Why Agile Is Essential for Banking: A blog about how Agile is essential for any business, especially a banking business
As banks race to meet the demands of technology, Agility or being agile has become the ultimate necessity for getting the job done. Agile frameworks and methods have a high return on investment as they allow businesses to be both cost effective and efficient.
The 15th annual State of Agile Report details notable trends and issues in Agile adoption and practice as identified by more than 1,380 global respondents. Completed at the height of the worldwide pandemic, findings from the report show IT leading the way as enterprises navigate a hybrid or remote workforce, with a strong increase in Agile adoption within both IT and non-IT teams.
This has brought agile practices to the forefront of business. Our blog will help you understand how agile can influence your business, specially how agile has changed banking transformation.
Agility: It’s Not Just for IT Anymore
To remain competitive, financial institutions should choose the same project management systems and data flows used by software development organizations.
Jennifer Borchardt, Director of Omnichannel Experiences & Strategy at U.S. Bank said: “This involves not only in software merchandise improvement, where the method is well-known but also during the whole team to deliver business goals quicker and great.”
Agile development is raising the bar for the Silicon Valley tech industry, leading to the iterative design and testing results rather than waiting for a finished project to be announced. If something goes wrong in your plan or changes are needed, you have a clear focus and can respond quickly. And the impact is more limited than having to fight and repair a complete product from start to finish. The system also helps reduce the time for business by providing a minimum viable product (MVP) that meets user needs and can be changed quickly.
“Agile culture needs to be trained across the business and not be assigned to a particular “innovation company,” suggests Dennis Gala in CIO Magazine. “Actions such as hackathons, ideations, or immersive learning activities based on the teachings of the failing firm with a focus on cross-functional collaboration aid firms remain forward of the innovation curve.”
Agile frameworks and methods in banking are more than just following IT-related plans. Banks can benefit from adopting agile methodologies across enterprise data, including customer service, wealth management and purchasing.
Agile Banking in the Real World
Agile is still comparatively new to the world of business. Due to the commonality of in-house advanced rules, alliances and assets and ageing core principles, banks’ access to their data begins with complexities not covered by many of their new tech rivals. “As time goes on and legacy methods are substituted by new policies built-in more current languages, the possibility to try agile practices of software development starts cracking up,” states James O’Neill, a superior analyst at Celent.
One case is BBVA Compass, which has pledged itself to agile frameworks and methods. BVA currently produces 60 per cent of its software, by practicing agile. The bank has previously cut development time from two years under a waterfall model to six months or less.
A Customer-driven Model
A key principle of Agile methodologies is the focus on meeting customer needs rather than simply creating products or backend technologies. Improving consumer knowledge across all touchpoints is a top priority.
“An agile banking provider is obsessed with the customer experience,” says Jeffry Pilcher in The Financial Brand. “The organization makes decisions first based on what’s best for the customer, then on what’s best for the financial institution.”
Serving nearly half of America’s households, with assets of more than $2.5 trillion and operations worldwide, JPMorgan Chase & Co. used agile frameworks in their mission to digitally transform. They emphasized serving customers, with the core objective: “To enable the delivery of highly personalized, real-time experiences that customers increasingly expect” The company highlighted critical areas in which customers rely on Chase’s digital offerings throughout their daily lives. Their four pillars of customer experience are to provide better choice, security, ease of doing business, and personalization.
Banks hold a solid competitive choice when it comes to the bottom, opportunity, and personal level of the consumer data they hold. By leveraging powerful analytics, agile enables rapid and resilient development of treatment using such data. This system assists in engaging with and serving clients with more innovative results — at important times in customer journeys and life experiences. Continuous development and improvement of such customer-centric products helps banks prove that they know their customers.
Making the Jump to Agile
“In banking, the iterative approach that is the hallmark of agile enables faster development of and improvement to digital banking platforms in response to customer demand,” note industry advisors Marc Harrison and Isaac Sacolick.
If you wish to work in Agile and Scrum, you can study your Agile skills by practicing Agile Scrum Master Certification Training. Achieving an Agile certification will unlock the gate of possibilities in Project Management, and you can walk through it to land your dream job.
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