Cowardly lions for the digital era

I spend a lot of time speaking to folks about how to bring their banks in line with a digital economy, in terms of scalable security, speed, resilience and, of course, the ever-rising expectations of clients and regulators.

Don’t do all the things all the time. Figure out what is key and focus.

And although it’s fair to say that retail clients have little power of influence until they have options (and can vote with their feet), that is not the case in wholesale banking, where each client represents millions of your chosen currency in revenue and their needs and wants are listened to rather carefully.

So the pressure is there. And it’s fair to say that the work we’ve been doing over the past 15 years or so has moved the needle, but not enough to allow us to move to the next conversation already…

So…

In the interest of *not* repeating myself and yet helping the conversation along, I will spell out the thing that we all know but rarely say out loud.

But let me start first with the really obvious thing that we all know… and I know you know, but you are still not doing it so… Captain Obvious, at your service.

The obvious thing we all know:

Business can always sustain a range of activity that doesn’t pan out or doesn’t entirely align with purpose. It’s inevitable. Big organisations seem to have thriving cottage industries within their walled gardens that are sort of self-perpetuating faff factories. They are not a good use of time and resources, but they won’t kill you.

Provided you understand what can fall into that category and what can’t.

You can afford to have seven meetings with seven separate legal teams because the assistants couldn’t work out how to align diaries. It’s not a good use of time, but whatever.

You can afford to have 36 hours of internal briefing calls every month so that senior people don’t have to attend working sessions or, you know, read anything. It’s dull, but whatever.

You can afford to have teams spending weeks writing reports on ChatGPT without any expertise to brief your internal compliance team meeting. You can afford to have four different town halls per week where at least three people per town hall spend at least half a day each per week preparing their slides. You can afford to have an entire team editing a video for a conference a different team attended for a week.

You can even afford two teams doing an eerily similar project for the last seven months because nobody realised the other guys were doing it.

But can you afford five teams doing eerily similar projects?

Can you afford teams working on things you don’t intend to use?

Can you afford the time and energy you are spending on retaining an optionality you don’t intend to exercise?

I would argue not.

I would argue that, in a world where there is so much stuff for you to play with and so much stuff for you to do, allowing your organisation some faff is fine. But it may be worth checking the basics first.

What is my core business? What are people paying me to do and what do I need to keep doing (and in what way) to keep getting paid? What digital capabilities do I need for this?

How can I deepen my target addressable market in line with my brand permission and what digital investments do I need for this?

What tools do my colleagues need to achieve the two key tasks outlined above (retain and grow revenue)?

What regulatory requirements do I have? What digital investments do I need for this?

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Any leader should know the answer to these questions, right?

And it may be that a digital asset strategy and a metaverse strategy and an AI strategy are part of the answer because of what you do. Because you are in the post-trade space and of course you need to have a plan for digital assets, what took you so long? Because you are a youth banking proposition and actually the metaverse may be the best place to meet your users. Or not. Because you are in wealth advisory and large language models are the future of your business.

Or it may be that you just need to get yourself to an API-first architecture that scales and can process payments in real time and can have a holistic identity view of your customers and the rest is a distraction.

I don’t know the answer for your business from a standing start. But you should. It is your business after all.

If you do these core things and then have time and energy and resources left over once you have answered the business questions, fine. Faff away.

But first, focus.

Make decisions that are materially connected to the heart of the business you are trying to preserve. Don’t do all the things all the time. Figure out what is key. And focus.

The thing we all know but rarely say:

In order to actually get out of the spinning-wheels-piecemeal-digital-transformation territory we have collectively occupied for so long, you need to focus on digital capabilities (read: investment in your tech) that line up with your business imperatives. You need to focus, prioritise and execute faster in fewer areas to avoid distraction and dilution of effort, attention and resources.

And that is scary.

Because you may be wrong.

If you make the wrong calls then, yes, doing a little bit of everything would leave your organisation marginally better off than having doubled down on the wrong thing. If you are wrong, there are material consequences, of course there are.

That’s why it’s called leadership. Because it’s not easy. The right answer may not be obvious. It requires judgment. Decision making. Commitment.

You know.

Your own brains, heart and courage.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. She is chief client officer at 10x Future Technologies.

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on Twitter @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.