Transactional to Transformational: How Banks Innovate

Digital disruption has been with us for a while now. As consumers raised their expectations, bright young things with a passion for digital solved their problems with technology and syphoned revenue streams away from businesses that seemed impervious to competition.

The trend for disruption hit financial services a little later. Regulation and process meant that other industries, seen as low-hanging fruit, were picked first but it was inevitable that disruptors would eventually seize the opportunity – and seize it they have.

When we started out with Divido, we began with disruption in mind. Like so many of the other fintechs operating in the retail finance space, we saw the opportunity to lay claim to revenue that had traditionally been claimed by banks. 

However, the market soon became saturated and we set our sights on a new goal: to partner with these traditional lenders and enterprise retailers, and disrupt the disruptors.

It was those years of experience, leading that innovation change in the financial services industry, that inspired me to start having deeper conversations with senior banking professionals about their approach to innovation.

Christer Holloman, Founder, Divido

As with all disruptors, innovation is at the heart of what we do at Divido. Traditional lenders, in particular, had become somewhat complacent and, as a result, were slow to innovate. This is where we felt we had the traction; with our whitelabel platform we could get these organisations to market, fast, and enable them to compete with the disruptors in the space – changing the rules of the game.

It was those years of experience, leading that innovation change in the financial services industry, that inspired me to start having deeper conversations with senior banking professionals about their approach to innovation. And I curated and wrote up those conversations, which were published last week in my book: Transactional to transformational: how banks innovate.

The insights in the book come from representatives of 16 global financial institutions who discuss their own technology programmes across three sections; buy, build and partner, to give a 360-degree view of the transformational projects banks are tackling.

Arguably, disruption injected fresh life into these traditional organisations that had lacked impetus to transform, instead resting on the status quo. The honesty shown by those who spoke to me clearly demonstrates their understanding of the need to use digital transformation to tackle disruption and avoid becoming another casualty of what has become known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Transactional to transformational: how banks innovate is available now at: Amazon, Foyles, Waterstones, WH Smith and Wiley.