OTP named Outstanding Digital Credit Institution

OTP named Outstanding Digital Credit Institution

With the recent launch of its online services, OTP Bank won the Digital Success Programme's outstanding digital credit institution trademark. The Bank’s innovation efforts, the quality of its online services and its corporate social responsibility aimed at the improvement of consumers’ financial literacy contributed to a great extent to winning the ‘outstanding’ category. Launched in November last year, the purpose of the Digital Success Financial Trademark programme is to call consumers’ attention to top quality contemporary digital services.

With its innovative solutions and customer-oriented approach, OTP Bank, as a major credit institution, has had an online presence from the start not only in Hungary, but – through its subsidiaries – in the entire region, and has always taken special efforts to continuously enhance its electronic channels and online services. It was the first bank in Hungary to enter the market with several services, such as the internetbank, certain mobile payment solutions – e.g. ApplePay –, or the online personal loan. The number of users of the SmartBank application, for instance, has been growing continuously since 2011; at present, over 1.3 million customers take recourse to the services provided by the app, which is an unprecedented feat among Hungarian banking applications.

In line with the principles set forth in the Digital Success Programme, in developing its services the Bank views digital transformation as a comprehensive, opportunity creating social change with its customers at it centre. Members of OTP Group serve users, even in a bank-independent way, through numerous innovative developments. Examples include the OTPay online payment platform introduced in 2014 by OTP Mobile, the Simple app, which offers complex services, or the OTP SZÉP app, which now supports advance payments as well.

The Bank responded immediately to the swift changes in customer needs over the past few years – in part, as a result of the pandemic – by offering, among other things, the new internet and mobile banking service launched last year, several mobile payment solutions and OTP Videobank, which supports online account opening, online application for the internetbank, and the online consumer credit process. On the various online platforms of the credit institution, new registrations and the number of transactions exhibited a two-digit growth in 2020 and, for example, there was a fivefold increase in 2020 in the number of users who use QR code scanning to pay their postal cheques via the OTP SmartBank mobile application.

Even now, the credit institution is involved in several digital developments, such as the enhancement of OTP Bank’s new internet and mobile banking application. In addition to these traditional online banking functions, the upgrades allow for such digital solutions as the Personal Finance Manager (PFM), the portfolio view – which displays the customer’s total assets held with OTP –, or the replacement of SMS messages by push messages sent to mobile phones. The number of functions is expanding on a continuous basis. Customers are constantly involved in the testing of new platforms, and their feedback allows the Bank to finetune the given services.

OTP Bank also expends significant efforts to support digital development and financial education. It achievements in this area are also demonstrated by the MasterCard and Global Finance awards: OTP Bank has been among the winner financial institutions for years, primarily in recognition of its digital solutions.