Yeah. Great. So welcome everyone today. I will be talking about ient and access management and customer experience for corporate clients. But before I start, let me briefly introduce myself. I have an industrial engineering background from gal university and after my bachelor's, I did a master's in management engineering in Italy with a specialization in digital business and market innovation. And after completing my studies, I first started working in a bank in Istanbul.
And later on, I joined, I G in 2018 as an international trainee where I'm currently working in IM area for wholesale banking. So my talk this afternoon is divided into three main sections. First of all, I will give an overview about I G and our strategy. Then I will introduce you to our wholesale bank, digital platform inside business. And later after that, I will discuss how we improve customer experience for our clients. And finally, I will deep dive into our identity and access management solutions and share some of my learning so far about corporate clients.
So I'm sure most of you know about I G but I G is a global financial institution with a strong European base. We are offering retail and wholesale banking services to customers in over 40 countries. And currently we have more than 56,000 employees and we serve more than around 39 million retail customers. Let me talk about the I strategy. It's actually very clear and straightforward. Our purpose is empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business, as you can see, there is absolutely no mention of financial services or banking in our purpose.
And the starting point for us is the customers. And even broader than that is the people. So the society, we believe that the I N G of tomorrow will exist in a digital world. So a world beyond banking. And the only way for us to succeed is through creating a differentiating customer experience.
And because customer needs are changing rapidly to stay a step ahead, we announced in 2016 that we would accelerate the execution of our strategy and transform. I G so we will unite. The foundations of I G is built upon, and we will simplify and streamlining global support functions.
This will really help us to collaborate better borders and innovate faster. So on top of these foundations, we will unite businesses for this. We introduce five change programs, creating best in class Omni channel omnichannel financial platforms that offer services beyond banking. Our ultimate call in the end is to get a complete United IEG one single experience for our, all our customers around the world. And in the end, empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business. So why are we doing all this? First of all, banking products have become commodities.
There is no real difference between the features of one savings account or a current account from a bank from ag or another bank. And the only way for us to stand out from the competition is to offer a better customer experience.
Second, the big tax, the big tech companies have raised the bar. When it comes to experience, people expect these companies like Uber or Airbnb, they provide global seamless and instant digital experiences. So wherever you go, you can use your Uber app to get a cap easily without any hassle. So you don't have to open a new profile or anything. So it's seamless everywhere and last but not least, people spend a great deal of time on platforms created by tech companies to buy things, socialize, explore, learn, and travel, which is a little bit difficult these days due to COVID.
So if people spend their time on their iPhones, tablets, their mobiles, Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb, how can we really get in touch with them? If we see that platforms are taking over, then the question is, should I G become a platform ourself because of these reasons we actually create the digital banking platform called inside business for our corporate clients. So inside business is a single platform for corporate treasures. Daily banking needs. Our clients can manage all their financial transactions like payments collections for an exchange or lending on our platform. Real time.
We have three main channels for our users on the left. You see our website in the middle, you see our mobile application, which we call inside business app. And on the right side, you see our inside business app application. And for all these three channels, we are working towards offering a true omnichannel experience so that our users can easily switch between different channels and continue working and doing their transactions without any problem. You may now ask how we actually improve customer experience for inside business.
We actually have a structured product open process where we start from identifying the customer problem. First, there is a really good sentence that you have to be obsessed with the problem, not with the solution. So once we truly understand the problem or the need of the customer, we start brainstorming for solutions and validate it with our users. Once we have one, a solution that we would like to bring it to our users, and once this solution is validated, we put it in our bed box.
So we work agile and we start building it in this way.
Actually, we minimize the risk of unused products or features and create real value for our customers in a short time period here in this slide, you see some of our tools for user research and solution design. All these tools are used during different phases of the process. And one of important aspect that I didn't put in this site is, is that all our decisions are driven by data. So for example, we use click data or user data, and so that we only make data driven decisions when it comes to solution design.
So from an ID and access management perspective, the challenge for us is really finding the right balance between security and customer experience. If you have already seen the previous session, our colleague from Akamai also mentioned that this is not easy, and this will be, it looks like it will be a challenge for us for all of us in the future as well.
So for, for us, for IG, for inside business, we currently serve more than 80,000 users from 73 countries. These are main big international companies. So we have an important responsibility to protect our customers at all times, if anything goes wrong, the consequences can be severe for our clients, but also for, I G for example, having downtime due to a DDoS attack because of which our clients cannot execute their payments on time or fraud, getting access, access to user profile and stealing millions of euros from client accounts.
So prevent this to prevent any of these problems.
We extensively test our applications. We do pen testing internally, externally. We do DDO tests. We do performance tests, and also we implement advanced fraud monitoring for transactions and user behavior. On the other hand, our users and admins can revoke their access any time in case of any pro potential frauds. And an important aspect is of course security events. We give training to our employees and create security events with our clients on a regular basis.
And of course, we also comply as a bank with all the regulation, all available regulations, like PST two for strong customer authentication, time of limits, providing access to third parties. And so, and finally we offer multifactor authentication solution to access our inside business platform for insight business. We offered two different MFA solutions.
In 2014, we started with the Harvard token with a smart card smart card and reader.
We call this token I G identity card and reader. The user has a personalized smart card, and he, or she can use the card and reader to get a response card for logging in and signing transactions in inside business. But more recently in 2016, we also introduced a mobile token, which can be used by downloading our inside business mobile app. Same as the card reader and token can be used for login and signing. And it's very easy.
The user just needs to open the app, scan pure code with his phone camera and confirm the login or signing. This solution offers much better user experience to name few of the its benefits and token is much easier and faster to use.
Of course, the activation is within minutes and there is no need to carry an extra hardware token. Now I'd like to show you a video that we have recently created to promote M token
I G believes your bank should be as mobile as your business. Introducing M token with M token, your mobile phone is your key to easy and secure access to I G's inside business, always at your fingertips, wherever you work at the office or remotely, no more need for additional devices to log in.
All you have to do is download the inside business app and activated, then go to inside business on your computer log to the inside business app, scan the QR code and confirm it is that easy join the more than 7,000 users from 40 countries who already use M token download the inside business app today and start benefiting from the convenience and security of the app's M token feature.
We strongly advise our clients to choose M token instead of our coding reader. And in the last six months, we actually saw a huge increase in the number of users with only MTO.
This is actually in line with the movements in the market as well. We see 60% of employees using mobile apps for work in UK. And on the other hand, more companies are implementing, bring your own device schemes. The good thing about mobile phone is that 70% of employees keep their phone within an eye contact. If the phone is stolen, then the user realizes this much quicker than a stolen hardware token. So this decreases the risk of internal or external fraud cases. On the other hand, we also did in depth interviews with our clients, some of them are among top 10 companies in Netherlands.
What we learned that they expect more mobile solutions from their banks since they do not really want to carry six or seven different hardware tokens from different banks. And second learning is that corporate policies are changing in the past. Most companies would not allow mobile phone usage at work because of security concerns, but it's not the case anymore. For many companies. On the other hand, we see that some users who are, for instance, the only user with signing rights, do not want to take any risk for access.
That's why they want to have both a mobile and hardware token to have access to inside business.
And finally, we see that there is a difference between west European and east European countries, where in general, Eastern European users prefer to use a hardware token at work. And here in the Netherlands, we see a mobile adoption, much higher. So to summarize, we notice that users are becoming more security array, even sometimes too much, that they do not trust our communications and they come to us and they question our requests.
We have a big challenge to find the right balance between security and user experience. There are still some practical limitations for mobile, such as not all employees have a platform or want to use their private phone for Brooke customers expect personal, easy and smart solutions from their banks. Like they receive from big tech or FinTech. And finally, even today, having a mobile app or a mobile token still creates a well effect for many corporate clients. Thank you for listening to me, and now I can get your questions.
