Updating digital systems in financial services can be expensive, inconvenient, and down right intimidating. Most organizations are concerned with their day-to-day, and are often so focused on their current performance metrics, that it’s hard to step back and imagine tearing that entire system apart.
However, tearing your current digital platform apart opens the door for new revenue opportunities, enhanced customer experience, and a new level of growth for your financial institution. Consider the following barriers and how you can help your organization overcome them.
Lack of Explicit Need
Sometimes, financial institutions struggle with the logic of replacing something that is working perfectly well. Most financial institutions have mobile banking that is functional and meets their clients’ basic needs. While this current system in place is great, executives and their organizations may be missing out on major growth opportunities by not re-examining and improving their digital offerings.
Simply put, you don’t know what you don’t know. Or, in this case, you don’t know what business opportunities your organization is missing. Consider just a few of the potential offerings:
- Customized marketing opportunities. By enhancing your digital platform, your organization can create customized, timely marketing for your internal products, based on customer needs, and informed by data.
- FinTech partners. It’s hard to emphasize the value of FinTech partners enough. These organizations can utilize your customer base and bring you value through digital innovation. Best of all, by providing your customer base, you’re already bringing value to the table for them, giving you leverage for low- and no-cost partnerships.
- Better security. Your outdated platform might have holes in its security, or at best, it’s falling short of enhanced standards in customer data protection.
Replacing Outdated Systems With Utilitarian Infrastructure
Many organizations face this issue of the status quo with their IT systems — using programming languages that are outdated, and often require expert knowledge to operate due to their archaic nature and complexity. Similarly, the individuals who understand how to operate these systems may be resistant to change. After all, by maintaining the status quo, they have total control over the current platform, bring value through their ability to navigate that platform, and want to protect their value.
However, executives and directors need to see the bigger picture of their IT infrastructure. In particular, transitioning to an open API is a huge step in the right direction, and should be a short term goal for any organization without this system in place. By transitioning to an open API, your organization opens the door for other innovators, such as FinTech and an abundance of tools, to operate on your platform and utilize your customer data in a way that can enhance the customer experience and accelerate your transformation.
