PUBLISHED DATE: 2025-08-13 16:35:50

2022

The Inside Story from 1,000 Senior Banking Leaders

The Global Banking Benchmark Study is part of an ongoing programme of research on the latest digital transformation trends in Financial Services. To access more reports, articles, and case studies from our teams around the world, visit www.publicissapient.com/fs

CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This year’s Global Banking Benchmark Study, based on a survey of more than 1,000 senior executives at banks around the world, reveals that banks are aggressively gearing up for the next phase of digital transformation. After making only moderate progress in the past 12 months, banks are refocusing on operational agility by investing in new technologies, enhancing their data use, and reorganizing their internal structures.

KEY FINDINGS

TRANSFORMATION PROGRESS, BUT NOT AT THE REQUIRED PACE

This year’s survey shows that respondents have progressed with their transformation initiatives, yet bank leaders are still feeling the competition from non-bank industry disruptors such as large technology companies and fintechs.

What Defines Banking Leadership?

Today, banks need to deliver superior customer experiences while being operationally agile to drive growth and compete with digital-first challengers and new tech entrants. The Global Banking Benchmark Study ranked the digital transformation maturity of leaders by assessing specific traits and behaviors of both customer and operational leadership.

Customer Leadership (vertical axis): Create unique and beloved experiences which solve for customer needs and turn customers into advocates.
Operational Leadership (horizontal axis): Drive significantly lower cost-to-serve through highly automated, highly efficient processing.

Top 5 Traits of Leaders:

Top 5 Traits of New Banking Leaders:

The majority say they have yet to make significant progress on executing their digital transformation plans. The main barriers cited are:

Which Qualities Do Banks Fear in Their Competitors, and How Are These Shaping Their Digital Transformation Strategies?

What Qualities Do Banks Fear Most in Their Competitors?

“Fintechs typically have a primary product and so they can deliver it to the market fast. We need to be able to keep up, but also leverage fintech products quickly in our ecosystem where it makes sense. You start to create inconsistent customer experiences if you can only deliver new product offerings in one channel but not another. Reducing complexity helps to do all of this faster.”

IMPROVING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: A TOP PRIORITY

Survey respondents cite improving customer experience as their most important digital transformation goal. To achieve this, banks are combining customer data across different systems to obtain a richer understanding of their customers and their relationships (36%), using this to design new offerings (35%), and to personalize customer journeys (33%).

What Sets Leaders Apart?

Leaders are much more likely to be focused on customer experience, and to be using data to drive innovation and new product development. The following compares the percentage of C-level respondents in the Leader group and the C-level-1 group who say their bank is focused on each of the following priorities:

85% of C-level execs say customer experience is a key metric compared with just 55% of senior managers.

“Two years ago, we launched a major initiative to continuously enhance customer experiences, because it’s the only way to stay ahead of the competition.”

HIGH INTEREST IN MODERN CORE BANKING SYSTEMS

Banks plan to revamp their internal operations to facilitate the necessary step change in customer experience, drive efficiencies, and cut costs. Their top priority for the next three years when it comes to operational transformation is investing in modern cloud-based core banking systems.

“We intend to migrate a triple digit number of applications into the cloud and significantly accelerate our data migration to the cloud, enabling us to harvest the data for insight, analytics and new AI/ML use cases. Next year will be the year of AI/ML.”

Attracting and Retaining Banking Talent with the Right Skills is Crucial

“Beyond technical skills, there are four things that I look for in people: a strong sense of ownership; curiosity to think outside the box; and empathy—because we spend so much time focusing on the customer, whether that’s internal or external; and being very data-driven.”

Address Different Perspectives Between the C-Suite and Senior Management

Partnerships Are Challenging to Forge but Bring Huge Benefits

“Technology integration isn’t the only problem. Potential partners can be very reluctant to share their data in a way that makes the partnership work, either because they are concerned about data privacy regulation or because they value it very highly and don’t want to share it.”

THE OPERATIONAL AGILITY IMPERATIVE

Banks rank a lack of operational agility as the second-most significant barrier to digital transformation in the past 12 months, behind only COVID-19. There are multiple components of agility, including having the technology and data that enable urgent change; collaboration between different teams; and a culture that promotes experimentation and adaptability.

“Ability to change is more of an imperative than ever. There are many aspects of agility within a bank, but it really comes down to an organizational mindset of realizing you have never completed the job.”

Banks are at very different stages of their journey to operational agility. Only 20% say they have a fully agile operating model, while 37% have an agile operating model in place, but not yet across the entire business. 41% have only started to implement some aspects of an agile operating model, or have plans to do so but have made no progress to date.

“With agility, you scale at speed and ultimately deliver better products and experiences for customers.”

What Will It Take to Accelerate Digital Transformation?

Banks say the following are the most important factors in accelerating digital transformation:

Improving Data Access Accelerates Banking Transformation

Banks are investing in new technologies and reorganizing their internal structures to improve access to data, which is seen as a key enabler of digital transformation. By making data more accessible, banks can accelerate innovation, improve customer experience, and drive operational efficiency. Many banks are moving towards microservices architectures and cloud-based solutions to break down data silos and enable real-time access to information across the organization.

“We’ve implemented a microservices infrastructure to make access to data very straightforward for different teams across the bank.”

Challenges to extracting and combining data include:

Rethink Team Structures to Promote Digital Banking Transformation

Banks are rethinking their team structures to promote digital transformation. Many are moving away from traditional, hierarchical models towards more agile, cross-functional teams that can respond quickly to changing customer needs and market conditions. This shift requires a new approach to leadership, with a greater emphasis on collaboration, empowerment, and continuous learning. By breaking down silos and encouraging greater collaboration between business and technology teams, banks can accelerate innovation and deliver better outcomes for customers.

“It is hard for traditional banks to drive disruption because they have to prioritize quarterly financial targets and they may miss out on something that can future-proof the bank for the next ten years.”

PUT CUSTOMERS AT THE CENTER OF INNOVATION

“We invested in giving them the capability to deposit a check. It might seem odd for a neobank like us to invest in such a traditional, non-profitable capability but it’s what our customers wanted most, so we did it.”

THE ESG “SAY-DO” GAP

More than half of banks report that they feel significant pressure to improve their ESG (environmental, social and governance) credentials; this rises to 61% of surveyed C-level executives. This pressure comes from multiple sources, including customers and employees, who increasingly want their banks to address societal challenges more actively. Banks therefore have an opportunity to carve out a competitive edge and key point of differentiation by actively addressing ESG topics.

CONCLUSION

FOUR ACTIONS BANKS SHOULD TAKE

To make meaningful progress towards transformation leadership, banks need to reorient their teams so that they can be truly customer-centric, and they must focus on creating more engaging customer experiences by putting digital and data at the core of everything they do.

  1. Creating rich customer profiles using internal and external data
    Understanding customers’ unique circumstances and treating them as a “segment of one” creates the opportunity for banks to deliver highly personalized experiences. But to combine, access, and analyze data in a timely way, they need to rethink the way their data is structured and accessed across the organization.
  2. Integrating channels to provide a seamless omnichannel experience
    Transformation leaders are those that take a holistic approach to improving customer experience, from delivering personalization and omnichannel servicing, to building seamless customer journeys and new distribution channels.
  3. Digitizing core banking systems
    Banks need to replace large and complex traditional core systems with modern architectures. By adopting a platform that puts data at the core—with a series of discrete services that access and utilize that data via APIs—transformation leaders will in effect become “core-less”, with a series of processes driven from an orchestration layer that run the bank in a flexible and cost-effective way.
  4. Transforming from a product-centric to a customer-centric operating model
    Leading banks are shifting away from more traditional vertical product-focused teams. Encouragingly, 63% of banks are planning to structure their teams, talent, and skills around specific customer segments, enabling them to create a holistic view of customer needs and design services tailored to them.

ABOUT THE RESEARCH

The Global Banking Benchmark Study is based on a survey of more than 1,000 senior executives at banks around the world. The survey was conducted in the following countries:

RESPONDENT PROFILE

Role:

Region:

Bank size (total assets):

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