Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services - 12

IT organizations need
to change too
So how can ﬁnancial institutions
manage both adoption and
modernization, in order to leave
their mountain without drowning
in a sea of complexity,
complications, and cost?
Like the banks, their IT
departments will need to move
closer to their clients. This involves
getting much better at listening.
Because, if they cannot
understand what their (internal
and external) customers need,
they are not able to speed up the
adoption that the bank needs for
transformation. This may lead to
repeatedly delivering something
that is not customized to the
purpose.

Besides a
new diversity in
people, these
departments will
require a heterogeneous
set of (new) technologies to
improve productivity,
manageability, and interactions
overall inside the organization.

That does not mean that they have
to be merely a servant, but they
have to regard themselves as
service providers and solve the
problems their customers want
solved. I always say, "Don't tell me
what you need. Tell me what you
want to achieve." And then we will
together identify the options that
really suit your needs.

Blockchain may also create some
important opportunities, not just
in greater back oﬃce eﬃciencies
and traceability, but also in
facilitating new kinds of markets.
And Al can help to take over some
of the workload of, for example,
service calls, but also ﬁnd patterns
of how customers behave or how
the organization's assets are
structured. While understanding
context is something inherently
human, machine learning driven
tools can already deliver
astounding results and will
continue to do so.

For this approach, the IT
departments cannot consist
merely of IT professionals and a
small number of people dealing
with ﬁnance. In the future, they
will still require IT experts, but
they will also need engineers,
economists, psychologists,
anthropologists, and leaders who
drive change. A diverse set of
backgrounds will enable them to
understand a diverse set of
customers and to provide
unconventional but clever
solutions.

12

Cloud technologies are a way of
democratizing IT within the bank,
erasing so-called Shadow IT which
in fact arises when individuals just
use the technology they want to
use. This can reduce the overall
complexity of the portfolio and
create the oversight necessary for
moving forward.

Taking a holistic approach is
integral in planning a strategy.
Cloud, Blockchain, AI, etc. - none
of these technologies will have a
signiﬁcant impact on its own. Only
by combining multiple of these
technologies and letting them
complement each other, a
profoundly diﬀerent way to deal

with complexity and other hurdles
can be established.
Great people leveraging a range of
technologies in an intelligent way
will make IT departments more
eﬃcient and eﬀective within the
business and get the bank as
whole closer to the customers,
understanding them, their position
and problems, to deliver solutions
that they want, need, and do not
need to climb a mountain for.

TAKEAWAYS:
*

Banks that survive
digitalization will be one of the
two types: the ecosystem
player, a super-regional or
global bank that oﬀers scale,
reliability, and security; or the
intelligent bank providing its
clients with extra intelligence
and know-how. Both need to
be highly aware of their role.

*

To adapt to adoption, their IT
departments need to rethink
their service, how they utilize
legacy and, ultimately, how
they can deliver the right
solutions to their clients.

*

Single technologies -
Blockchain, AI, Cloud, etc.
- do not change anything;
the interplay of multiple
technologies does.
Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Straight Talk Special Issue: Financial Services
