PUBLISHED DATE: 2025-08-13 15:56:29

2022 Global Banking Benchmark Study

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.

Banks are making progress, but the pace of change is not fast enough to keep up with the competition. The proportion of banks that are transformation leaders has increased, but the majority are still slow starters.

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:

NEW BANKING LEADERS (top right quadrant)

Top 5 Traits:

The majority say they have yet to make significant progress on executing their digital transformation plans. Key barriers include:

WHICH QUALITIES DO BANKS FEAR IN THEIR COMPETITORS, AND HOW ARE THESE SHAPING THEIR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION STRATEGIES?

The biggest force driving banks to transform right now is the large number of non-banks that are entering and disrupting banking.

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. Banks need to keep up, but also leverage fintech products quickly in their ecosystem where it makes sense. 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%).

Top methods for improving customer experience:

Biggest opportunities to improve customer experience:

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

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.

Top priorities for operational transformation:

Over the next year, banks intend to have a low triple-digit number of applications in the cloud and significantly accelerate data migration to the cloud, enabling them to harvest the data for insight, analytics, and new AI/ML use cases.

Attracting and retaining banking talent with the right skills is crucial. Beyond technical skills, banks look for a strong sense of ownership, curiosity, empathy, and a data-driven mindset.

Addressing 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 reluctant to share their data due to privacy regulation or because they value it highly.

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. Agility includes 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.

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

Agile operating model adoption:

Most important enablers of operational agility:

IMPROVING DATA ACCESS ACCELERATES BANKING TRANSFORMATION

Banks are investing in data and analytics to obtain a richer understanding of their customers and their relationship with the bank. However, many banks still struggle to access the data they need, when they need it, and in a usable format. This is a significant barrier to transformation, as it limits the ability to personalize customer experiences, drive operational efficiencies, and innovate at speed.

Key data challenges:

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, talent management, and collaboration across the organization. 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 may miss out on something that can future-proof the bank for the next ten years.

PUT CUSTOMERS AT THE CENTER OF INNOVATION

Banks are investing in capabilities that customers want most, even if they seem traditional or non-profitable, because customer demand drives innovation.

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 14 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and United States.

Respondents by region:

Respondents by role:

Respondents by bank size (total assets):

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