Bankia : “The objective of Bankia’s new strategic plan is to maintain its leadership in efficiency, profitability and solvency”, said Goirigolzarri

• Goirigolzarri explained that the central idea of the plan 'will be the customer - listening to and serving the customer'
• 'Bankia intends to offer the best combination in the market in terms of excellent service at a highly competitive price'
• 'We want Bankia to be seen by consumers as a close, simple and transparent bank'
• 'The successful banks will be those that know how to adapt their traditional networks and combine the multi-channel approach when responding to the growing demands from customers via virtual channels'

Following the conclusion of the bank's first strategic plan in 2015 'with all targets met', Bankia's chairman, José Ignacio Goirigolzarri, said that the objective of Bankia's next plan is 'to maintain its leadership in efficiency, profitability and solvency' among Spain's six largest banks.

He explained that the central idea and the focus of this plan 'will be the customer - listening to and serving the customer'. 'We therefore intend to offer the best combination in the market in terms of excellent service at a highly competitive price'.

Goirigolzarri, who today took part in a lunchtime symposium organised by the Association for Management Progress (APD) in Barcelona, said that one of the challenges of the second strategic plan is for Bankia to be seen by consumers as a 'close, simple and transparent' bank.

'This position affects every aspect of the bank's activities, from the design of its products, which we want to be easy to understand, transparent and with no small print, through to the configuration of our virtual channels or the dialogue we have with our customers'.

Goirigolzarri stated that Bankia is currently the most efficient bank in Spain, 'but we must continue to be' if we want to achieve these objectives, since 'having the best offer in the market in terms of service quality at a competitive price means being a highly efficient bank'.

In this new situation in the banking sector, 'the key variable for a bank is going to be efficiency and the key instrument for achieving this will be digitalisation', said Bankia's chairman. Consequently 'technology is going to play an essential role in radically reducing process costs'.

Goirigolzarri said, 'The improvement in productivity involves simplifying, automating and outsourcing processes' and represents the first of two strategic vectors for the future.

Multi-channel approach

The second strategic vector for the bank is its multi-channel approach. 'The successful banks will be those that know how to adapt their traditional networks and combine the multi-channel approach when responding to the growing demands from customers via virtual channels', said Goirigolzarri.

At present, 'one third of Bankia's customers are multi-channel', '46% of consumer loans are taken out online or at ATMs' and 'only 11% of transactional operations are performed in branches', he said. But it should not be forgotten that '86% of employees in the banking system work in branches, which in turn account for nearly 60% of the remaining general expenses'.

Consequently, 'the major challenge for the banking sector over the next five or 10 years is how to realise the potential of this installed capacity, which must adapt', said Bankia's chairman, before going on to say that 'the banking sector will continue to have a hybrid system over the next few years'.

'We are therefore working hard to segment the branch network and to combine remote managers and personal managers, while at the same time investing heavily in understanding our customers' behaviour' explained Goirigolzarri.

Bankia's chairman acknowledged 'the enormous transformation process' that the sector has gone through since 2012, which has involved major consolidation to increase banks' size, huge financial sacrifice, provisioning an amount equivalent to 30% of Spain's GDP, and a difficult adjustment process, with the closure of 15,000 branches and a reduction of nearly 84,000 employees - 30% of the workforce.

During this period, Goirigolzarri recalled that 'Bankia has implemented an extremely demanding restructuring plan; its access to the markets has returned to normal; it has begun repaying the aid it received, totalling 1.627 billion euros; and it has achieved the targets in its strategic plan' in order to end 2015 as 'the most efficient bank, with the highest level of solvency and the highest return on equity, obtaining the largest profits in Spain' among the country's top six banks.