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A certain office supplies retailer rolled out an "Easy Button" marketing campaign in 2005 that touted the ability of its products and services to help simplify our lives.
Fred Lie embraces the "Easy Button" approach in guiding Hanmi Bank's adoption of fintech, which he believes should emphasize the "easy" factor and de-emphasize the "cool" factor.
"In my professional world, I believe that one's true value is measured by how much you make the lives of those around you easier," said Lie, senior vice president and chief digital banking officer at Hanmi. "The easier a customer can securely access their funds and manage their accounts, the more value the bank creates for that customer — even more than any favorable rate or discounted fee."
For innovations to work, though, they must benefit customers and bankers alike, said Lie, who joined Hanmi in 2020.
What prompted Lie to promote this philosophy? A desire to improve the experience for customers who contact Hanmi's call center.
"If innovation makes things easier for the customer but adds excessive burdens for the bankers, it will fail, and vice versa," said Lie, whose previous employers include CIT Bank and Union Bank.
One of the digital innovations that's working well for Hanmi's business customers is the authentication feature on the $7.9 billion bank's mobile app. The feature lets business customers verify transactions via biometrics on a cellphone instead of using a one-time passcode sent by text or email. It also combats fraud by eliminating the need for a one-time password, which Lie said has lost some of its reliability as a multifactor authentication method.
Lie said the rise in the number of business customers' email accounts being hacked and one-time passwords being compromised led to the biometric function, which replaced one-time passwords sent by email.
Another digital initiative at Hanmi is the "epitome" of the "Easy Button" philosophy, Lie said. The bank's online account-opening platform decreases the amount of time it takes to complete an application, avoids the need to visit a branch and eliminates the requirement to produce a driver's license and other documents for identity verification.
An emerging focus for Lie is protecting customers from social engineering scams. Crooks employ these fraud schemes to win someone's trust, often on a social media platform, so they can steal money or gather confidential data.
With an assist from AI, banks will be able to fight social engineering scams by monitoring a customer's activity and seeing whether it arose from a scam, Lie said. If a fraudster triggered a customer's behavior, a bank could delay or cancel a real-time money transfer.
"Customers expect their banks to protect them from all fraud, including social engineering," he said. "Banks that are successful in this area improve their position as the trusted financial partner their customers rely on most."
