Digital transformation in banking and brokerage

The state of digital transformation in banking and brokerage

If the amount of time and money spent on banking and brokerage technology over the past 20 years was any indication of digital transformation in the industry, the apps and websites should be the most user-friendly ever developed. Of course, the opposite is closer to the truth. Why is so much effort resulting in comparatively little progress? And what are some firms doing to reverse the trend?

Technology-driven change has transformed consumer services, with banking and brokerage as no exception. However, the digital services and solutions provided by these firms (including, although perhaps to a lesser degree, those from the largest banks) have consistently lagged behind other consumer service-oriented industries. There are many possible reasons for this, but a major culprit is that many firms still rely upon on-premises mainframe infrastructure. Although several large firms are now making progress toward public cloud, core processing remains mostly on-premises across the industry. This legacy infrastructure, in turn, can make it virtually impossible to truly adopt the principles of agile software development, since large swaths of data and back-end processes are by necessity out of the control of even the best product owner. While the financial services industry remains protected from wholesale digital disruption by a large moat of regulatory requirements, the result is that operations, despite decades of effort and the availability of both off-the-shelf software and cost-efficient outsourcing services, typically feature a greater or lesser number of manual, swivel-chair, and even paper-based tasks.

Explore the core areas banking and brokerage firms must focus on to achieve product alignment and modernization for digital transformation.

Unlock digital transformation in banking and brokerage

Having a product-oriented organization is critical to delivering responsive customer-facing applications. It depends on an agile software development organization, which, in turn, depends on cloud adoption, breaking up monolithic systems, and making fundamental back-end data readily available. Learn how banking and brokerage organizations can embrace the challenge and reorganize around their core products in the full report.