Business agility—which we define as an organization’s ability to respond to and capitalize on its changing operating environment—will be a critical source of competitive advantage in the future. We look at business agility across a number of aspects
Customer agility with cloud
Cloud better enables organizations to move fast to respond to changes in customer demands before the competition does. Using cloud to power smaller, more iterative, and more rapid releases significantly improves speed to market. This helps banks get new products and services into market quickly, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and unlock new revenue streams driven by emerging customer needs
Atom Bank: delivering an exceptional customer experience Customer engagement and personalization are key to Atom Bank’s brand strategy: the organization focuses on providing customers with a best-in-class, highly customizable user experience. The mobile-only bank allows its clients to tailor their mobile experience and interactions to suit their needs and preferences—even to the point of choosing a colour palette and preferred logo. The bank is highly responsive to customer feedback, and every product and app feature is beta-tested with real Atom Bank customers. In case of any issues, customers can connect to the contact centre directly through the app, reducing the need for additional authentication and cutting wait times. Real-time machine learning and AI are also used; their self-help chatbot learns from the contact centre’s assistance how to resolve customer concerns more quickly to deliver an exceptional user experience
Partnership agility with cloud Cloud will play a pivotal role in ensuring banks and other financial institutions are ready for open banking, as global financial regulators move to allow—if not mandate—financial institutions to share data. This data exchange is made easier by using cloud, as banks use open APIs to quickly establish new partnerships and grant data access to trusted third parties. These new, cloud-based ecosystems will enable connected organizations to build on each other’s innovations in new ways, rapidly iterating within the partnership and drastically accelerating the pace of industry change.
BBVA’s Open Marketplace: maximizing the power of partnerships Open Marketplace by BBVA is a matchmaking platform that enables fintech startups to connect and collaborate with BBVA’s business units to develop smarter, more innovative, and more timely solutions for business needs. When there’s a match, Open Marketplace provides a platform for the parties to interact, formalize their relationship, and use the virtual coworking space to support real-time development and foster speed and transparency. Open Marketplace is a great way for BBVA’s business units to capitalize on a pool of highly talented entrepreneurs to validate and develop multiple proofs of concept and solutions outside of the constraints of conventional banking. The platform already has 150 members and is expanding rapidly.
Data agility with cloud Cloud is essential for turning data into a true business asset. The massive data sets banks and other financial institutions use are only truly manageable over the cloud—private data centres aren’t up to the task. Cloud providers are investing in AI and machine-learning capabilities at a huge scale, and their platforms’ built-in advanced capabilities allow organizations to quickly develop applications and significantly accelerate the generation of insights that deliver profitable growth, detect potential fraud, and more. With cloud, data becomes more portable, accessible, and usable than ever before.
Cloud helps National Australia Bank (NAB) improve asset agility and speed to market NAB has set aggressive plans to move to cloud-based systems and refocus its workforce around digital capabilities. It’s already dramatically changing how it functions as it seeks to set itself up for the artificial-intelligence era of automated processes. Two years ago, NAB announced a three-to-five-year plan to boost technology spending by $1.5 billion while slashing its workforce by 12 percent (6,000 employees). It was a controversial plan, designed to help NAB face down emerging competition from fintech startups and global technology giants. NAB’s QuickBiz QuickBiz, an unsecured small-business lending product, was developed and launched in about 14 weeks, an example of how it used cloud-native services to deploy new products much more quickly than previously possible.
