Journey Reinvention in Financial Services: From Product-Centric to Customer-Centric Operating Models
Rethinking Financial Services for the Customer-Centric Era
The financial services industry is undergoing a profound transformation. Disruption from digital-first competitors, rising customer expectations, and evolving regulatory demands are forcing banks, insurers, and wealth managers to fundamentally rethink how they deliver value. The traditional product-centric approach—where offerings and operations are organized around internal silos—no longer meets the needs of today’s empowered, digitally savvy customers. To thrive, financial institutions must embrace a new paradigm: customer-centric journey reinvention.
Why Shift from Product-Centric to Customer-Centric?
For decades, financial institutions have aspired to be customer-centric, but legacy structures, entrenched processes, and siloed technology have made this ambition difficult to realize. The result? Investments in customer journey transformation often fall short, with limited impact on growth, efficiency, or customer loyalty. The imperative is clear: to unlock true transformation, organizations must reimagine their business from the ground up, focusing on the outcomes customers seek—whether it’s buying a home, planning for retirement, or managing risk.
Publicis Sapient’s Methodology for Journey Reinvention
At Publicis Sapient, we help financial services organizations move beyond product-centricity by:
1. Adopting a Customer-Centric Taxonomy
We guide clients to define journeys based on customer outcomes, not internal products or processes. This new taxonomy sets the tone for the entire organization, guiding strategy, capability development, and investment.
2. Building Cross-Disciplinary Teams
Successful journey transformation requires more than just front-end experience design. We integrate technology, data, risk, operations, and customer experience into permanent, empowered teams. These teams iterate rapidly, resolve dependencies, and deliver holistic solutions that are desirable, viable, and feasible.
3. Modernizing Operating Models
Legacy technology and siloed data are major barriers to agility and personalization. By embracing agile delivery models and modern enterprise architecture, institutions can break down silos, enable real-time insights, and respond nimbly to changing customer needs and regulatory requirements.
4. Deep Human Insight
We co-create with customers and employees, using primary research to uncover unmet needs, pain points, and aspirations. This insight drives the definition of future business strategy, culture, and operating models.
5. North Star Vision
We help clients articulate a bold, tangible vision for the ideal customer and employee experience. This “North Star” serves as a rallying point for transformation, illustrating the radical shift from current state to future state.
6. Frontstage-to-Backstage Transformation
True journey reinvention goes beyond the customer interface. We reengineer the underlying processes, policies, technology, and data that enable the value proposition—ensuring that employees are empowered to deliver seamless, compliant, and efficient service.
7. Agile Delivery
Transformation is delivered through a mixed backlog of initiatives—spanning both software and business change—prioritized by value and executed by agile journey teams. This approach enables rapid prototyping, testing, and scaling of new propositions.
Lessons Learned: What Sets Successful Transformations Apart
Through our work with leading financial institutions, several critical success factors have emerged:
- Start with pilot journeys: Begin with a small set of high-impact journeys to refine the operating model, surface organizational inhibitors, and build momentum for broader change.
- Baseline and blueprint comprehensively: Establish a clear baseline of current journey steps, customer and colleague needs, and supporting capabilities. Service blueprinting accelerates this process and ensures all dependencies are mapped.
- Integrate data and risk from the outset: Data and analytics are essential for personalization and continuous improvement, while risk capabilities must be embedded “by design” to streamline compliance and accelerate time to market.
- Secure organizational support: Central functions such as finance, HR, and management information must be engaged to support new funding models, performance measurement, and role definitions.
- Embrace continuous improvement: Journey reinvention is not a one-time project. It requires ongoing iteration, measurement, and adaptation as customer expectations and market conditions evolve.
Real-World Impact: Success Stories
Institutions that embrace journey reinvention are seeing measurable results:
- A leading U.S. insurer partnered with Publicis Sapient to optimize journey workflows and enhance both customer and agent experiences. By prioritizing strategic journey opportunities and aligning technology and operations to the journey framework, the insurer achieved over $5 billion in additional revenue and established a foundation for continuous improvement.
- Lloyds Banking Group revolutionized its engineering organization, achieving a 20–30% reduction in time from backlog to production, a 10–20% reduction in effort for architectural changes, and a 30% improvement in quality, all while enhancing employee satisfaction.
- Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), Thailand launched XPlatform, a one-stop cloud and DevOps solution that accelerates the development of digital banking products, and expanded offerings with a food delivery app, driving business growth beyond traditional banking.
- A major investment management firm transformed its digital presence, resulting in a 50% increase in leads and a doubling of new clients, by personalizing web experiences and continuously optimizing journeys through a ‘test and learn’ approach.
The Path Forward: Building the Future of Financial Services
The future belongs to those who put the customer at the center of everything they do. This means:
- Embracing customer-centric journey reinvention—moving beyond products to focus on the outcomes customers seek.
- Modernizing legacy systems to enable agility, personalization, and real-time insights.
- Leveraging data and AI to deliver hyper-personalized, secure, and seamless experiences.
- Fostering a culture of continuous improvement—piloting high-impact journeys, measuring results, and scaling what works.
With decades of experience in digital business transformation, Publicis Sapient brings a unique blend of strategy, design, technology, and sector expertise. Our approach is grounded in a deep understanding of financial services’ regulatory, operational, and customer experience challenges. We partner with clients from ideation to implementation, ensuring that journey reinvention delivers measurable value—now and in the future.
Ready to reinvent your customer journeys and unlock new value? Let’s connect and start your transformation journey today.