Christer Holloman - Transactional to Transformational: How Banks Innovate

Reading this book has been a great way to validate what we are already doing as well as giving a lot of new ideas about what we could be doing next!

Jan Strang

Head of Retail Finance

Nordea Bank

An enlightening factbased read that provides direction without forcing a solution to what is arguably the biggest challenge faced by businesses today, digital transformation.

Paul O'Leary

Managing Director, UK

IKANO Bank

The challenges overcome by global banks of different nature and size provide readers with a useful tool to be able to embrace innovation themselves.

Alberto Greppi

Head of Investment Team, Neva Finventures

Intesa Sanpaolo

If you work with banks, or in banking, this is a must read crash course in the best practices of their varying innovation models.

Will Mason

Director of Markets and Innovation

Experian

These case studies demonstrate that whilst there are many paths to success, banks need to focus as much on how they approach innovation as what they hope to deliver in order to make a lasting transformation.

Anthony Craufurd

Venture and Startup Engagement Director

VISA Europe

This book shows that there is no silver bullet when it comes to how to drive innovation within companies, it is difficult to innovate within an established corporate culture, flexibility is key and the ability to pivot quickly if needed.

Werner Decker

EVP/GM, Global Merchant Services International

American Express

The success levers and learnings from each case study are very clearly laid out. What I really love about it is that it is practical, actionable and easy to absorb.

Pinar Alpay

Senior Vice President, Global Payment Solutions & Transformation

FIS

Christer's case studies are a valuable resource for operators attempting to drive change in and around financial institutions.

Philip Bodell

Corporate Development Director

Fiserv

By Christer Holloman

This edition first published 2021

Copyright 2021 by Christer Holloman.

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You are destined for greatness

Over their lifetime, banks have not been known for innovation. They have long held a privileged position of trust in society, as safeguards of our wealth and most private information. As such, customers have traditionally been happy with low rates of innovation, with almost 80% of us actively choosing to remain with the big traditional banks, despite financial incentive and regulatory support to switch. This was because, in the old world, we had accepted that security and innovation were an insurmountable tradeoff and that when given the choice, we would rather that our bank kept our money safe than give us more innovative technologies.

As you know very well if you are reading this book, this is no longer true. Following a perfect storm of events that shook both the industry players as well as the expectations of bank customers, we are now living in an age where banks have to compare themselves to, and collaborate with, small fintech and large tech companies in the race to satisfy their customers' needs.

In the events that led to this dramatic change in the banking industry, the 2008 global financial crisis has been considered a cornerstone. The crush of incumbent firms and the banking system led to the loss of customer trust, and the ripples of this shock continued for people who experienced financial losses in the crisis and the following economic downturn. Even though most big banks remained a safe place in people's eyes for keeping their financial assets, lack of transparency and persistent high fees caused a different kind of trust problem that banks needed to solve.

Another driver of the transformation of banks into innovative organisations has been their realisation of the different needs and habits of millennials who are starting to become their customers. The differences in this generation's life goals, spending habits and employment patterns from previous generations are stark enough to make any organisation stop and think about reconfiguring their product portfolio. With lower home ownership rates, high student debt, variable employment and income, low trust in established institutions and, perhaps most importantly, high willingness to share their data for better services, millennials require not only a different set of financial services but also a much more datadriven, personalised approach to their finances.

Finally, we must mention the buzz word, open banking, if we are to discuss innovation in banking. Open banking is a set of regulations that has been positioned as the catalyst for reinvention within the banking sector. Starting with the UK and EU in 2018, versions of open banking regulation are spreading fast around the world, with noteworthy examples in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India and Singapore. In a nutshell, open banking facilitates competition by mandating incumbent banks to produce open access to valuable current account and other financial data via application programming interfaces (APIs) to trusted third party providers. In other words, it gives customers control over their financial data and allows datadriven new entrants to access the data they need in order to compete with big banks. Open banking has spurred competition to big banks, not only from small innovative fintechs but also from BigTech. Using the new regulations to access customers' bank data, the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook are taking big strides into banking as I write this. Examples include Amazon's extension of credit to businesses on its platform via Amazon Lending, Facebook's aggressive implementation of P2P payments into its social platform and Google's announcement of basic banking (e.g. checking account) services starting in the US in 2021.