A Deep Dive into Customer-Centric Transformation in Commercial Banking: How Leading Banks Are Moving from Product-Centric to Customer-Centric Models

The Urgency for Change: Why Customer Centricity Matters Now

Commercial banking is at a pivotal moment. Competitive pressure from digital-first challengers, evolving customer expectations, and the rapid pace of technological innovation are forcing banks to rethink their operating models. The latest Global Banking Benchmark Study (2024) reveals a clear consensus: banks that continue to operate in product silos risk falling behind. Instead, those that organize around customer needs—rather than selling individual products—are poised to win greater engagement, deeper relationships, and improved loyalty.

Yet, the journey from product-centricity to customer-centricity is complex. Most commercial banks are still grappling with fragmented infrastructures, legacy technology, and organizational silos that hinder their ability to deliver seamless, personalized experiences. The stakes are high: 58% of banking executives admit their organizations aren’t investing enough in digital innovation to keep pace with digital-first challengers, and 66% say legacy systems hinder their ability to provide the digital experiences customers expect.

The Product-Centric Trap: Where Banks Are Today

Historically, commercial banks have expanded their product portfolios in response to market demand, resulting in disconnected systems, channels, and databases. This product-centric approach creates several challenges:

Fragmented Customer Experience: Customers encounter inconsistent journeys across products and channels, often feeling like they are being sold to rather than understood.
Siloed Data: Customer insights are trapped within product lines, making it difficult to anticipate needs or personalize interactions.
Operational Inefficiency: Moving customers between segments or onboarding new products is slow and cumbersome, often requiring redundant data collection and manual intervention.
Missed Opportunities: Digital channels are often designed for cost efficiency, not differentiation, and lack integration with high-touch, relationship-driven experiences.

The Customer-Centric Model: What Good Looks Like

A customer-centric commercial bank organizes every interaction around the customer’s situation and needs, not just the next product to sell. The benefits are profound:

Proactive, Relevant Advice: Banks use data and analytics to anticipate customer needs, offering tailored solutions and timely recommendations—whether it’s supporting international expansion or managing liquidity during market disruptions.
Frictionless Journeys: Once data is collected, it’s accessible across the bank, enabling rapid responses to new requests and reducing onboarding times from weeks to minutes.
Consistent Experience: Customers enjoy seamless transitions as they grow, with unified digital and human channels, and relationship managers who have a complete view of their history and needs.
Broader Value Proposition: Banks extend beyond traditional products, offering sector-specific advice, risk management, and connections to partners—becoming trusted problem solvers, not just product providers.

The Building Blocks of Customer Centricity

Achieving true customer centricity requires foundational change across technology, data, operating models, and culture. The 2024 Benchmark Study and executive interviews highlight six essential building blocks:

1. Coreless Architecture

Modern, cloud-based, coreless architectures break down product and channel silos, enabling banks to add or swap components easily, integrate with partners, and build security in from the start. This flexibility is essential for delivering unified customer experiences and supporting rapid innovation.

2. High-Quality, Accessible Data, Analytics, and AI

Decoupling data from product systems and channels makes it accessible enterprise-wide. Next-generation analytics and AI—especially generative AI—unlock deep customer insights, drive smarter decision-making, and enable hyper-personalized experiences. Banks leading in digital transformation are investing nearly a third of their customer experience budgets in AI and machine learning.

3. Insight-Driven Coverage Approaches

With better data, banks can refine customer segmentation and coverage strategies, moving beyond simple metrics like turnover to include behavioral and needs-based insights. Relationship managers are incentivized to focus on customer outcomes, not just product sales, and can proactively support customers through business cycles and market changes.

4. Knowledge-Powered Assisted Channels

Digital workbenches and AI-powered tools free relationship managers from administrative tasks, allowing them to focus on value-added advice. These tools aggregate data, surface insights, and scale specialist knowledge across the sales organization, enhancing both efficiency and customer impact.

5. Intelligent Digital Channels

Flexible, modular digital platforms enable banks to embed digital assistants, automate routine inquiries, and seamlessly hand off complex issues to human experts. Unified APIs and entitlements support single sign-on and rapid deployment of new interfaces, while also enabling differentiated experiences for brokers and partners.

6. Hyper-Relevant Propositions

With a foundation of modern architecture, data, and agile ways of working, banks can rapidly innovate and tailor solutions to specific customer needs. This includes integrating banking and non-banking products, launching new offerings quickly, and continuously improving based on market feedback.

Overcoming Barriers: Lessons from Leaders

Despite widespread recognition of the need for customer centricity, most banks’ progress remains incremental. The main barriers include:

Legacy Technology: 66% of executives cite legacy systems as a major obstacle to delivering digital experiences.
Operational Agility: Only 31% of banks have a fully agile operating model; most progress is limited to pockets of the business.
Siloed Data and Teams: Data remains trapped in product lines, and cross-functional collaboration is rare.
Funding Models: Traditional annual budgeting cycles stifle innovation; leading banks are moving to outcome-based, flexible funding that supports rapid pivots and continuous delivery.

Transformation leaders are addressing these challenges by:

Investing in coreless, cloud-native platforms
Building enterprise-wide data and AI capabilities
Creating cross-functional teams aligned to customer segments
Adopting agile, outcome-based funding and delivery models

Proof Points: What’s Possible

Banks that have embraced customer-centric transformation are already seeing results:

Faster Onboarding: One bank enabled onboarding of 45,000 SMEs in under 45 minutes, a process that previously took days.
Personalized Insights: Advanced analytics platforms are driving 900% increases in key customer actions, such as test drive bookings in automotive finance.
Broader Engagement: Digital platforms are supporting millions of users and thousands of merchants, expanding banks’ reach and relevance.

The Path Forward: Now Is the Time for Bold Change

The shift from product-centric to customer-centric models is no longer optional. With digital-first challengers setting new standards and customer expectations rising, commercial banks must act decisively. The winners will be those that:

Reimagine their architecture, data, and operating models from the ground up
Empower cross-functional teams to deliver seamless, personalized experiences
Invest in AI and analytics to unlock new sources of value
Adopt agile, outcome-driven approaches to funding and delivery

At Publicis Sapient, we partner with leading banks to make this transformation a reality—combining deep industry expertise, proven frameworks, and cutting-edge technology to help our clients leap ahead of the competition. The future of commercial banking is customer centric. Now is the time to build it.

Learn more about how Publicis Sapient is helping commercial banks unlock new value through customer-centric transformation at publicissapient.com/fs.