Digital technologies have impacted the way we live and interact, including our expectations of financial services. Customers now demand digital-first, instant and personalised financial services through any touch point.
How can financial institutions win in today’s customer-driven, open, and competitive market? Market conditions certainly favor digital banking champions who are able to offer superb customer experiences. Still, many financial service providers find it challenging to balance new regulations, fintech disruption and the hefty burden of legacy systems while paving their road to digital.
Now is the Time to Reinvent Digital Transformation
Stable economic fundamentals, a good regulatory climate and easily accessible technologies have propelled the digital leadership race. 82% of global banks are already implementing a digital transformation program. And 62% expect to be digitally mature in 2020, compared with just 19% in 2018. Transformation is no longer an option but a must.
But what is digital banking transformation? Certainly not solving single business needs with individual, disconnected digital technologies. To digitally transform your bank you need to transform all its processes, functions and interactions, while delivering a compelling customer experience and distinguished engagement. Your digital transformation strategy should respond to your business strategy. And it requires a fundamental change in culture - from analog to digital.
Software Group’s 10 year experience driving digital transformation for financial institutions has helped us extract 3 key foundations for a successful digital journey.
1. End-to-end Digitalised Operations
Addressing integration challenges is one of the first items on CIO’s digital transformation agenda. Software Group’s Digital Banking Platform helps financial institutions connect the patchwork of legacy systems, ensuring easy system replaceability, and integrating silos into an end-to-end platform. Next stop is to streamline operational processes with automated workflows.
Once optimised and connected, a business is ready to embrace future-proof digital banking capabilities, such as instant payments, digital customer onboarding, origination and servicing and next-level technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA).
2. Omnichannel Customer Experience
It is high time for financial service providers to shift their viewpoint from bank-centric to customer-centric. The modern customer lifestyle is a harmonic blend of the physical and digital worlds.
With Software Group’s Digital Banking Platform, you can deliver compelling digital products and services omnichannel to meet modern customer expectations - be it via online or mobile banking, digital wallets, field officers, chatbots, ATMs, agent or merchant networks. Exceptional digital experiences, in turn, are key for expanding your customer base and share of wallet.
3. Continuous Digital Innovation
To stay ahead of the competition, you need to be able to move fast. Rapid innovation is only possible if you can leverage on flexible, modular and reusable digital banking capabilities. Software Group’s platform has addressed this need with its scalable architecture based on a robust core, microservices, open APIs and modular functional building blocks. It allows financial institutions to quickly build and launch new custom digital financial services.
Opening up to your ecosystem is another key differentiation factor. Open Banking enables strategic partnerships with fintechs, telco, insurance providers. Such partnerships allow financial institutions to offer value-adding 3rd-party services which can unlock new revenue opportunities.
How do you approach digital banking transformation?
Originally published in Bucharest Tech Week Blog
