Competitive Agility – Evolve Faster

 “A ship in harbor is safe — but that is not what ships are built for.” — John A. Shedd

This may be extended much further in today's environment. When banks try to play it safe, they're doomed. In the digital era, where clients want and expect contextual offerings, the need to innovate is paramount. The only way to stand out and remain ahead of the competition is to keep inventing —in terms of products and services.

Agility has become a cliché in recent years - yet clichés exist for a reason. Banks need agility in general, and competitive agility in particular, to survive. But how can a bank stay nimble with decades-old legacy systems when fresher fintech businesses have flexible technology that allows them to make any essential adjustment in days?

Let's talk about the 'why' before we go into the 'how. Most corporate banks are of the opinion that since their customers are corporations, they are equally burdened with legacy systems and therefore cannot react as much as retail customers. Recent studies, however, have debunked this notion. Organizations vary in their agility depending on their sector, but they are all looking at the process, product, or service innovation in some way.

Most corporations want their banks to be nimble enough to manage digital products that are contextual, especially in the context of digital banking. In this context, process agility is critical. Furthermore, most banks are attempting to become customer-owners, in which case all other services become a part of the ecosystem. In this environment, banks are in charge of the complete client experience, thus adaptability is a must. So, how does a bank become more responsive?

While understanding the customer's expectation is critical, the driver of an agile and fast-paced setup necessitates a well-oiled system for the assimilation of the insights into the organization's working This is particularly true in today's linked world when various teams supply multiple services to a wide range of customers. As a result, it's critical that the data gleaned from customer surveys, market trends, social media comments, and user reviews make their way into the organization's service's functional cycle as rapidly as possible.

With legacy systems in place, the only way for banks to move forward without completely overhauling their systems is to implement a middle orchestration layer that can 'talk' to both downstream and upstream systems, obtaining data from siloed systems, translating it into insights, and finally determining and managing the experience via customer-facing systems.

Corporate banks can no longer function without competitive agility. So, whether they want to do it or not is irrelevant. They must instead decide 'how' to implement such an organization. The moment has come to act.