Match borrowers with lenders directly and there is no need for intermediaries anymore. So when digital disruptors squeezed their way into financial services industry, one could think banks were doomed. Nimble financial technology companies (fintechs) are luring customers away with better online service, lower fees, and cheaper transfers. Consider a huge cost of digital transformation for banking corporations and you see legacy players can have a hard time catching up with the newcomers. Apparently, the banks were not going to simply give up. Over the last five years, they spent tens of billions of dollars setting up innovation hubs, buying competitors, and changing operations. Deutsche Bank is one of the great digital transformation examples in banking. The bank established an R&D center with over 400 developers and brought in several vendors to enhance its digital capabilities. But Deutsche Bank is a global company with hundreds of billions in assets, and the media generally focuses on the “big guys”. What about community and regional banks? When it comes to digital capabilities, most of them played the waiting game. As a result, the majority of community banks find themselves losing out on both ends:
They find themselves squeezed between global banks with deep pockets and agile fintechs. Moreover, technological innovation is extremely challenging and costly for the community and regional banks. Switching to digital rails often gets prohibitively expensive – they simply cannot afford to bet a fortune on transformational initiatives. After all, around 80% of digital transformations fail. This post offers a way out for community banks. A strategy of digital transformation in banking with a reasonable budget and clear achievable results. Contents:Roadmap of digital transformation in banking
Originally published at www.n-ix.com Roadmap of digital transformation in bankingIt’s not all bad news for community banks. Studies show they are actually better at banking than the big guys. It is also possible that the regulatory climate will change in their favor in the near future. Small banks also have distinct advantages over fintechs, e.g. diversified services, established brands, loyal customer base, community support, focus on security, and more. They just need to utilize these strengths in the new digital environment. Community banks can’t throw the money around but they can play a smarter game. This calls for a cautious and actionable approach to banking digital strategy. A plan with clear stages that allows a bank to transform on a relatively low budget. Let’s call it: Start small, Add platforms, Scale success This cautious strategy allows to transform a bank in iterations focusing on process automation. Here is the roadmap: Roadmap of digital transformation in community banking:Stage 1: Start smallClients call for zero human interactions. They don’t want to wait in queues and go to the branch to carry out every transaction. Wasting 30-60 minutes just to check the balance or perform other routine operations is extremely frustrating, especially for the millennials. Interestingly, even SME and corporate clients often spend hours in queues each month. Small businesses pay banks huge transaction fees, so they, too, require fast and convenient service. A mobile application can cover a large chunk of the routine workload and is a viable solution for retail and business customers alike. Therefore, start by automating user-bank interactions. Focus on the most important functionality for modern consumers – mobile experience. Create a fast and secure mobile platform and a customer-facing app with intuitive UX. It will allow users to perform the most popular operations from their device. Just up to 12 actions, e.g. check balance, order transaction statement, pay the bill, etc. That’s it. Over 60% of bank customers aged 18-44 use mobile banking and the number is steadily growing, a study by Federal Reserve claims. That is one of the most sought by digital capabilities, but the majority of small- to midsize retail banks lack good mobile experience. We’ve analyzed 25 US community banks to understand how well users rate their mobile apps. Here’s the list: The findings are quite intriguing. It turns out, only 10 out of 25 banks have some mobile application. Here is the breakdown: 5 out of 10 analyzed apps have Google Play rating 3.9 or less: Therefore, as of September 2017, 80% of the analyzed banks have no mobile app or a weakly performing one. Simply providing a decent mobile app will help them automate routine customer interactions and greatly enhance their digital capabilities. WorkflowWe saw several high-profile banking digital transformations in 2017, e.g. Deutsche Bank, ABN Amro, and the likes. Compared to these full-scale campaigns, launching a robust mobile platform seems like a relatively trivial project. If outsourced, it can be set up and implemented within several months and with a reasonable budget. What’s more, retail banks can start mobile platform development right away without the need to change their internal processes. In this scenario, a bank uses an open API to connect its existing legacy architecture with a newly created mobile application. The system simply extracts data from the backend and presents it to the user through an app. At the “Start small” stage, a bank can implement further changes that will not require dramatic redesign of the internal processes. The solutions here include video tellers and self-service kiosks at the branches as well as automation of some existing back-office operations. Here are the key features of the first transformational stage:
ImplementationIt is hardly possible for a bank to develop a sophisticated mobile platform in-house. Luckily, there are digital vendors, vastly experienced in the financial sector. They build fast, secure, and robust solutions for all popular platforms, including web, iOS, and Android. Suitable vendors are already familiar with the security, compliance, and further requirements of such development. Offshoring and nearshoring are viable options as well, as they can mean further cost reduction. Notable vendors that create solutions for financial service industry are in the Czech Republic, Romania, Estonia, Poland, and Ukraine. For North American and European banks, outsourcing to these countries offers 25-50% cost savings without compromising quality. Implementation phases usually look as follows: Once you have an up-and-running mobile app, you can build up its capabilities and add support for new platforms. Stage 2: Add platformsWith the first platform up and running, you can port it to other platforms and devices. You can already use data analytics to boost client mobile service and increase customer engagement. At this stage, you can analyze how users behave with the app to make tailored offers. A mobile platform also offers many integration possibilities ranging from the highly sought reward programs and mobile wallets to digital payments and chatbots. WorkflowAnalyze user behavior to improve your app and support more devices:
Extend app functionality:
Stage 3: Scale successMerely adding an app to an AppStore is not a complete digital transformation in banking. There is no way a legacy bank can successfully launch an innovation digital banking strategy without changing its internal processes. Hence, a mobile platform should be an inception point, not the final destination. The next step is to introduce a new backend system and to remodel the underlying processes. Some community banks might want to skip that stage, as it requires a thorough redesign of the operations. However, there are two important implications to consider:
This stage is the most challenging part of the digital innovation in the banking sector. Banks are generally pretty clunky, so the resistance to change inside the organization is usually the biggest issue. This calls for a huge effort from the management to fully back the transformation and properly communicate all coming changes. More on the importance of top management involvement in the transformational initiatives in a white paper by N-iX. Luckily, as long as the app proves its worthiness, it is easy to demonstrate how digital technologies bring value to the bank and its employees. It should be a strong point in pushing for further changes. WorkflowWhen a bank already has a fully functional mobile app, it’s time to change the backend system and to redesign the underlining processes. After that, newly created core systems can be connected to an existing mobile application with APIs. The new infrastructure will greatly boost the functionality of the mobile platform. At the third stage of digital transformation, a bank can pursue one of the two options:
Irrespective of the path chosen, the development phase still implies the upgrade of the system. Here are the key features of the final stage:
Drivers for successStart by finding a suitable vendorMake sure your solutions provider has proven experience in fast, secure, and scalable apps and can choose the best tech stack for the project. Next to cross-platform mobile development, the vendor has to be fully familiar with the financial services industry including compliance and strict security regulations. Domain knowledge is also essential for handling common financial technology development issues such as the logic behind financial operations, ultimate data consistency, and the high load. The following project functions can be outsourced:
Launching a decent mobile application requires a lot of effort from the bank’s team, too. The CTO and the head of the customer experience department have to be fully involved in the project. This way you can make sure the application fully matches your customers’ expectations and your backend capabilities. Keep employees informed about the changesFear, uncertainty, and opposition accompany any change initiative. Still, when people are badly informed, the resistance can get really ugly. Communicate the transformation is essential for the bank to survive. Assure people that the change will not happen overnight. They will have plenty of time to accommodate to the reorganization. Strategy pros and consFor most of the 6,000+ banks in the US alone, this seems like the most viable digital transformation banking strategy. Why? It is cost-effective, evolutionary, and scalable. The price of implementing such strategy is the lowest compared to other alternatives. Global financial organizations have huge resources they can allocate to change their operations, but most banks in the world are relatively small. Given these limited capabilities, a “discount” transformational strategy is the way to go. This strategy also fits well into the risk-averse culture of the community banks. Small financial institutions are slow on picking up digital trends because they fear it is just “another stylish thing”. Starting with something that has already proven its worthiness for other banks (mobile platform) should convince the opponents of the change. Once the mobile platform starts bringing value to the bank, pushing for further changes should become easier. Pros
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