Digital transformation in financial services boosts scale and credibility

Digital transformation is nothing new. 

For many years, digital transformation initiatives at financial services organizations have been focused primarily on driving efficiency and automating manual processes in the back-office. But the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated the pace of digital transformation when it comes to customer-facing technologies.

Lockdowns and restrictions have brought the digital channel and remote work to the forefront of organizational efforts to adapt to the new reality. As organizations transition to work-from-home schemes and digital sales and support, many digital leaders must face up to the fact that their organization's digital footprint must be expanded rapidly and at scale.

As remote digital channels continue to evolve, do companies simply need to focus even more on digital transformation than they already have - introducing more tools, speed, and technologies? While new and innovative technology definitely has a role to play, we believe that culture and scaling strategies, as well as the focus on better utilization of existing technologies will be on the radar of many financial services organizations in 2021.

Gaining credibility through better digital service

Customers today expect 24/7 availability and real-time service for their inquiries. To meet the demand for the real-time digital channels, organizations must focus on ways to optimize workflows throughout the organization in the backend while at the same time offering personalized digital service in the front end.

This balancing act between back-office efficiency and front-office quality of service is an important one and relies primarily on the service provider's ability to connect the pieces of the puzzle into a seamless end-to-end process.

Simply collecting the data digitally is not enough. Customers expect their service provider to utilize any personal data they have collected about them in order to improve their experience. Personalization is the name of the game, and testing and optimizing digital experiences on an ongoing basis is a necessary component of great customer experience.

The free flow of data and democratization of access to this data across the organization is now becoming of paramount importance. The data must be made available for internal analysis as well as optimizing the digital self-service experience on an ongoing basis.

Improving the quality of digital service through personalization, optimization, and smart utilization of data will lead to higher customer satisfaction, and as a result, higher retention and growth.

Business executives have long recognized the need for digital transformation, but COVID-19 has increased their urgency as organizations seek to improve their speed, agility, and ability to make data-driven decisions.

Businesses are increasingly relying on IT consulting services to assess their current IT landscape and provide a strategy for bringing their current digital ecosystem in line with their long-term goals. In order to develop a roadmap for digital transformation, consulting firms first determine where a company is today and where it wants to be. They next examine the organization's people, technology, and processes as well as its culture, leadership, and governance. They then analyze the current market disruptions and trends to finally develop a digital transformation roadmap that can assist the company in achieving its strategic objectives.

Digital transformation must be supported by digital culture

Digital transformation doesn't happen in a vacuum. While the financial services industry is reinventing itself with major shifts in operating models, processes, and customer relationships, it must foster a digital culture to support its growth.

The relationship between introducing digital technologies and the digital culture goes both ways. The more digital technology becomes a part of an employee's daily tasks, the more digital the culture becomes. But simply introducing new technologies without changing the way your employees perform their daily tasks will lead to new inefficiencies, siloes, and problems along the way.

The organizational mindset must transition from rigid adherence to procedures and to the ongoing optimization and experimentation mindset. Simply introducing new digital tools without transitioning to a digital mindset is going to end in disappointing results.

Achieving digital transformation at scale

Digital transformation is no longer a collection of disparate one-off projects. Cross-departmental initiatives are now brought together under the digital transformation leadership to push organizations forward.

Digital transformation strategies are increasingly focused on new ways to scale up and optimize existing digital processes. One of the ways organizations can scale up their digital initiatives is by transitioning to no-code development models.

No-code development tools empower organizations to quickly spin up new digital applications and experiences in a matter of hours and without straining the internal IT resources. By using visual, drag & drop features as opposed to custom code, the speed of delivering new digital products becomes evidently quicker and organizations can quickly scale their digital transformation initiatives.

No-code tools empower business users to create digital applications without coding. By using the power of no-code tools, organizations can quickly transform one-off digital experiences into end-to-end digital journeys.

Digital transformation at scale - is it possible?

Digital transformation can no longer rely on custom code and traditional IT development. The speed and scale at which organizations must deploy new digital products to market require a new approach. No-code/low-code development tools offer organizations a path forward to quickly scale up their ongoing digital initiatives.

Author Bio:

Tal Daskal is the CEO and Co-Founder at EasySend, a SaaS company with a no-code development platform for insurance companies and financial services based in Tel Aviv, New York, and Germany. Tal is an expert on all things digital transformation in banking andinsurance and is a passionate advocate for the paradigm shift towards no-code application development in the financial sector.