Digital transformation is a popular term, not least so among management consultants and service providers, however it masks an almost paradox: it’s hard, like really hard.

Within financial services, digital transformation often refers to taking an ‘offline’ process, with many labor intensive albeit not necessarily difficult manual tasks and creating a new digital process and a new whole experience for the end user. This sounds rather intuitive, but the reality is that copy and pasting offline to digital, misses the core of what it means to be digital in the first place.

Nowhere is the comparison as clear as it is with challenger banks. Despite providing very similar depository services, a TransferWise and N26 are a breeze to interact with and create a swift, wonderful user experience. Onboarding can happen from your living room couch, using your laptop or even mobile phone and verifications all in all take a day or two, tops. Even in the best situation, a ‘traditional’ bank, with its printouts and branches, will feel like a broken process in comparison.

Source: The Financial Brand: It’s Time To Build Digital-First Banking Units

Nowhere is the comparison as clear as it is with challenger banks. Despite providing very similar depository services, a TransferWise and N26 are a breeze to interact with and create a swift, wonderful user experience. Onboarding can happen from your living room couch, using your laptop or even mobile phone and verifications all in all take a day or two, tops. Even in the best situation, a ‘traditional’ bank, with its printouts and branches, will feel like a broken process in comparison.

Does usability in digital native services create a risk exposure to the user? No, of course not. Data analytics and intelligence in software is powerful and can be used to spot patterns that may uncover erroneous or even fraudulent behavior. So, why then is it so hard to transform an existing process into a digital one? The short answer is that you have to transform an entire culture.

But let’s focus on the positive: hard or not, this doesn’t ultimately matter.

Financial services are going through a clear specialization, egged on by regulation such as open banking a la PSD2 and further requirements for consumer empowerment in data protection a la GDPR. Despite originating in the EU, both of these sets of regulations have set in motion a series of events that have pushed the direction for all organization, in financial services and beyond.

These requirements and this specialization are pushing the industry to further disintermediation, that spells a huge opportunity for vertical marketplaces and services to be created, for example focusing on unbanked populations in certain regions and providing access to credit. By driving an incessant and deliberate client focus and concentrating on doing one thing really well, digital native new challengers can claim a clear niche and win market share, by providing an unrivaled service.

Unrivaled? Yes, because of the ‘digital transformation’ effect, the only real competition is from their peers, the other digital natives. Is that oversimplified? Yes, of course it is. There are many real challenges such as scale, yet the reality is that user adoption seems to be driven by simplicity of use. So, if we consider digital native to win usability hands down, well, that just paints an interesting competitive landscape.

What does this mean for financial services?

Specialization will continue, but it will foster a competitive landscape to compete on high margin business lines, such as debt for clear client segments (think e.g. small business borrowers in manufacturing in a specific region). 

Due to modern tools, this type of deep client focus is possible and efficient, as attracting quality applications and deal flow can be done through online portals. Onboarding and compliance functions can be automated through specific workflows able to run clients data through imperative KYC and AML checks and vet approvals through various eligibility checks.

This used to be available only to powerhouse financial services, yet today the reality is that cutting edge tools are available through various APIs, which Difitek seeks to aggregate and provide streamlined access through with its back office platform.

Usability is key, but so is being able to focus on the whole experience with credibility in front of the right client segment. Today this is possible and it looks like a vast opportunity for those with a deep client expertise or sector focus.

If it is easier to create new products, than to transform old ones, that simply means we need more customer champions to power. Bring it on, we say.