Читать книгу Transactional to Transformational - Christer Holloman - Страница 17

LBG aimed to deliver this transformation agenda whilst maintaining their cost‐to‐income ratio. As such, the group recognised the importance of utilising every available transformation lever.

Internally, the group brought the end‐to‐end change functions into a single area called Group Transformation. The function was organised into value streams aligned to customer journeys and an increasing amount of change began to be delivered using agile principles and practices. Additional transformation enablers such as Design and Data Science were also scaled up with the aim of delivering more customer‐focused change, whilst lowering the overall cost of change.

However, as they looked across the industry, there was an external lever that other banks appeared to be increasingly using that did not play a big role in their change and innovation toolkit at the time: working closer with fintechs.

They saw a lot of examples of banks and insurers announcing either direct partnerships or investments. Within Lloyds, the Group had interacted with the fintech ecosystem through various industry initiatives or incubators but without any material commercial outcomes, so they set out to understand the opportunity better. Firstly, could fintech partnering be a relevant delivery route for innovation across LBG? Secondly, if it could, then why had it not emerged organically to date?

By mapping external innovation activity against LBG's strategic agenda, they found sufficient evidence to support two delivery goals. Firstly, the opportunity to accelerate or enhance their technology transformation agenda, especially where that leveraged emerging technologies. Secondly, the opportunity to ensure they were able to provide best‐in‐class products and services to their customers, especially where this stretched beyond traditional balance sheet products.

On the second point, they found evidence of several friction points that collectively pointed to the need to develop a specialist set of capabilities, processes and culture in order to enable them to fully benefit from this opportunity. They needed to enhance the ‘rails’ on which partnering opportunities could run, meaning the journey right from opportunity identification through to execution. For example:

 There was no consistent way of monitoring or segmenting the fintech landscape to support opportunity identification.

 There was no consistent approach to help to surface business needs that would benefit most from partnering solutions.

 Some elements of their policies added out‐sized friction to conducting proofs of concept with third parties.

 In some places their technology capabilities made integration with third parties more challenging.

 There were few established routes through which to surface promising innovation partnering opportunities to an adequate level.

 There was no existing framework for considering strategic investments in partners at this scale.

 Their traditional corporate development activity had focused on relatively large‐scale acquisitions and disposals, where the value was primarily in the existing balance sheet as opposed to a primarily IP and growth‐led approach.

Crucially, at the same time this discussion was taking place, one specific opportunity had been identified by a group of senior colleagues within the technology team. This related to a fintech called Thought Machine, which was developing a cloud‐native next generation banking platform. This provided an ideal pathfinder project and helped to illustrate the broader opportunity within the group.