Another key factor of the digital banks I’m talking to is that the customer is their primary focus. Not the shareholder, the investor, the quarterly bonus, the dividend yield or the cost-income ratio. The customer. This is something I’ve found quite rare in most banks, as the retail customer is deemed fairly unimportant in the…
Another key factor in building a truly digital bank is commitment. Commitment right from the top and, by the top, I don’t just mean the CEO and the leadership team, but the Board of the bank. Quite often, a digital transformation of a bank requires years of commitment during which time shareholder return takes second…
For years, I’ve been wondering why people in business operations couldn’t align their needs with the people delivering technology in the organisation. The CIO would sit outside the business, watching and responding to requests. The requests would get prioritisation and be delivered in sequence over time, sometimes a very long time. The business people would…
So, I’ve been summarising other people’s views of the year ahead from a variety of sources, but I also wrote two outline pieces for my friends at The Banker magazine and Jim Marous’s The Financial Brand. Just to finish off my week’s blogs about this year, here’s what I wrote. From The Banker: Why ‘real time’ will…
There has been a lot of thinking and rethinking during 2018 about blockchain, cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and everything digital currency related. I wrote about the challenges getting blockchains implemented for example, and was surprised to find myself enduing up as a network meme. The power of the pundit, ay? Last year we saw bitcoin drop from…
I was listening to a great discussion about innovation (again) amongst a group of innovative bankers. As the conversation progressed, it made me reflect on a few things. In particular, how the conversation about innovation has changed over the past decade. Just before the financial crisis hit, innovation was big on the banks’ agendas. In…
I present regularly to retail, commercial and investment banks, wealth managers and fund managers, insurance companies and more about how technology is transforming everything. I often can feel a sense of cynicism in the room. We’ve heard all this before and yes, I’ve pointed this out several times: The boy who cried wolf (FinTech style)…
Another day and another discussion about digital transformation with a group of bankers. As the conversation progressed, several of the attendees touched on a subject in different ways but the core of what they were asking was this: when will we know we’ve done digital? I find this question quite vexing, as it shows a…
