Improving Millennium Bank's personal finance manager

Double Degree

This dissertation reviews and analyzes the best practices in the Online banking business, namely in those which concern the Personal Finance Manager (PFM) tools for clients. Poland is currently a European leading market in Online banking, ranking amongst the most technologically advanced platforms in the Continent and being considered very reliable when it comes to security of payments. Considering that the Polish banking sector reached saturation and further growth should not be expected1, industry-experts predict that profitability will be gained mostly through cost-savings deriving from less face-to-face contact in customer support which will gradually be replaced by online contact channels. This paper focuses on improving the Personal Finance Manager’s (PFM for short) functions of Millenium Bank’s online platform (which directly or indirectly correspond to money transactions) and aims at analyzing how to develop competitive advantage through a more feature-rich easy-to-use and intuitive online platform (hence the execution of a study on international best practices concerning PFM). A study on the top 5 Polish retail banks is conducted to understand how advanced Millennium’s PFM is in relation with competition (whose results are compared with the aforementioned analysis on the best practices applied by internationally leading PFMs). Next, and on the basis of both these elements, specific suggestions were reached to improve the actual PFM tool. All in all, the objective of the report is to condense all the gathered information into a set of recommendations for Millennium to use in the development of their new PFM platform. The task was of special importance for two reasons: it is estimated that banks’ profitability in the future will be mostly driven by the “digitalization of clients” (resulting in cost savings for the institutions) rather than by the acquisition of new ones (which means that online banking platforms ought to be appeasing for customers); Millennium’s homebanking platform is already very advanced for Polish and even European standards, thus being hard to improve, even marginally.