To reverse their precipitous loss of competitive advantage and market share, traditional banks are increasingly transforming themselves from financial products/services providers into customer lifestyle experience orchestrators. One of the key levers they’re pushing to bring about this innovation turnaround is expansion of their ecosystem to include academics, regulators, FinTechs, telecom firms, and technology vendors.
Everest Group’s recently-released report, Guide to Building and Managing the Banking Innovation Ecosystem – Case Study and Examples from 40 Global Banks, revealed four distinct ways in which banks are working with the ecosystem to drive their innovation strategy.
FinTechs
This is all about exploiting the symbiotic relationship between banks and FinTechs. Serving as “enablers,” FinTechs are helping banks provide more choices to customers and expand the set of services and features in their current offering. For example, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) collaborated with WaveApps to integrate invoicing, accounting and business financial insights into its online business banking platform. This enables RBC’s small business clients to seamlessly manage their full business financial services’ needs — from banking and bookkeeping to invoicing — in a single place with a single sign-on.
Taking on the “enabler” role, banks allow FinTechs to gain access to their customers, data, capital, experience, and platform. This collaboration helps FinTechs avoid the challenges they face in scaling their services independently.
Banks and FinTechs are also combining their unique strengths to solve specific business/customer issues in co-branded partnerships. As the banking industry moves towards lifestyle orchestration services, banks need to launch products that cut across industries such as travel & hospitality, manufacturing, and retail & CPG. This can be achieved by meaningful cross-industry collaborations like the one between Citi and Lazada Group, an e-Commerce site in Southeast Asia. The partnership allows Citi card holders to enjoy a discount of up to 15 percent on selected days when shopping on Lazada, while shoppers who sign up for a new Citi credit card receive additional discounts on Lazada. The move drives growth in Citi’s cards business via increased customer loyalty.
Internal innovation
To build their internal innovation ecosystem, banks are conducting hackathons and establishing digital R&D hubs that help them retain talent and bridge the digital skills gap. For instance, Bank of America launched its Global Technology and Operations Development Program – which is called GT&O University – to train workers for new and evolving roles related to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. This has helped the bank not only upskill its workforce but also enhance its retention-oriented employee value proposition. And banks, including ING, are tapping open banking by providing external developers, industry innovators, and clients with access to their APIs. This helps them expand their offerings, provide new channels to serve customers, build new experiences for clients, and enable open collaboration.
Investments
Banks are closely tracking the innovation ecosystem through multiple programs such as investments, incubation support, and partnerships to avoid threats of disruption and competitive disadvantage. This includes investments across academic institutions, startups, and service providers. Interestingly, our research suggests that banks are likely to continue investing in startups via acquisitions or venture capital financing to accelerate their transformation efforts. This is evident from TD Bank’s recent acquisition of Layer 6, a Canada-based AI startup, which adds new capabilities to TD’s growing base of innovation talent and know-how.
Co-innovation
Through co-innovation partnerships with startups, consortiums, academic institutions, and technology giants, banks are jointly developing innovative solutions and technology. Leading banks are forming consortiums with other banks, technology firms, and other participants across industries to solve industry-wide issues such as cybersecurity, API security, and regulatory technology, building platforms and standards for the industry. For instance, TD Bank joined the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity to co-develop new cyber risk management technologies. And HSBC is working with IBM to jointly establish a cognitive intelligence solution combining optical character recognition with robotics to make global trade safer and more efficient.
To learn more about banks’ leverage of the extended ecosystem to drive competitive advantage, and details on the “why’s” and “where’s” banks are focusing their innovation efforts, please see our report titled “Guide to Building and Managing the Banking Innovation Ecosystem – Case Study and Examples from 40 Global Banks.”
