Connected banking involves leveraging new-age technologies to connect systems, processes, people, and things, enabling financial institutions to minimize process rigidity and quickly launch innovative offerings.
The financial services industry is going through a significant phase of disruption. New entrants in the financial landscape are redefining the industry by delivering products and services in unprecedented ways. The resulting competition and changing customer behaviours have made it imperative for financial institutions to rapidly innovate their offerings.
Financial institutions must adopt a transformative approach to their operations in order to drive continuous innovation and improvement, without compromising on speed or adaptability. This can be achieved by building a connected bank.
Connected banking involves leveraging new-age technologies to connect systems, processes, people, and things, enabling financial institutions to minimize process rigidity and quickly launch innovative offerings.
Achieving Rapid Product Innovation by Enhancing Agility
Innovation is significantly hindered by monolithic operations and siloed processes, which create bottlenecks and inefficiencies, thereby lengthening turnaround times.
At its core, rapid innovation is all about shortening the idea-to-execution lifecycle. And so, financial institutions must improve their operational agility and minimize the product development lifecycle through digitization.
However, implementing digital technologies or automation alone won’t help financial institutions achieve greater agility. Instead, they must take a holistic approach and:
Ø Automate processes for flexibility: It is important that process automation allows for smarter, more flexible decision making and routing. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and business rules, banks and credit unions can increase responsiveness and adaptability, especially in unprecedented situations
Ø Manage the process lifecycle: A platform-based approach to automation allows users to easily and quickly design, develop, execute, and administer processes. Further, with effective process lifecycle management, financial institutions can enhance their change management capabilities
Ø Leverage low code: Innovation happens when professional IT developers are empowered with low code and new-age technologies. The right tools enable them to rapidly design and develop complex, mission-critical applications, while maintaining consistency and control
In order to enable enterprise-wide agility, flexibility, continuous improvement, intelligent decision making, rapid innovation, and more, financial institutions must take a connected approach to banking.
How Can Connected Banking Lead to Innovation?
Connected banking is all about bridging various organizational silos and creating a synergistic financial institution that cohesively operates to address four key areas: product innovation, customer experience, operational efficiency, and risk and compliance. This involves leveraging intelligent automation, low code capabilities, and modern technologies to connect people, processes, systems, and functions.
With connected banking:
Ø Banks can develop the ability to continually and rapidly improve processes by automating the process management lifecycle. This significantly speeds up their ability to translate ideas into tangible products and seamless deployment
Ø Financial institutions can operate in a nimble way, wherein the workforce is able to make intelligent decisions and offer innovative solutions to unforeseen customer needs and business gaps
Ø Access to advanced technologies allows for the rapid development of more innovative products, as well as the ability to offer fresher experiences to customers. Some examples include on-the-spot claims processing, using imaging, geo-tagging, and AI, and real-time account opening, using digital KYC
Connected banking empowers financial enterprises with the capabilities and tools to manage change effectively and launch products and services faster. It also enables professional IT developers to innovate quickly, developing and deploying mission-critical applications using intuitive, low code functionalities.
The Way Forward
With connected banking, financial institutions can maintain synergy across their organization. It helps them achieve the required strategic and operational agility to launch innovative products and offerings more quickly. What’s more, with a connected approach, financial institutions can build a sustainable rapid innovation paradigm, allowing them to quickly adapt to dynamic business and regulatory requirements, all while staying ahead of the competition
Source: Business World
