Explore why agile approaches are critical to making established financial services firms grow faster, become more competitive, and serve customers better, especially online.

1. Fending Off the FinTechs:
How Agile Financial Services
Firms Are Transforming
Their Businesses
RamanaMurthy Magapu
SVP Operations, BFSI Platforms
Sathish Sankaranarayanan
Principal Consultant, BFSI Technology Group – Enterprise Intelligent
Automation
August 2018

2. FinTechs Disrupt Financial Services
In its first year of operations,
Rocket Mortgage shot
into the top 30 list of
US mortgage lenders
All segments of the
banking industry are
being disrupted by
FinTechs and startups
Its trajectory was powered
by agile approaches
Agile techniques are being adopted in financial services such as banking, insurance, wealth
management, and mortgages.

3. Digital Disruptors on the Rise
Robo-advisors are disrupting
wealth management
Online banks are challenging
their brick-and mortar brethren
Mobile payments platforms
are expanding rapidly
Digital-first giants Apple,
Facebook and Google will
drive growth of payments via
smartphones
Technology has disrupted banking, wealth management, and payments.

4. Chasing Agility to Compete
Bank leaders understand the need to adopt agile approaches but find barriers.
Lack of a common vision
around agile ways of working
Complex and unwieldy
legacy systems
Organizational structures
create distance
Limited automation slows
down software releases

5. Agile Demands Unity of Purpose
Organizational
assessment and planning
– define vision; identify
internal impediments; create
a transformation roadmap
Agile is not just about creating new software. It requires a three-pronged transformation:
Implementation
preparations – establish
teams organized around
discrete pieces of customer
experience
Technology platform and
engineering culture –
employ modern IT
architecture and design

6. Empowered Teams Drive Delivery
Providing agile teams with
C-suite backing
Adopting DevOps strategies
to collect timely feedback
from customers
Giving teams the flexibility to
define their scope of work
Self-organizing teams form the core an agile organization. Empower them by:

7. Building the Team
The success of agile teams relies on four principles:
Organizing teams by features
so that they focus on
customer journeys
Scaling agile skills after
success has been proven
Developing team skills to
analyze and improve
customer value streams
Building once, using many
times after hit features have
been found

8. Making the Change Stick
Collaboration with
business stakeholders
Technology alone is not the
answer. Cross-functional
participation is needed
Banks face three challenges but they can be overcome.
Distributed teams
Success requires the skillful
distribution of tasks.
Collaboration tools help.
Embracing an agile
culture
Managers must see the value
of agile. Skill development
will be needed

9. How Agile Can Pay Off
Agile lets banks introduce products and services faster, identify cost reductions, and
improve ratings from customers:
A US financial services
company reduced product
development costs by more
than 40% and reduced test
times by 70%
A global bank cut the cost of
customer research by 94%
and the time for customers
to open brokerage accounts
by 75%
A mortgage provider reduced
roll out time for new product
features from 3-6 months to
6-8 weeks

10. Agile is Key to Deterring Disruptors
Adopting agile offers banks a response to new competition. It has many benefits:
Systems become more
coherent
The organization becomes
stronger
Competitiveness is increased
Customers get better service

11. Fending off the FinTechs: How
Agile Financial Services Firms
are Transforming Their
Businesses
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