Government Savings Bank digitalizes operations to serve customers better with Power Apps

Founded in 1913 by King Vajiravudh (King Rama VI), Government Savings Bank (GSB) is a fully state-owned organization serving 26 million customers. As a social bank, it is determined to build a sustainable economy for Thailand by eliminating poverty and reducing inequality. “Our mission is to facilitate people’s savings and make our services accessible, convenient, and straightforward,” says Boonson Jenchaimahakoon, First Senior Executive Vice President of Information Technology at GSB.

To promote financial equality, GSB understood that it must move away from a bureaucratic, paper-based process to a seamless, digitalized customer service. This is because of the bank’s research that showed how the high cost of travel drove customers in rural areas to adopt online banking than those in the cities. “Our large pool of online banking customers prompted us to rethink our system,” recalls Jenchaimahakoon. “We realized that digital solutions would help close the gap between our customers and team and enable us to serve a larger number of people faster. We also understood that this was a long journey. We had to start by transforming our work culture and changing how our customers perceive our organization.” With this in mind, GSB looked for ways to establish digital operations for their services and gain seamless access to company-wide data. 

The company embarked on this initiative after the devastating 2011 Thailand flood. “I suggested to the team that, if another catastrophe were to happen, we should be able to work anywhere at any time without the need to travel to headquarters. Our team learned its lesson and gradually implemented digital tools,” shares Jenchaimahakoon. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this initiative. 

As a long-time user of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure, the bank turned to Microsoft Power Apps and Power Platform to digitalize its processes and data and enable employees to serve customers from home. “We did not have time for a steep learning curve with new tools,” says Jenchaimahakoon. “Thankfully, Microsoft solutions have been easy to learn for our team.”

Providing more efficient customer service

It took GSB approximately four months to transform operations and employee experience with Microsoft solutions. The most effective reformation was creating a digital branch—a single platform for retrieving customer data from any place and with any device. 

The digital branch was also integrated with GSB’s flagship system called MyMo. Previously, bank employees manually relayed customer requests and transactions to the GSB headquarters using a legacy system. The tedious process involved customers filling out paperwork and personnel sending scanned documents to headquarters, resulting in unnecessary back-and-forth communications, lost emails, and long waiting hours for confirmations.

Now, even with customers physically visiting branches, they no longer need to file paper forms. Employees enter information into Power Apps and retrieve the necessary documents within seconds, bypassing headquarters altogether. This enables the bank to track every concern while saving time. Closing an account, for example, now takes three to five minutes instead of hours. 

The Microsoft solution has also helped branch managers monitor each task and report from a single intuitive platform. “Our employees are very grateful to have these tools that help them provide more efficient customer service,” says Jenchaimahakoon.

Attaining sustainable banking through tech

Digital transformation is also enabling GSB to achieve its goal in reducing financial inequality through initiatives such as expanding loan access. Approximately 240,000 non-salaried customers without a credit history can now receive loans despite the absence of traditional credit scoring. This is done through an AI-based loan calculator developed with Microsoft.

The solution analyzes clients’ financial situations with live data, reducing the time it takes for customers to request loans and providing the necessary information from an hour to minutes. “The solution has allowed us to process over 400,000 loan applications in a single day. This included 1.72 million relief loan applications related to COVID-19 from November 2020 to the end of 2021.”

“With Microsoft, we have streamlined repetitive financial services like loan collection, enabling our employees to quickly check customer profiles and documentation. By relying on digital tools to provide the right assistance to our customers, we have truly improved our service during the pandemic,” says Jenchaimahakoon.

Empowering employees to serve customers better

Internally, Power Apps has improved GSB’s employee data gathering and recruitment processes. The team used to manually collect sensitive personal information in different formats, which needed conversion and slowed assessments. With Microsoft, recruitment information is quickly and securely gathered and stored in the right format, tracking each applicant through an ID system that accelerates the hiring process. Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) consent forms can be easily scanned and uploaded to the platform as well, making up to 40,000 documents from 21,000 employees easily accessible to human resources. 

The data-gathering solution came in handy during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, the bank updated an Excel sheet daily to track thousands of employees’ health statuses. After implementing Power Apps, employees add information to the central database that updates and aggregates data automatically. This eliminated the need for overtime work, enabling the team to finish work four hours earlier. 

Even for internal elections, Microsoft’s solution enables employees to browse nominees and vote electronically from any location, instead of manual ballot counting that took place before GSB’s digital transformation. Aside from saving time, Power Apps ensures transparency and security of the entire process.

Sustaining and future-proofing digital banking

Moving forward, GSB is integrating a chatbot that can help manage customer service and provide quicker access to general information. The bank is also considering Robotic Process Automation (RPA)—a solution to build, deploy, and manage software robots with ease—for data management. 

“Throughout this process, we have learned to examine our pain points and tackle them with digital solutions,” Jenchaimahakoon concludes. “Now that we are able to identify more gaps, we can fix persistent problems in the blink of an eye.”