digital transformation

alrajhi bank continued to enrich the customer experience and differentiate its customer value propositions in 2024 through digital and technology-led advancements across the alrajhi group. With the launch of its new ‘harmonize the group’ strategy, the bank continued to strengthen its position as leaders in digital, by leveraging best-in-class digital capabilities. With ‘Digital and Data’ identified as a key pillar of the new strategy, the bank highlighted its strategic significance as a ‘centre of excellence’ to power a segmented approach to customers, and enable the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) strategic pillars through digitally optimised journeys that simplify group offerings.

The bank focuses on three key objectives under the Digital and Data pillar; to ‘Expand Digital Capabilities Group-wide’, to build ‘Customer-centric Digital Journeys Group-wide’, and to leverage ‘Group-wide Insights and Real-time Marketing’. The strides made over the past few years in digitally optimising the bank’s customer journeys have enabled it to provide customers with the option of choosing products from across multiple businesses within the alrajhi ecosystem. These efforts are backed by alrajhi group’s continuously expanding data capabilities, which have enabled the bank to harness data insights from emerging technologies such as GenAI and Machine Learning, thereby hyper-personalising and raising the benchmark in customer experience.

The Digital and Data pillar also focuses on the bank’s efforts in the Open Banking domain, and its value addition to alrajhi’s segmented customer propositions. Open Banking has empowered customers with greater control over their financial data, allowing them to choose solutions better suited to address their needs, and seamlessly connect across multiple apps and solutions. The reporting period saw alrajhi expanding its FinTech portfolio from its payments company neoleap, to add neotek – a data aggregation FinTech, and Drahim – a personalised finance manager (PFM) app, to further strengthen alrajhi’s wide-ranging banking solutions.

This far-sighted and comprehensive approach towards digitalisation, and its strategic leveraging of these new digital capabilities and resources across all business verticals have resulted in 95% of all active alrajhi customers utilising digital channels for their banking needs in 2024, a remarkable transition.

Improved agility and efficiencies

Focused efforts during the previous strategy cycle resulted in enhanced digital products and journeys, from card and savings account applications and multiple payment methods, to easily customisable financing journeys for personal, mortgage and motor products. Retail journeys addressed segment-based requirements, with digital products meeting evolving requirements of youth, minors and families, while also focusing on the unique demographic-based requirements to service unique segments such as military personnel, students and retirees. Digital transactions and mobile payments via digital wallets were further encouraged with enhanced security and additional authentication. Insurance products were made easily accessible online by collaborating with alrajhi takaful, where six new digital insurance products were delivered in 2024 to meet market demand.

While strengthening partnerships within the alrajhi group, strategic collaborations with multiple other business partners enhanced the digital customer experience, with several products and services being introduced exclusively online. Key collaborations saw agreements being formalised with a number of leading service companies such as Zain (telecommunication and digital services), Suplift (leading platform for travel and tourism), Almosafer (leading travel brand in Middle East), Al Wallan (leading automobile distributor), as well as a few Government Organisations such as GOSI (General Organisation for Social Insurance), and Ejar (Government-led real estate leasing platform). These partnerships have enabled the bank to engage customers beyond their banking and financial needs, and provide them with holistic lifestyle experiences, building unmatched customer value propositions that helps the bank nurture deeper customer relationships and long-term loyalty.

During 2024, as the bank’s investments in FinTechs expanded, it was able to introduce more services and highly beneficial digitalised features. This included the Account Finder feature that enables users to consolidate all their banking accounts (belonging to any local bank) onto the alrajhi app. The advances in Open Banking regulations and the continued pace in digital transformation continues to require the rapid and more urgent adoption of APIs across the bank’s digital banking functions. At alrajhi, ensuring secure and efficient API exposure remained a significant priority during the reporting period, with the bank implementing robust security measures and optimising API performance to successfully overcome security concerns.

During the previous strategy cycle, the bank introduced the ‘One Minute Approach’ to enable high-speed transactions and services in under a minute to enhance customer experience. alrajhi bank continued this approach under the new strategy cycle in 2024 by leveraging its digital capabilities. A number of digital journeys were enhanced during the year in review including the auto lease application journey, the standing order journey, the Guest Login journey, and the entirety of the personal finance journey, from application and execution to cancellation, greatly reducing turnaround times and improving customer experience. Main-product application journeys were complemented with related add-on products to reduce customer search and decision-making times. Several dashboards were revamped to enable greater customisation and provide actionable insights. The SIRI voice command service was extended to avail the search feature.

The ‘Branchless Banking’ initiative also continued in 2024, as the bank continued to deliver new features to enable more branch services via digital channels. New services extended digitally during the year include the first-in-market personal finance buyout feature, the instalment-based Sahlha financing program, the digital cheque feature, and the QR-code based cash deposit functionality. Users were provided the ability to digitally revoke authorisations, cancel Awaeed accounts, request for Mada debit cards, and raise credit card and ATM deposit claims. Digital signatures can now be utilised to securely disable B9 services. Additionally, while the bank provides 24*7 customer support via chat through its app, plans are underway to introduce a Virtual Relationship Manager during the next financial year, to further enrich and personalise the customer experience.

The mobile experience

alrajhi bank remained highly focused on improving convenience, security and accessibility of the alrajhi mobile app during the year in review, addressing the evolving needs of customers. Achieving an average 4.7/5 from over 3.2 million ratings to maintain its top position among all Saudi mobile banking apps is testament to the digital and technological standards set by the alrajhi mobile app. The user-friendly and robust banking application features allow alrajhi customers to meet all their banking needs through one app, with assured fraud controls, security and data privacy measures complementing the evolving technology.

During the year in review, the bank integrated the Over-the-Air (OTA) updates feature for the alrajhi app. This technology, also known as wireless updates, enables alrajhi to deploy code fixes and updates directly to users, and avoid awaiting approval upon app review by the relevant app marketplace. This development streamlines the bank’s workflow and allows for quicker resolutions to production incidents of the alrajhi app.

This technology update and other enhancements to the app design, navigation and user interface continued to improve user experience and boost engagement in 2024, contributing to an improved digital banking Net Promoter Score (NPS) has increased by 5 points comparing with last year.

Enhancing and expanding the B2C and B2B offering

In 2024, the bank continued to optimise working processes through agile methodologies, maintaining a strong focus on delivering value to customers by closely collaborating with project and product stakeholders across its business verticals, and ensuring quality benchmarks were met within time and budget constraints. The bank’s digital migration project continued, successfully completing the migration of the entire Personal Finance journey and most alrajhi cards, with plans underway to move mortgage and auto finance to NewGen’s digital lending system. Retail banking saw over 400 digitalisation initiatives carried out in 2024 alone – comprising new digital journeys, as well as enhancements made to existing products and services.

On the B2C front, over 200 digitalisation initiatives, upgrades and enhancements were carried out during the reporting period. Significant updates were made on the digital issuance and management of cards, with digital native experiences introduced to both business owners and their employees. New B2B accounts being opened digitally were equipped with both a Mada Card and SME Pre-paid Card as part of the bank’s ongoing strategy to enrich the B2B cards portfolio.

A new Partnership Portal was introduced to alrajhi Business Partners. Existing corporate clients onboarding alrajhi as Business Partners were allowed to use their e-Business credentials when registering on the Partnership Portal, further simplifying the process. The Partnership Portal connects to multiple other platforms that form a supportive foundation to uplift Saudi’s growing SME ecosystem; the Partnership Portal connects with the Qawaem portal (enabling direct deposit of financial statements by SMEs), GOSI electronic services (for social insurance), THIQAH (smart business solutions), and Bayan – the leading integrated trade, credit, and financial data provider in the Kingdom. The integration with these platforms aims to improve SME participation in the Saudi economy by facilitating greater access to an ecosystem of services.

For the micro and small business (MSB) unit, a system upgrade during the year resulted in the launch of MSB 3.0, which introduced an upgraded Need-based Financing suite of products; this includes cash financing available for Point-of-Sales (POS), Business Instalment Financing (BIF) and eCommerce, real estate financing options through Eirad credit facilities, fleet financing solutions, payroll financing solutions, as well as invoice financing solutions that also includes alrajhi takaful insurance financing. To further improve the eBusiness customer experience, the alrajhi Business Application was enhanced to be tablet compatible for an easy and hassle-free experience.

With the progressing digitalisation of alrajhi takaful products, the bank been able to introduce a range of digitised insurance journeys that meet varying needs of its corporate client segments. The alrajhi takaful Health Insurance offering covers employers, employees and their respective dependents.

alrajhi introduced an upscaled SADAD payments module through its eBusiness channels, enhancing efficiencies for corporate customers, while improving its own revenue stream from SADAD payments by availing features such as scheduling, favouriting, and retrieving bills linked to a CR. The addition of this module has been exceptionally well received by corporate clients, resulting in over SAR 2 Mn. in SADAD payments carried out in the month of October 2024, a record high for the Corporate Banking Group.

Awards and recognition

The scale, scope and speed of the bank’s digital transformation, and the benchmark achieved in digital banking functionality by alrajhi bank has earned recognition and commendation from local and global industry peers, publications and organisations. alrajhi bank received a number of awards during the reporting period: