A Deep Dive into Customer-Centric Transformation in Commercial Banking: How Publicis Sapient Helps Banks Shift from Product-Centric to Customer-Centric Models
The New Imperative: From Product-Centric to Customer-Centric Banking
Commercial banking is at a pivotal crossroads. The rise of digital-first challenger banks, rapidly evolving customer expectations, and the relentless pace of technological innovation are forcing traditional banks to rethink their operating models. Recent benchmark studies reveal a clear trend: banks that organize around customer needs—rather than around products—are better positioned to deepen relationships, drive loyalty, and unlock new sources of value. Yet, most commercial banks remain hampered by legacy systems, fragmented data, and entrenched product silos that make true customer-centricity elusive.
Publicis Sapient is at the forefront of helping commercial banks make this critical shift. By leveraging our SPEED philosophy—Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data & AI—and our expertise in coreless architecture, we enable banks to reimagine customer journeys, harness data and AI for hyper-personalization, and build agile, customer-focused operating models that deliver measurable business outcomes.
The Challenge: Why Customer-Centricity Remains Out of Reach
Despite widespread recognition of the need for customer-centricity, most commercial banks struggle to deliver. Our latest Global Banking Benchmark Study highlights several persistent barriers:
- Product Silos: Decades of product-led growth have resulted in disconnected infrastructures—separate channels, product systems, and databases. This fragmentation leads to inconsistent customer experiences and operational inefficiencies.
- Legacy Technology: Outdated core systems and monolithic platforms make it difficult to adapt quickly, integrate new capabilities, or provide seamless digital experiences.
- Data Fragmentation: Customer data is often trapped in product or channel silos, limiting banks’ ability to gain a holistic view of the customer and deliver relevant, timely solutions.
- Organizational Inertia: Traditional structures and incentive models reinforce product-centric behaviors, making it hard to pivot to customer-centric ways of working.
The result? Customers feel they are being sold to, rather than understood. Onboarding new products can take weeks, and moving between segments within the same bank can feel like switching banks altogether. Meanwhile, digital-first challengers are setting new standards for experience and agility, capturing market share—especially among SMEs and digitally savvy business clients.
The Opportunity: What Customer-Centric Commercial Banking Looks Like
A truly customer-centric bank organizes every interaction around the customer’s needs, context, and lifecycle—not around internal product lines. This approach delivers:
- Proactive, Relevant Advice: Banks use data and analytics to anticipate customer needs, offering tailored solutions and timely recommendations—whether it’s supporting international expansion, managing liquidity, or navigating market disruptions.
- Frictionless Journeys: Once data is collected, it is accessible across the bank, enabling rapid responses to new requests and reducing onboarding times from weeks to minutes.
- Consistent Experiences: 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 Propositions: Banks extend their role beyond traditional products, offering sector-specific insights, risk management, and connections to partners and services that help clients thrive.
The Publicis Sapient Approach: SPEED and Coreless Architecture
SPEED: An Integrated Transformation Framework
Publicis Sapient’s SPEED philosophy is the foundation for driving customer-centric transformation:
- Strategy: We help banks define a clear vision for customer-centricity, identify priority value pools, and develop actionable roadmaps that align technology, data, and operating models with customer needs.
- Product: We enable banks to adopt a product mindset focused on continuous evolution, leveraging agile, lean, and DevOps practices to accelerate delivery and innovation.
- Experience: We design omnichannel experiences that put customers at the center, blending digital and human touchpoints to create seamless, personalized journeys.
- Engineering: We modernize technology foundations, moving banks toward coreless, cloud-native architectures that break down silos and enable rapid change.
- Data & AI: We unlock the power of data, building unified data platforms and deploying advanced analytics and AI to drive personalization, insight, and operational efficiency.
Coreless Architecture: The Enabler of Agility and Personalization
A coreless architecture is essential for breaking free from legacy constraints. By decoupling data and business logic from product and channel systems, banks can:
- Integrate new capabilities quickly (e.g., embedded finance, third-party services)
- Simplify data access and governance, making it easier to deliver personalized experiences
- Enable modular, API-driven ecosystems that support innovation and collaboration
- Reduce operational costs and improve resilience
This architectural shift is not just a technology upgrade—it’s a strategic enabler of customer-centricity and agility.
Real-World Impact: How Publicis Sapient Delivers Customer-Centric Transformation
Reimagining Customer Journeys
We work with leading banks to map and redesign end-to-end customer journeys, identifying pain points and opportunities for differentiation. For example, we helped a major commercial bank reduce SME onboarding times from weeks to under an hour by streamlining KYC, automating data collection, and integrating digital channels with relationship manager workflows.
Data and AI-Driven Personalization
By unifying data across products and channels, we enable banks to deliver hyper-personalized experiences. Our work with a global financial institution involved building a cloud-based data platform that aggregates customer data, applies advanced analytics, and powers AI-driven recommendations—resulting in higher engagement, increased cross-sell, and improved customer satisfaction.
Agile, Customer-Focused Operating Models
We help banks move from hierarchical, product-centric structures to agile, cross-functional teams organized around customer segments and journeys. This includes redesigning incentives, governance, and funding models to support continuous improvement and rapid response to market changes.
Modernizing Technology Foundations
Our expertise in coreless architecture and cloud transformation enables banks to decouple legacy systems, adopt modular platforms, and accelerate the integration of new capabilities. This not only improves agility but also reduces the cost and risk of change.
Proof Points
- SME Banking Transformation: Enabled a MENA-region bank to onboard 45,000 SMEs in the first year, with onboarding times under 45 minutes.
- Embedded Finance: Supported a global bank in launching embedded finance solutions, integrating banking services into client platforms and marketplaces.
- AI-Driven Insights: Helped a leading bank deploy AI-powered analytics to provide clients with actionable insights, driving differentiation and new revenue streams.
Why Publicis Sapient?
- Industry Expertise: Deep experience in commercial banking, with a track record of delivering transformation for leading global and regional banks.
- Integrated Capabilities: End-to-end expertise across strategy, design, engineering, data, and AI.
- Proven Methodology: SPEED and coreless architecture approaches that deliver measurable outcomes.
- Partnership Mindset: We work as true partners, co-creating solutions and building capabilities with our clients.
The Path Forward: Making Customer-Centricity a Reality
The shift from product-centric to customer-centric commercial banking is both urgent and achievable. It requires bold leadership, a willingness to break down silos, and a commitment to modernizing technology, data, and ways of working. With the right partner, banks can move beyond incremental change to deliver the experiences, agility, and value that today’s customers—and tomorrow’s markets—demand.
Publicis Sapient stands ready to help commercial banks make this transformation a reality. Let’s build the future of customer-centric banking, together.