So here’s the problem facing the financial services sector. We keep reading about how quickly the industry must transform to meet changing consumer needs. About how digital banking experiences and engagements are the future. How banks should be enabling people to financially succeed from anywhere.
But here’s the thing. Many of them are trying to do this while they’re still working on legacy systems and – wait for it – mainframes. They’re still trying to work out how to ensure basic issues like resilience, 100% uptime, disaster recovery and back-up, let alone taking the latest generation of customer-friendly apps to market or providing the mythical ‘single view’ of the customer.
At a time when they should be slashing costs to reach the 770 million underserved adults in Africa, they’re battling the highest cost-to-income ratios in the world, and watching agile FinTechs sail past them with 100% digital operations that are wholly based in the cloud.
The larger banks have massive contracts with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to maintain big chunks of their IT operations in the cloud, but they’re finding that these offerings are far more expensive than local offerings at a time when every cent counts. And then IT operations are still expected to move away from being seen as a cost centre, and become revenue generators in their own right.
At Strategix Technology Solutions, we tell our financial services customers that their business plans shouldn’t be limited by existing technologies or security threats.
Instead of spending millions on updating their core platforms to do things customers will never see, they should be looking to lay the digital foundations that give them the flexibility and agility to leapfrog competitors and rocket themselves into the future. That allow them to take products and services to market a lot quicker, while baking in security, DR and all the back-end stuff that they need.
What’s stopping them in many cases is a real lack of skills. More than half the CEOs in the financial services sector say they want to transform, but they just can’t find the digital skills they need in critical areas like AI, analytics and design thinking to build any sort of momentum in the market.
They often get bogged down in conversations about what cloud approach they should take – hybrid, private, on-premise. At this point, it’s all about cloud. That’s a given. The real conversation should be about how they want to compete, cut costs, and get to market quicker and slicker than the competition. Thankfully, it’s a conversation we’re having with a growing number of industry players. And they’ll be better for it.
Be part of the conversation and give us a call today. We’re the only TEC, Transparent Experts that Care, you’ll need.
