Saxo Bank gets more personal with clients amid trend to go digital

'Having the presence here makes people feel more secure. They can come into the office, they can meet us. They need the assurance that they are not just dealing with someone on the phone.'

About 800 million customers use mobile banking, and that is expected to more than double to 1.7 billion users in the next five years. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images / AFP

As banks push ahead with digital services and scale back their branch networks, one investment bank says its retail brokerage business is growing in part because of the human touch.

Fadi Mehdi, the head of Saxo Bank’s representative office in Abu Dhabi, said he was starting to see double-digit growth in new clients this year, compared to single digits last year, with a similar growth in the amount of money that was being traded by customers.

“Having the presence here makes people feel more secure,” he said. “They can come into the office, they can meet us. They need the assurance that they are not just dealing with someone on the phone.”

The Danish institution, which specialises in online trading of global securities, opened an office in Abu Dhabi in May last year. That raised the number of offices throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Australia to 26.

Going digital has been a win-win situation for banks, with customers enjoying convenience and speed while banks save money. About 800 million customers use mobile banking, and that is expected to more than double to 1.7 billion users in the next five years, according to industry estimates.

HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, said this week that getting customers to bank digitally and reducing its branch network would help it in its push to restore profitability. As part of that drive, it is planning to cut 25,000 jobs worldwide.

In the UAE, which boasts one of the world's highest rates of smartphone use, banks have been spending millions of dollars to upgrade digital applications. Emirates NBD, Dubai's biggest bank, this month said that 80 per cent of customer transactions were now done outside of branches on computers, phones or ATMs.

Mr Mehdi said Saxo Bank had been receiving regular ad hoc visits from customers who live in the neighbourhood near its Abu Dhabi office.

Because of anticipated demand, the bank would be looking to increase its headcount in the capital, he said.

“People are just walking into the office,” he said “We do not actually encourage that, because a lot of the time we are out at meetings [with clients].”

Saxo Bank is big in forex trading, an activity that has been booming in recent years because of the large amount of money that clients can borrow from brokerages to trade currencies.

Mr Mehdi said he always took great care to remind clients that margin trading could magnify losses just as much as it could pump up gains. “It’s quite addictive because of leverage, but we always reiterate in meetings that leverage is great when it goes up, but when it goes down it is equally dangerous. Clients understand that,” he said.

In an effort to tailor its products to the UAE, the bank this week unveiled a new multi-asset trading platform that comes with an Arabic version. Through the SaxoTraderGo application, its customers can buy and sell more than 30,000 financial instruments including stocks, bonds and commodities on just about any device.

The Copenhagen-based bank, which gets about 10 per cent of its revenues from the Middle East, is also hoping that its Abu Dhabi office will aid its efforts to sell its proprietary trading platforms to banks. Saxo has had an office at the Dubai International Financial Centre since 2009, and its presence helped to double the bank’s revenues in the region.

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