Accounting Disrupted

CHAPTER 8Better Change Your Mind

If you're an analog business, you have to reposition yourself rapidly. You have to blow things up … if you don't change your organization, it's going to change for you – it's going to be out of your hands.¹

—Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP and CEO of S4

Ping An Bank learned much about what could be done with digital at the time of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Before the pandemic it had started a drive to transform its structure from the traditional hierarchical pyramid to a dumbbell‐shaped organization where it increased the number of senior executives focused on digital transformation and IT. It kept the number of middle‐level managers level in the face of growth and extended the scale of front‐line market‐facing teams.² Ping An Bank then introduced the Do It At Home campaign, offering contactless and smart services in its anti‐coronavirus initiative. This allowed customers to undertake a variety of financial services on the Ping An Pocket Bank app. The app could be used for basic banking transactions, wealth management, insurance, foreign exchange, private bank or family trust, investor education, and more. Artificial intelligence–powered customer service provided 24/7 consultations. Customers learned quickly. Within two weeks, over 11 million transactions were carried out by more than 3 million customers with 475,000 customers viewing online lectures on mutual funds, PE investment, and financial laws and taxation.³ Users of the app now exceed ...