LEAN & AGILE THINKING
42
“ The first wave of digital transformation has unleashed productivity and innovation at the front end , but banks are now realising the next frontier ”
— Laurén Robbins , Vice President and General Manager of Financial Services , ServiceNow
Contrary to those who might view the matter as a binary choice between developing in-house solutions or collaborating with / acquiring FinTechs , Robbins takes the stance that , while both have merit separately , the best approach actually lies in the middle and is often circumstantial . “ Banks feel that they are at a decision point : they have to decide whether they want to become very IT literate and compete with the best FinTechs in the market , or if they ’ d rather focus on what they ’ re already strong at , i . e . serving their customers . The reality is that the best IT environments we ’ ve seen within financial services tend to be a hybrid of both ; I ’ m in favour of incorporating higher IT standards into industry solutions to enable a faster ‘ plug and play ’ approach .”
Examples of this include Starling Bank ’ s collaboration with Currencycloud and its integration of the latter ’ s Spark platform . Capable of facilitating multi-currency transactions across 30 countries , Spark is nonetheless a background process , meaning that Starling ( and others ) can easily incorporate powerful third-party system architecture while still owning the customer relationship and experience . Thought Machine ’ s ‘ Vault ’ – deployed
OCTOBER 2020