National Bank of Oman (“NBO”) provided a platform for its employees to encourage the conceptualization of new and innovative ideas and solutions that could enhance business processes and improve customers’ banking experience.
The ‘Ibtikar’ journey began in 2014 as part of the bank’s transformational growth journey whilst focusing on driving a high-performance and values-based culture and enhancing employee engagement.
Earlier this year, over 20 teams were shortlisted after they displayed a series of innovations that seek to enhance our customers’ banking experience, improve operational efficiency, and to develop our service offering, among others to drive change in the banking industry. For the past few months they have worked to further develop their projects, and during last week’s final presentation, each participant presented their prototypes for the best Ibtikar title to a panel of judges including James Dartnell the Deputy Editor of enterprise IT magazine Computer News Middle East.
The panel was impressed with the solutions presented, which address a range of topics with the underlying objective of strongly positioning NBO as the bank of choice by offering innovative financial solutions. Subsequently, a voting poll was also conducted internally for employees to vote for the most popular innovation.
On this occasion, Mr. Ahmed Al Musalmi, CEO of NBO said: “We created the “ibtikar” innovation platform to harness and fully leverage our talented employees’ capabilities and to help them unlock their full potential. We are very impressed with the quality of ideas that this year’s ibtikar showcased. This is an important vehicle for NBO to deliver innovative services that will enhance our customers’ banking experience.”
Commenting on the initiative, Faizal Eledath, General Manager – Chief Information Officer and Head of Transformation at NBO, said: “At NBO, we are committed to empowering our people and tapping into their ingenuity by nurturing great ideas and successful innovations that will help us become the bank of choice, and we look forward to bringing these ideas into fruition soon for our customers.”