In the coming weeks, we’ll explore a feature from Forbes Australia, where John shares insights into the future of Australia’s banking and financial services sector. You can find the full article as a featured story on the Forbes Australia platform.
After an era dominated by technological advancements and a pandemic that fast tracked us into a digital future, Australia’s financial sector is facing a new challenge: how to use these innovations to enhance the customer experience and re-humanise solutions for banking and finance.
Under the direction of John Dimitropoulos, Liberty IT Consulting Group is modernising management consulting and restoring market trust into consulting services with innovative, forward-focussed, thoughtful, and ethical practices to transformation. Through leveraging advancements in tech, the company is crafting right-tailored solutions for clients to improve everything from online usability for customer convenience for financing home ownership to personalising customer experience far beyond typical transactional relationships that organisations historically hold with customers.
Given his deep-seated passion for the industry and a genuine commitment to moving tech forward, it is hard to imagine Dimitropoulos in a role other than leading a cutting-edge tech firm. But the entrepreneur’s ambitions weren’t always focused on the digital space.
“In high school, my passion was sport, and I found technology extremely intimidating,” he says. “It was only because I received some excellent advice about technology being the future that I decided to begrudgingly force myself to study it at the University of Technology Sydney.
It was until landing his first internship with Financial Network Services (one of Australia’s first tech start-ups in the 90’s) and realised how technology helped improve human livelihood that Dimitropoulos realised his future lay in the rapidly growing industry. Today, he lives and breathes IT. “It’s my passion, and now second nature for me,” he says.
Today, Dimitropoulos is one of fintech’s primary leaders and an advocate for Australian tech innovation. He believes Australia has the potential to become a global leader in the space. It can’t be done, however, without encouraging, nurturing, retaining, and investing in homegrown talent.
“For example, all those incredibly bright graduates from universities like the University of Technology Sydney… let’s make sure they stay and work here, let’s help them transition smoothly into the industry, because if we don’t make and retain that IT knowledge here, we will have several problems on our hands, including a workforce shortage and a lack of technological know-how to make the right decisions for our nation and its corporations” he says. “But to do this, we need to make sure that we have a thriving and robust industry which welcomes them, gives them enough job opportunities and makes it affordable and rewarding for them to live in our major cities and help our nation compete in the global stage on tech innovation.”
One of Liberty IT’s important contributions is the ability to enhance how banks understand and engage with their customers. As tech giants like Amazon set new standards in personalised customer service, financial service corporations are struggling to keep pace. Dimitropoulos points out that while banks may have millions of customers and a wealth of information about their customers, they seriously lag in utilising this information to meet or foresee changing customer needs and preferences. Liberty IT’s approach aims to bridge this gap, enabling financial services institutions to offer more personalised services and thereby bolster customer satisfaction and retention. The by-product of customer satisfaction is growth in profitability and shareholder returns but the focus must be on the customer and not the institution.
He predicts that the next major industry trends will focus on how institutions can protect, engage and retain customers. Dimitropoulos advocates that for banks to thrive and survive they need to “comply, compete, protect and delight.”
“”We’ve been through the era of digital banking technology, the royal commission, and a pandemic but now we’re entering an unprecedented era of the consumer and true customer centric solutions,” he says.
The Shift to Customer-Centric Banking
Historically, tech innovations were primarily designed to enhance operational efficiencies, staff productivity, profitability and cost minimisation for financial services institutions. Dimitropoulos points out that while these innovations did offer some convenience to customers, their primary beneficiary were the moneylenders themselves. He argues that as tech giants like Apple are entering the financial services and payments industries in earnest there must be a pivotal shift for Australian banks and non-bank lenders: “It really needs to be about how solutions improve the livelihood of the human being, whether it’s in health, whether it’s in banking, finance, whether it’s in education, or everyday living.”
The evolution of banking technology now enters a new phase—focusing on the consumer and merchant rather than the financial services institution. This shift is not just about applying technology but rethinking its purpose to enhance the human experience, he argues. “For instance, is the 10-minute or instant mortgage innovation truly in the best interest of the consumer or the bank? Is such innovation enough incentive for a customer to refinance their mortgage? In my opinion, customer service and interest rates are far more important issues for the consumer than the ability to apply online. Perhaps it’d be more prudent to focus on solutions that enable smoother and less cumbersome refinancing for more cost competitive options. It takes an inordinate amount of energy and time to transition from one bank to another despite open banking, digital mortgages, property valuation solutions and despite the plethora of already known information about the customer’s transaction and credit history.”
