Commercial Bank of Dubai making rapid progress on digitalisation: CEO

Dr Bernd van Linder, CEO of Commercial Bank of Dubai shares the importance of selfmotivation on the job and adopting new technologies. Dr Bernd Van Linder, chief executive officer of Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD), has a tried and tested method when it comes to business excellence. Every morning on his way to work, he asks himself what he can do to make CBD a little bit better for everyone.

"I have an internal drive to leave things in a better shape than I first found them in," he says. "This is true for everything that I do. Even if things look great, there is always a way to make them better. If I can make it a little better each day, then at the end of the year, it will certainly be a lot better in a broader sense for our customers, employees, and shareholders."

Van Linder highlighted the importance of self-motivation on the job, adopting new technologies, and the state of the UAE's banking sector. "One of the most important parts of my job is talking to people; I don't believe in hierarchy, and the people that I work with know this," he said. "When they want to talk to me, they come to me directly and we talk business. We have different nationalities working at the bank, making a very diverse workforce. What I practice in my interactions with everyone is a simple matter of respect. In my experience, if you are respectful to others and don't try to impose your opinion on them, things will work out."

Asked about his time at CBD and the progress of the bank's digitalisation, he said: "A lot has happened in digital, especially at CBD, but in a way, what banks have done so far has been the easy part. It has mainly been the digitalisation of the customer facing format. The biggest impact of digitalisation will be the digitisation of back-end processes. This will have a massive impact on improving the bank's productivity, efficiency, and customer experience."

Every bank in the world, he noted, is focused on getting their back-end processes digitised. Phase one - involving digital services for customers - has already been completed by many banks, but the next phase, which is end-to-end digitisation, is going to prove to be a bigger challenge. Going deeper into the subject, he explained that when it comes to AI, what is happening today is that simple processes are disappearing.

"The first step is automation, but very soon, such processes will disappear completely. I think that in some areas of banking, certain jobs will disappear completely. Everything that can be standardised, will ultimately end up being automated," he said.