• Juerg Truniger, Product Marketing Lead at Appway


• 28.04.2017 11:15 am
Banks

Last week, I wrote about why a digital onboarding solution is the best option for digitalizing banks based on insights from Gartner’s 2017 CIO Agenda: A Financial Services Perspective (David Furlonger, February 2017).

Now let’s talk about why implementing a solution that unifies all activities related to the client lifecycle can only be successful by leveraging an out-of-the-box platform that easily adapts to change.

As Gartner highlights in its report, Market Guide for Open Unified Digital Banking Platforms (March 2016, Stessa Cohen), "Emerging digital banking platform technologies are key to the success of banks' business-critical digital initiatives. Open unified solutions make it possible to deliver new digital products and services, and create a multidimensional customer experience across all digital channels."

However, let’s now look at what’s effectively happening in financial services, looking at Gartner’s 2017 CIO Agenda: A Financial Services Perspective (David Furlonger, February 2017). Based on the survey feedbacks, they emphasize that "financial services firms are lagging behind global top-performing organizations in relation to digital transformation, and hoping doing ‘more of the same’ will equate to improved performance. This finding is reflected in their lower digital spending allocations, shortage of talent to execute, overt focus on legacy technology (ERP) and slowness to adopt bimodal operating models."

The New Normal

If banks want to be sustainable in the Digital Age, they must continuously evolve their business models, processes and user interactions. But going fully digital doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a step-by-step journey. And because customer and user expectations are constantly changing, the journey never completely ends.

Change has become the new normal, and it’s exactly what legacy and backend systems are struggling with. Even though they do a great job at what they were designed for—adding stability and security—the systems just aren’t prepared to keep up with the increased speed of user demands. It takes a huge amount of effort, money and time to change these systems.

At Appway, our goal is to empower our clients who are dealing with increasing demand for speedier digital solutions. One of Appway Platform’s key capabilities is enabling organizations to increase the agility of their technological foundation in order to drive efficiency and innovation. By supporting the various interconnected phases that involve all stakeholders, from relationship managers to customers and everyone in between, Appway Platform allows banks to continually learn, adapt and develop.

Empowering employees leads to agile development and continuous delivery

Investing in the Digital Journey

When it comes to banks investing in digitalization, "Gartner recommends that FS CIOs discuss with their executive peers ways to increase their spending on digitalization to around 35% to 40% of the total IT budget by 2018. Increasing discrete IT spend does not automatically correlate to more revenue growth, but increasing spend on digitalization most certainly has a direct correlation with increased revenue for the business." (Gartner, 2017 CIO Agenda: A Financial Services Perspective, February 2017)

As I touched on in How Digital Innovation Can Transform Banking and Customer Experience, Featuring Gartner Insight on Financial Services CIOs, a digital onboarding solution is the optimal springboard for banks starting out on their digital journey. We have seen firsthand how our clients have increased their efficiency by applying their onboarding solutions’ processes and capabilities to the rest of their business platform, and how this has also enabled them to improve customer engagement and increase revenues through shortening their products’ and services’ time-to-market.

To read about Gartner’s next steps for CIOs in the financial services, you can download the full report here.

Want to learn more about how Appway can help solve your digitalization issues? Reach out to us to request a live demo!

Gartner: 2017 CIO Agenda: A Financial Services Perspective, David Furlonger, 09 February 2017.

Gartner: Market Guide for Open Unified Digital Banking Platforms, Stessa Cohen, 18 March 2016.