and August 2021, over 60,000 clients were contacted to closely follow up on their individual situations and propose adapted solutions to their specific needs. Furthermore, the level of PAR30[1] (loans in arrears for over 30 days) improved, decreasing by 5 percentage points from May to August.
The Juakali tool helped automate processes when possible and thus allowed commercial officers to gain time and focus more on the client relationship itself. CROs’ tasks were digitalised thus making possible to maintain a distance relationship with clients when field visits were difficult.
Juakali has been used by Advans Myanmar’s teams each month ever since and has been adopted as a long-term solution to serve its client-centric strategy.
[1] PAR30 = Portfolio At Risk 30 days