Business Agility in Retail Banking

We release our Business Agility in Retail Banking, which looks at how agility can help banks better manage disruption and customer expectations through continuous change and employee empowerment.

The challenges retail banks face are well known, yet the rate with which these changes are happening means adapting quickly is now vital to the future success of banks. This report explores the ‘why’, ‘who’ and ‘how’ of business agility for incumbent retail banks, from an organisational behaviour perspective.

The first part of this report draws on anonymised interviews across ten countries, to gain a wider understanding of how incumbent retail banks are embracing business agility.

Some key findings show:

• Improving efficiency was the top driver for embracing business agility.
• The mandate for business agility came primarily from the CEO, followed by the CIO.
• Employee mindset and behaviours are more critical than capabilities.
• The majority of our respondents are undertaking business agility across the whole organisation.

The second part outlines our conclusions and recommendations by setting out three key ingredients, embedded in organisational behaviour that help incumbent retail banks achieve true business agility. These three key ingredients call for incumbent retail banks to:

1. Start with the ‘why’ and focus on outcomes;
2. Achieve big through small;
3. Invite, don’t inflict.