The strongest economic crisis in modern history caused Mexican banks to seek the most effective method to take care of their financial strength and, incidentally, implement a digital strategy that would allow them to be competitive in the following years.
In the case of Citibanamex, the bank decided to create preventive reserves for 10.5 billion pesos and this caused its net profit to contract by 50%. Despite this, the bank is confident that there will be an economic recovery in the second half of 2021 which in turn will boost the demand for credit.
To meet this demand, the bank is considering making changes in the way it grants loans. Manuel Romo, CEO of Citibanamex, said in an interview that in 2020 there was a dramatic change in customer service since with digitization the bank had a growth in transactionality of up to 60%.
“The first thing that is going to change is the way of granting loans. If before there was doubt about the appetite in the digital channel, now we know that it is one of the favorites and we are going to develop models that take into account the digital (payment) model” , He said.
In this way, the bank seeks to offer customers personalized products according to their ability to pay. Attention will also change in the branches, which will be more dedicated to advice than to transactions.
Manuel Romo stressed that the recovery in the placement of credit will depend on the economic reactivation of the country.
“The demand we are seeing is slow, clients continue to be cautious in the personal and country economic expectations. To the extent that clients and companies see that domestic consumption is reactivated, that employment is more permanent and to the extent that If the activity of each of the money transfers continues to recover, we believe that the credit will recover, “he said.
The manager highlighted that in the pandemic, one of the sectors that required the most support was SMEs with more than 50% of this portfolio.
These companies have requested restructuring of their loans from the bank to continue operating, so the bank has launched mechanisms to facilitate sales. In March and April 2020, the bank eliminated the collection of the rent for point-of-sale terminals.
The initiative was applied to clients who invoiced in February and who reduced their sales by more than 50% at the same time that they received training in the digitization of businesses.
“We are leading SMEs to an e-commerce model, which we believe is here to stay,” Romo said.
