In the highly regulated environment of financial services, digital transformation is not just about new technologies; it’s about reshaping how organisations deliver value to their customers, while remaining compliant.
Recently, we sat down with Angela Lomas, Senior Product Owner at Nationwide as part of the ‘Being a Digital Leader - the Good, Bad AND Ugly of Digital Transformation’ podcast, to explore the critical factors that led to their successful digital transformation.
Our 4 top digital transformation takeaways
1. The importance of agile in digital transformation
A lot of financial services organisations operate using a traditional waterfall model, a sequential approach that sees tasks completed fully before moving on to the next. A pivotal role in Nationwide’s digital transformation was their transition to a more agile way of working, which introduced more flexibility and allowed them to deliver value faster and respond more flexibly to customer needs.
To introduce effective change into your business, you need to ensure strong communication throughout the process. A cultural shift into agile working can be met with resistance from teams accustomed to more traditional methods, but having regular feedback loops and sprint reviews, and being able to demonstrate the benefits of iterative delivery, are essential in helping teams adjust and ensuring that everyone is aligned with business goals and customer needs. Building trust through transparency helps everyone feel included and committed to the transformation effort.
2. Balancing the need for speed
In the financial sector, governance and compliance cannot be ignored or understated. Throughout Nationwide’s digital transformation, they carefully balanced the need for speed with the rigorous governance frameworks required in their industry. Understanding the nuances of governance and how it impacts delivery is crucial, and you need to ensure that members of your team have experience in this environment.
A way to achieve this is to create multidisciplinary teams that can cover all aspects of compliance, customer experience and technology. Having teams work together in an agile fashion not only helps reduce the risk of non-compliance, but it can help companies accelerate their innovation by being able to see all aspects and perspectives of a customer journey at once.
3. Customer-centric data management
Nationwide have implemented a ‘flags’ and ‘choice’ tracking service, which collates customer preferences in one place. Having a centralised location for these preferences was crucial, particularly within such a large business, to guarantee that customers were being treated in their preferred way regardless of how they interacted with the organisation, be it in-branch or online.
By having a single customer view, you can deliver a consistent experience, and map their full journey to understand the potential issues they could be facing. For Nationwide, these were usually based around process or data issues, or technology problems in the back end. For heavily-regulated financial services organisations, infrastructure can often be quite old and outdated, with old processes that haven’t kept up with change.
If you haven’t got the foundations right; the systems, processes or data flow, you won’t be able to deliver a great customer experience, or deliver the value that you’re trying to provide for your customers, which ultimately costs your business.
4. Putting customers at the heart of banking
Nationwide introduced new digital journeys for their customers, including iPads in-branch, as well as a new banking app and improvements to how customers bank online. Making the digital experience a core part of your business plan is crucial to improving customer relationships.
To build customer centricity, you also need to constantly be testing and reiterating processes, getting customer engagement and feedback throughout, in order to deliver the right product. If you constantly review the problem statement, and whether that has now changed for the customer, you’re constantly improving and providing the right level of value.
You can’t just build a data platform and expect customers to love it. The data has to flow in the right way for your customer, and there could be multiple iterations of that, depending on their circumstance and how they interact with your business.
The road to successful transformation
Digital transformation in the financial services industry requires a delicate balance of speed, governance and customer focus.
It’s a journey that is constantly evolving and adapting alongside customer needs, but as we’ve seen through our work with Nationwide, adopting agile methodologies, prioritising customer-centric data management, and fostering a collaborative, multidisciplinary team environment, can help organisations deliver significant value.
Learn more about how leaders in financial services, such as at Nationwide, Ordo and Ruffer, were able to make their digital transformation efforts a success.
Want to know what's ahead for tech transformation in financial services?
Hear from renowned Futurist, Tom Cheesewright, in our on-demand webinar 'A vision of a digital future: What does the next decade look like?' where Tom shares insight into how organisations should prepare for the next 10 years of tech transformation.
Tom Cheesewright regularly features on BBC World News, BBC Radio 4, Times Radio, and LBC, and brings over 20 years of industry experience, including in financial services.
