As part of building a culture of innovation among the Bank’s employees and engaging them in creating new solutions and submitting ideas, the Innovation Lab conducted 17 crowdsourcing campaigns in 2023, which collected a total of 5,136 ideas and submissions from Bank employees, including those developing business projects and supporting innovative initiatives. There has been an increase in the activity and size of the community of banking innovators who joined the internal crowdsourcing platform IdeaCrowd, a tool implemented by the Innovation Lab in May 2021. The IdeaCrowd community grew by 1,647 employees in 2023 – thus the ranking of active innovators was 5,510 people from various units of the Bank (a 42.6% year-on-year increase in the number of active employees). Commitment can be seen among both the employees of the sales network and support units.
Responsibility
Development of innovation in business operations
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The number of initiatives related to the digitization of organizations requires continuous monitoring of the innovation market, cooperation with fintechs and testing of solutions that are in the implementation phase. Bank Pekao’s Innovation Laboratory (hereinafter: Laboratory, LAB), established for these tasks, focuses on four areas:
In its activities, the Lab is particularly focused on innovations to build modern banking and align products and services with customer expectations. The Innovation Lab draws on both market and non-market practices, as well as trend research, crowdsourced ideas and technology provided by young companies.
The Innovation Lab also plays a key role in the manufacturing process of new features planned for implementation as part of the Bank’s mobile application development strategy – PeoPay.
The Innovation Lab has launched a dedicated innovation manufacturing process under all customer segments called the Innovation Factory. It allows the Bank to seek and verify ideas for innovative solutions for its customers. In addition to this, we sustainably support the organization in the development of ongoing solutions (e.g. for SMEs, JDG, Private or Retail Customer) to support the Bank’s current Strategy.
In 2023, the LAB continued to actively collaborate with the startup ecosystem in Poland and abroad. Thanks to its participation in the Poland Prize program of the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development, Bank Pekao has carried out accelerations and pilots of startups – including Nexus, Global Changer, Kareer.
- analyzed more than 150 startups based on a proprietary system – SRM (Startup Relationship Manager),
- after the acceleration and piloting of Getpin (a platform for managing the Bank’s presence in map services), the Bank decided to implement the solution commercially,
- a new procurement strategy for innovative startup solutions was developed, with the piloting of innovations (PoC – Proof of Concept) as an integral part of the procurement process,
- an internal Startup Manual describing the process from business need to pilot implementation of new technologies and startup solutions was also created,
- a pilot of a carbon footprint calculator for the Bank’s business customers was implemented with the participation of a foreign platform,
- in response to the identified areas of interest of the business units, numerous scoutings of technology solutions were carried out – including technologies for analyzing branch traffic, Web 3.0 solutions (among others, NFT and Metaverse) and others. A total of 20 surveys were conducted for Business Owners from various units of the Bank.