The digital future has been the subject of a lot of discussion across all industries in the past several years, yet, most of the talk has not fully captured the true scope of the art of the possible, especially in financial services.

Current Limitations

Digital transformation largely takes place within the traditional boundaries of a brand or an industry. For example, when a bank considers digital transformation, they generally limit their thinking to their current business and apply digital technologies to aspects like account opening, loan application, payments, or other traditional banking functions. In other words, they focus more on improving what they have always done rather than imagining what they could also do.

While this can be valuable for a bank and their customers, it falls short of their complete opportunity. Because digital transformation transforms actions, decisions, money, and intelligence into data, traditional assumptions about who does what evaporate.

Think about it this way. In our personal and business lives before the information age, we would go to a specific place to do a specific activity. For example, if we needed to do something with insurance, we would see an insurance agent. If we wanted to purchase something, we would go to a store that had that product. As the internet emerged, many of these services shifted to websites where these same services could be done remotely, but within that same business. In other words, the move to a digital experience has stayed (to a large degree) within the traditional boundaries where an insurance companies provide only insurance services.

Shifting to holistic customer experiences

Now we are on the edge of the next major shift, characterised by the blending of these functions across functional silos and consolidating them into holistic customer experiences. These customers can be both end consumers as well as business buyers. Increasingly they don’t look to specific industries to help them; they expect, rather, that digital services will be combined to help them achieve a desired outcome. That’s the shift, in a nutshell.

The opportunity for financial services

It starts to become clear that financial institutions in particular have a great opportunity to snatch up these value-enhancing services and position their own brands as the source for intelligence at scale.  

To broaden our perspective a bit more, the opportunity for businesses in all financial services are two things:

• First, they must determine how they can participate and enhance customer experiences created and curated by others.
• Second, they must find ways to develop intelligence—using AI—that they can monetise into these customer experiences.

Orchestrating customer experiences

The more you define yourself by what you have always done rather than what you could do for your customers and fans, the more commoditised your business becomes—and the more vulnerable to disruption. Organisations in financial services are rightly concerned about commoditization. The only way to succeed is to deliver new kinds of value, in new ways, by orchestrating altogether new types of customer experiences.

Source: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/dynamics365

Global iTS a leader in business applications on Microsoft technology, driving digital transformation for enterprise clients including BFSI, Government, Energy & Utilities for two decades now. We enable next-generation digital services for our clients across multiple channels and delivering it on platform of customer choice. Headquartered in United Kingdom, we are present across GCC countries with a team of 200+ professionals. We have our core expertise in banking industry across corporate, retail, investment, and compliance. We enable customer digital journey bringing unprecedented levels of customer delight, help bank adapt to change and improve their decision-making process.