5 Steps To Take Your Financial Services Business To The Next Level

But maintaining this path is going to lead to a patchwork of initiatives that lack cohesion, fail to target major pain points or investment opportunities, and prevent your organization from planning ahead to ensure the proper resources are in place.

Instead, go beyond a piecemeal approach and develop a multi-year strategy that:

• Incorporates input from all of your stakeholders—internal, external, and across technical and business elements—to identify transformation opportunities and targets
• Weaves in customer engagement best practices from outside of the financial services industry such as retail, telecommunications, hospitality, and gaming
• Can be broken down into measurable, actionable initiatives that deliver functionality that can be built upon
• Is regularly reviewed and evaluated to ensure your direction aligns with financial industry-leading best practices, organizational goals, and market conditions
• Considers key elements of a modern digital business, such as:
  • Cloud migration
  • Data analytics
  • Zero-data latency initiatives
  • Customer engagement
  • Predictive analytics/AI
  • Workforce enablement
• Is pragmatic, realistic, and achievable based on your organization’s technology capabilities and cultural barriers

However, the pressure to evolve is a constant driver for financial services leaders looking to remain competitive.

This is why it is vital to communicate:

• Early and often about when and where a change is going to take place
• Clearly about the “why” behind the change and how it will affect current business as usual; jobs and responsibilities; and ultimately, how it will improve customer interaction
• Across a range of media, as appropriate (e.g., email, newsletters, social media, meetings, training videos) to reach your audience
• Internally and externally, focusing on what benefits each stakeholder group can expect to realize
• Where stakeholders can go to learn more about how their workflow or interactions will change, including available training

Not only do manual processes make it hard to monitor the status and quality of each input and output for each step, but they also limit opportunities for integration and automation. These challenges can be especially pronounced when processes and data sources span across different business units, geographically dispersed locations, or even across distributed stakeholders.

Focus digital transformation efforts on initiatives that dissolve data silos and provide flexibility for integrations across business systems so you can:

• Encourage data sharing
• Boost collaboration
• Enhance visibility
• Leverage automation
• Enable performance measurement

When done properly, all of the systems and processes that enable transactions will be invisible to your customers, allowing for a seamless digital experience. This means planning beyond just one technology at a time and identifying platforms, tools, and initiatives that can effectively and securely work together. Holistic strategy allows each investment to become bigger than the sum of its parts and deliver new value for your business.