Introduction

Your challenge: business as usual plus transformation

As a leader at a financial services institution (FSI), you’re likely to be grappling with a challenging set of technology-related priorities. On the one hand, it’s essential to maintain the reliability and security of your systems. It’s also vital to help ensure the business meets its myriad compliance and regulatory obligations. The overriding goal is to best manage costs and risks, day-in and day-out.

On the other hand, you have a key role to play in enabling digital transformation programs that will introduce new processes and business models. You’re also charged with enabling teams to become more effective and customer-centric while making your workplaces attractive to the best talent in the market. And you’re central to better engaging with customers to drive better experiences, loyalty and sales.

One way to achieve all these interrelated goals is to focus on how teams are communicating with each other and with customers. Specifically, how well your infrastructure is supporting or hindering easy, rich and secure collaboration. In this short guide, we explore why enabling this level of secure and user-centric collaboration has become so hard and how your organization can break through.

Priorities for financial institutions

Operating in a seamless, omni-channel way across digital and physical channels.
Breaking down silos between business groups and enabling better communications between head-office and branch locations.
Ensuring front-line branch and sales staff have the latest customer and product information for personalized, data-driven interactions.
Delivering up-to-date business applications to staff and partners.
Automating network and security management, to free up funds and time to better focus on supporting business innovation.

What are other finance sector leaders doing?

In its 2019 CIO Survey, Gartner gained responses from 411 financial services sector chief information officers (CIOs) and other technology leaders worldwide. It found:

61% are focused on making engagement easier for customers, 53% are using digitalization to reduce the cost of consumer engagement and 55% are striving to become omnichannel – all among the highest rates for any sector.
20% believe product-centric delivery has become irrelevant, as they move from product centricity to secure consumer centricity.
29% are changing their business models to meet new consumer demands and expectations.
75% are increasing cyber-risk mitigation efforts relating to infrastructure and operations, though finance sector CIOs are less likely to have sole responsibility for cyber-security than those in other sectors.