Connect the front-end and back-end banking of the bank

Using the insights of Laurén Robbins, Vice President of ServiceNow, we explore how banks can escape the “innovation trap” and achieve true technological agility.

With the increasing popularity of digital-native banks such as Hefei, traditional banking institutions have realized that digital transformation and its ability to introduce lean and agile business practices are crucial. It is important not only to optimize the efficiency of the organization itself, but also to obtain a better overall customer experience, and to completely and intelligently reimagine the bank’s processes without changing the bank’s front office image or sacrificing security to achieve logistics liquidity. office. True lean and agile thinking should cover the overall operation of the organization in a technically feasible way, without falling into a useless “innovation trap”. Using the exclusive insights of Lauren Robbins, we explore how banks can best achieve this goal.

As with any major changes to an organization’s operations, the first important consideration for implementing an agile-based technology strategy should focus on structure and culture: What is the current state of the bank? How to make changes most effectively? Robbins said: “This is actually looking at the existing talents, tools and processes, and clarifying the gap between how they operate and what they think is agile.” The supplement to this point is the consideration of employee skills; whether to hire Can new employees drive the bank’s new vision for digital operations, or can existing employees be retrained to adapt to changing role requirements? In its article, McKinsey & Co believes that “micro skills, skills upgrading, re-skilling and hiring new talents” should all be considered; “has become one of the most important business topics in the digital age. Third, the establishment of a strong partner ecosystem to promote bank innovation and shape its mindset is essential to keep the change going.

Contrary to people who might view the problem as a binary option for developing internal solutions or with/acquiring FinTechs, Robbins takes the position that although both have their own advantages, the best approach is actually to be in the middle, and It is often accidental. “Banks feel that they are at a decision point: they have to decide whether they want to become very IT literate and compete with the best fintech on the market, or whether they are willing to focus on what they already do, such as serving their customers. Reality The situation is that the best IT environment we see in financial services is often a mixture of the two. I am in favor of integrating higher IT standards into industry solutions to achieve a faster “plug and play” approach .”

Examples include cooperation with and integration with the latter. Despite this, Spark is able to facilitate multi-currency transactions in 30 countries, but it is a back-office process, which means Starling (and others) can easily incorporate powerful third-party system architectures while still having customer relationships and experience . -Follow a similar principle: replace monolithic services with seamless microservice APIs, and its cloud-native backend service suite can help maintain the flexibility, scalability and high security of modern banks.

Robbins believes that these significant collaborations carried out by leading financial institutions are moving towards a trend, and the market’s attitudes towards digital transformation and lean and agile thinking are changing. As customer service can now be easily automated (RPA or chatbots), banks can begin to fully explore the agility unlocked by more complex aspects such as cloud and even AI (artificial intelligence). “The first wave of digital transformation has released productivity and innovation capabilities at the front end, but banks are now aware of the next area. Now, I want to see modern business concentrated in the middle and back offices.” She said.

Indeed, the aforementioned AI advancements will soon penetrate into several core aspects of the bank’s basic processes, enabling human workers to focus on value-added services, thereby creating more opportunities for streamlined and more efficient services. Robbins continued: “I even think that fraud detection and other things, if you look at the speed of digitalization in the industry, you will soon be able to use a set of AI-based rules to detect fraudulent transactions.” The value of automation is particularly obvious to ServiceNow itself. , Because the creation of its products can eliminate manual processes and legacy systems, thereby simplifying operations and reducing bottlenecks.

Robbins’ four key deliverables are used to enhance digital solutions in financial services:

Robbins listed the following as the core deliverables of ServiceNow’s Workforce product. However, in general application, they form a centralized roadmap for any bank or software provider seeking to upgrade existing IT functions in the bank.

1. Provide front-to-back process solutions to improve efficiency, productivity and flexibility of work processes.
2. Comprehensive system integration without subsequent investment in other middleware or services.
3. Generate easy-to-set up or “out of the box” workflows built around financial industry-specific standards.
4. Integrated risk management functions and policy compliance, so customers can get efficiency improvements from the process without sacrificing security.

Ultimately, the bank’s goal of streamlining and agile operations should be to achieve better results for its customers. Otherwise, Robbins believes that it may lead to an “innovation trap”: a situation where an organization spends too much time and too much resources on digital “improvement” without affecting performance. As with many things in business, strong customer-centricity usually indicates the best development path, which is undoubtedly advocated by Robbins. She explained: “Higher agility means faster product development, and for customers, this means faster turnaround time.” Robbins continued to quote the US paycheck protection plan related to COVID-19 (PPP), as an example, proves that the rigid banking business of banks is slow and costly. So far it seems to have confirmed this view. It is estimated that the plan has cost $518 billion. Robbins hinted that if banks adopt lean and agile thinking, this number may be much lower, while still providing Americans with the support they need. “With these more agile technologies, greater front-to-back conductivity can be achieved, resulting in better turnaround time for customers.”

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to cause financial anxiety to people around the world, banks should credit their customers to re-evaluate their daily operations to meet the challenges of today’s economy. Robbins concluded: “Banks and financial institutions may fall into the “proof of concept” stage, so they only have myopia and focus on isolated issues.” “On the contrary, they should use integrated, cloud-based end-to-end technology to solve the problem. The solution looks at the problem as a whole. This will enable banks to find the agility they need without having to invest millions of dollars in potential core system modernization projects.”

Is the current vice president and general manager of financial services , Is one of the most important enterprise software developers in the world.

“I lead an organization of industry experts responsible for different sub-sectors of financial services, banking, asset management, insurance, risk and compliance. By working closely with our customers and partners, we can build specialized solutions. To solve the most pressing challenges in the market today, we are responsible for creating and implementing services for the industry.”