Our 16^th annual Model Bank program recognizes financial institutions for best practices of technology usage in areas critical to success in banking. Our aim with these awards is both celebratory and instructional. Celebratory because, despite the headlines, there is much to celebrate in banking. Initiatives throughout the globe are improving customer’s lives and enriching bank’s value delivery. These stories get lost amidst the “crisis peddling” in the media. Instructional because there is much for institutions to learn from the success of others. We’ve written hundreds of case studies over the years that convey actionable insights. Today we announce our 2023 Model Banks and publish a bevy of case studies and pre-recorded interviews with the many project sponsors that accomplished award-winning work.

First and foremost, Celent is delighted to recognize ICICI Bank, based in Mumbai, India, as this year’s Model Bank of the Year! We’re recognizing ICICI Bank for multiple technology initiatives it brought to market over the past couple of years – six of them, in fact. Three support the bank’s credit card line of business and three support the bank’s corporate treasury services clients. Celent is publishing two case studies detailing these initiatives. The first half of the award recognizes the progress ICICI Bank made in digitizing the card customer lifecycle. ICICI Bank developed an end-to-end digitized solution for its credit card customers, from digital onboarding (including identity verification) to seamless user management of credit card usage and spending, with solid data security and compliance controls. Concurrently, the bank launched a series of initiatives aimed at further automating the processing of credit card customer requests for improved user experience and operating efficiency. These included a fully conversational interactive voice response (IVR) system and automated inbound e-mail response automation.

These in themselves would be award worthy, but ICICI Bank was also busy innovating in its corporate banking line of business. ICICI Bank is a strong example for other banks to follow in leveraging technology to strengthen their trade finance offerings across several dimensions: a comprehensive portal for start-ups, an internal solution to identify and close leads, and an end-to-end solution to managing domestic trade transactions.

We are also excited to recognize 12 additional financial institutions and their initiatives with Model Bank 2023 awards, with links to each institution’s case study and interview:

Each of the above linked case studies – one for each winning initiative, are now available to Celent clients. We’re also publishing an overview document, entitled Innovation in Banking and Payments 2023. This report, however, is available freely to anyone who registers on Celent.com. Also available freely on Celent’s website are a library of short videos – one for each winning initiative. In most cases, you can hear from the project sponsors themselves. We encourage you to make good use of these resources as you learn from the extraordinary work done by these institutions and leverage their experience at your firm.