Best - Breaking digital gridlock: improving your banks digital future bymaking technology changes now

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 14

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 6
3. Chapter 8
4. Chapter 10
5. Chapter 13
6. Chapter 14

John Best

Copyright 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Best, John, 1970 author.

Title: Breaking digital gridlock : improving your bank's digital future by making technology changes now / by John Best.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017060722 (print) | LCCN 2018000084 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119421993 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119421924 (epub) | ISBN 9781119421955 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Banks and bankingTechnological innovations. | Banks and bankingInformation technology. | Bank management. | Information technologyManagement.

Classification: LCC HG1709 (ebook) | LCC HG1709 .B48 2018 (print) | DDC 332.10285dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060722

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: 45RPM/iStockphoto

Brett King

International Bestselling Author of Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane and Bank 4.0

Whenever you have a book that rounds out with a chapter entitled Big Data and the Zombie Apocalypse, you know you're in for an unconventional ride, and yet I have to say the conclusions behind John Best's debut tome are undeniable and sound.

In a world where almost every industry on the planet is being transformed in some way by digital technologies, the question always seems to be can the incumbents do enough to survive? In the case of music, books, retail, transportation and video, we've seen enormous disruption through the emergence of pure-play digital competitors. Initially, this was through so-called e-commerce players during the dot com, and in 2007 it started all over again with the emergence of the iPhone and its App ecosystem. Today we're talking blockchain, artificial intelligence, robotics, energy transformation and gene therapy, but the pattern is the same. It's been the same since the luddites smashed up the steam machines, the first US transcontinental telegraph line killed off the pony express, and automobiles disrupted horses.

Faced with potential disruption many organizations delay a response, hoping upon hope that they'll be different, and when the inevitability of change is evident, the organization is simply unable to adapt fast enough. Best tackles this from a practitioner's point of view, of someone who has been in the trenches trying to enable such transformation. He starts with the classic psychological myths that inhibit a reasoned response in the early days of the digital threat, and then details the building blocks of resistance and how to circumvent those processes, legacy behavior, thinking and systems.

I've seen many of the organizational symptoms Best identifies over and over again. Even today when we're seeing the emergence of so called unicorns in financial services such as Ant Financial, Stripe, Klarna, Credit Karma, Transfer Wise, Ripple, SoFi, LuFax and many more that could end up dominating in their categories, and where they've mostly already overtaken incumbent contemporaries there's still uniform denial that there's any threat.

Breaking Digital Gridlock, however, is about just that. It's about how you truly transform your organization. We hear a lot about digital transformation in the current day and age, but if you were to ask me (and I get asked this constantly) which banks or financial institutions were the best examples of true transformation, I'd struggle to identify a handful. Why? Because if you want to compete against the FinTechs and Technology (or TechFin) companies gunning for you, competing as a traditional player is like having both hands tied behind your back and your shoelaces tied together in a 100-meter world championship sprint final. If you're going to try to win or just survive in the digital world you have to think and act differently.

From simple innovations like remote check deposit, through to cloud, AI, Blockchain and Crypto, Best meticulously explains what the evolutionary or revolutionary technology impact is, why you should be worried as an incumbent player, and what your options are. Later in the book when explaining API banking and PSD2, Best uses the analogy of the McDonald's brothers faced with the possibility of the franchising model and dismissing it as impossible or potentially that it would undermine their core business. Banks and FIs have some choices in this disruptive landscape, but culture, leadership, skill sets and approaches must all be revamped. It takes enormous will to embark on such a transformation.

In the final section around strategy, Best asks the fundamental question that all incumbents will need to ask themselves over the next 57 years in order to survive.