Finance Monthly January 2020 Edition

19 www.finance-monthly.com FINANCE & BUSINESS - POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS Resilience is king If services go down – nothing else will matter. That’s why putting in place rock- solid connectivity with the stand-in systems and backup infrastructure for emergency situations is so important. Whether that’s selecting a connectivity provider with 99.99% reliability or investing in high capacity backups to cover the 0.01% of times, banks need to plan for failure. Investing in resiliency is not a nice-to-have – it’s an essential part of keeping services running. Evolutionary, rather than radical change Financial service companies should look for a partner’s ability to implement incremental change. The best partners won’t be looking to rip out a client’s infrastructure and start again. Not only would that be incredibly expensive, but it would likely cause major disruption to employees and customers. One bank that has realised this with great success is Danske Bank. Choosing Virgin Media Business to guide it through an overarching transformation agenda, it listened to advice on the potential of incremental change to deliver a new vision for customers, employees, stakeholders and society – with enormous success. Boosting the bottom line Banks should also consider whether their potential IT partner has experience making the connection between IT systems and customer acquisition. Perceptions of IT departments as back-end and functional parts of a business are misguided. In fact, small changes to IT infrastructure can hold the key to boosting profitability and bringing in new revenue. Metro Bank has transformed its IT architecture in a way that supports business goals. By using application programming interfaces (APIs) and a loosely coupled IT platform – as well as putting the IT team at the centre of its digitalisation strategy – the business has implemented a rapid and streamlined process for customers opening new accounts. Clearly, getting the infrastructure right can have a major business impact. An effective strategic partner can play a crucial role in guiding a financial services institution towards incremental success that drives revenue. Partnerships win To prevent IT outages and move towards systems capable of supporting growth and first-class customer experience, it’s vital banks choose a long-term strategic partner. This isn’t just to boost resilience in the face of cyber-threats, but to work out how infrastructure can feed into commercial growth and customer retention and acquisition. As competition heats up in the sector and challenger banks continue to shake things up, infrastructure will take on new importance – supporting business growth, creating compelling customer journeys and implementing effective cybersecurity strategies. Having round-the-clock counsel from a trusted and experienced partner is vital to achieving this.