Home Credit, one of the world’s leading consumer lending companies, was among many companies that saw the coronavirus pandemic temporarily close shops in much of the world. But the company can still be happy with its results in Kazakhstan; thanks to its head start in the digital realm, Home Credit was advantageously positioned and remained profitable during all months of this year in the country.

In short, Home Credit’s bet on digitisation paid off: “Just two years ago, we served virtually all our clients in person at the branches; today, 1.2 million people use our mobile application every month. This is one-tenth of Kazakhstan’s economically active population,” says Karel Horák, who is at the helm of the Home Credit Bank in the Central Asian country.

Despite advanced digitisation, the first wave of the pandemic made things difficult for the bank at the start, Horák says. In addition to the closing of shops, and thus the decline in consumer credit provision for goods sold in those shops, its branches were compelled to shut their doors as well. That led the workload for retail banking operations to shift to the call centres as well, which had to rapidly scale up the number of its operators – a monumental challenge because of the pandemic situation and the restriction imposed on free movement between Kazakhstan’s vast and distant regions. “In just two weeks, we enabled more than one half of approximately 1,000 of our operators to work from home. It’s not just about giving everyone a laptop, a headset with a microphone and a good connection – being a bank, we also have to keep a high level of customer data security in mind,” explains Horák.

According to the bank’s CEO, another challenge was connecting the operators relocated to home offices to the right telephone systems, which are automated to a great extent. The scarcity of operators called for more solutions, though. “For instance, we started offering jobs in remote regions. Given Kazakhstan’s expanses, it means that you are in fact hiring and training a person you have never met before, perhaps thousands of kilometers away. Still, you can control the quality of their work and be in touch with them as needed,” Horák says, adding that modern technologies for automated communication were harnessed too.

It was not just about chatbots – a fairly widespread technology nowadays – it was also about voicebots: speaking robots whose voices are almost indiscernible from those of real operators. “If you do not switch between languages or cause the voicebot other mischief during the call, you cannot tell the difference. Customer satisfaction surveys also show that there are no differences between human operators and voicebots in this respect.” People in Kazakhstan speak both Kazakh and Russian, and they often switch or mix both languages in the course of ordinary conversation, but aside from such minor issues, voicebots allowed the company to answer many more customer enquiries while maintaining a high standard of service quality.

Another complication for Home Credit Bank Kazakhstan was the steep drop of the Kazakh currency, primarily due to the decrease in crude oil prices and to the local economy’s interconnection with Russia. “Kazakhstan is an oil superpower. When Brent crude greatly weakened in early April, tumbling from more than 60 US dollars to just a little over 20 US dollars per barrel, it had a marked impact on the Kazakh currency, the tenge. The Russian rouble devalued significantly too, which magnified the effect, such that the tenge lost more than one-fifth of its value compared to the dollar within one month,” Horák says.

What initially might have seemed a problem eventually brought many new clients to Home Credit Bank Kazakhstan. The Kazakh government resolved to support those affected by the coronavirus pandemic through direct financial aid. Since Kazakhstan, as the 9th largest country in the world has a population of just 18 million people, the government decided to give its citizens the option to collect the aid through bank networks. With branches closed, it stipulated a requirement that digital solutions must be available.

“People then applied digitally for the issue of debit cards on which the money was available to them. As we had a digital solution and a messenger network already thanks to our previous initiatives, we were able to deliver the plastic to the clients. Thanks to the cards, many of them went on to try the other benefits of our services, and they have stayed with us and they keep on using their cards,” Horák explains. Despite this leap, Kazakhstan remains a cash economy where more than half of all money transactions take place physically, often in US dollars. “I think, however, that what we have learned this year in the digital realm, whether it be in terms of digital sales or digital service provision, is something that nobody will want to throw away, and everybody will keep on developing it,” concludes Horák.