FinXTech Intel 2023 report final 2 - Flipbook - Page 10
Banking as a service and embedded finance are another story
should be realistic in setting those goals, though, saying, “It’s
entirely, and banks that are getting into those areas should
never going to be 100%.”
ideally have entire departments or business units dedicated to that. “You really have to understand that’s not your
garden-variety fintech partnership,” Shevlin says. “That’s a
whole new set of products and services.”
Breaking larger projects into smaller chunks or tasks can
also help keep teams motivated and on track when tackling
strategic initiatives, says Laura Merling, chief transformation
and operations officer at $26 billion Arvest Bank Group in
It’s also a good idea for bankers to make sure they’re fully
Bentonville, Arkansas.
utilizing the technology they already have, says Enrico
Camerinelli, a strategic advisor at Aite-Novarica Group. The
more technology a bank introduces, the more robust its backend systems need to be to handle that, he says.
“You’re not shortcutting something, but you’re saying, what
can be done in small chunks to show progress,” Merling said
in an August 2022 conversion with Bank Director. “A lot of
times in a bank, something might be a very long project that’s
“Banks need to leverage, as much as possible, the existing
going to take 18 months to roll out. I don’t ever want a big
investments they have,” he says. “Technology is not neces-
aha at the end. What I want to see is incremental progress,
sarily always innovation in the sense of always building new
which means figure out what you can roll out in 30 days, 60
things on top of old stuff.”
days, 90 days, so that you have consistent progress. And then
you measure it.”
Legacy technology written in older programming languages
doesn’t necessarily need to be scrapped as long as the bank is
Tech initiatives that serve an internal function can still be
able to still maintain that infrastructure. In many cases, the
linked to some measurable outcome, but Behringer says that
issue is not so much with older programming languages as it
doesn’t necessarily have to be head count or expense reduc-
is with a lack of internal expertise about the language or tech
tions. Instead, bankers might look at improving the average
in question.
time it takes to clear a particular task and once that’s
accomplished, think about how they can deploy those full-
“It’s not necessarily the software per se, but it’s the fact that
it’s at risk of being unmanaged,” Camerinelli says. “That is
time employees more smartly. “I don’t like to just focus on
cost-cutting,” he says.
the risk.”
Bank Secrecy Act and Anti-Money Laundering Act compliBankers can work on a broader strategy by mapping out
whether a particular item on the to-do list is internal or
external facing, or if it relates to a credit opportunity, mobile
banking, the retail bank, a back-office function or some other
function. Initiatives aimed at creating efficiencies within the
organization can be just as meaningful as those intended to
boost revenue or customer acquisition.
ance may be one example of a function where a bank can digitize some part of the process and create internal efficiencies.
Behringer describes one client that previously took about four
hours to close out a suspicious activity report investigation
because the BSA analyst needed to spend about three of
those hours pulling data from various places. The firm built
a bot that could automatically pull that relevant data for
It may also help for bankers to think about setting measur-
the analyst and was ultimately able to make that person’s
able goals, within reasonable timeframes, as part of that stra-
job less mundane and repetitive. After making that change, a
tegic road map. For customer-facing technologies, tangible
BSA analyst can now close out about eight alerts in a work
metrics could include adding more customers, growing mar-
day instead of two.
ket share or increasing the number of customers using digital
banking or the bank’s mobile app.
“There should definitely be a growth target, from both the
perspective of the percentage of customers that are in that
“That employee’s job satisfaction just went through the
roof because they’re doing what they like to do, versus doing
administrative tasks,” he says.
Laura Alix is director of research at Bank Director.
bull’s-eye plus the percentage of revenue that is being generated by that segment,” Shevlin says. He adds that executives
8 | FINXTECH INTELLIGENCE REPORT
Bank Director Managing Editor Kiah Lau Haslett contributed to this report.
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