Skip to main content
Skip to footer

RamanaMurthy Magapu

SVP Operations, BFSI Platforms, TCS

Sathish Sankaranarayanan

Principal Consultant, BFSI Technology Group, Enterprise Intelligent Automation, TCS

Agile making financial services firms grow faster

FinTechs and digital startups have disrupted all areas of the financial services world. While banking leaders understand the need to adopt agile approaches to counter such disruptive competition, their existing processes and structures stand in the way of adoption. Becoming agile calls for a transformation that engages people, systems, and processes at all levels. To achieve this, companies must undertake:

  • Organizational assessment and planning - define the vision, identify the internal barriers, and create an enterprise transformation roadmap
  • Implementation preparations - establish teams organized around discrete pieces of customer experience to quickly create customer value   
  • Technology platform and engineering culture - support the agile deployment of new products with modern IT architectures  

Agile organizations have self-organizing teams staffed with people from all relevant functions. Four principles are crucial to their success:

  • Teams organized by features that focus on customer journeys, mapping, and improving a consumer’s experience
  • Team skills for analyzing and improving customer value streams
  • Scaling agile skills to build a culture of customer-responsive change
  • Reusability of features across different banking functions

Banks with agile cultures introduce new products and services at speed. To achieve their potential, they must ensure collaboration between business and IT stakeholders and embrace an agile culture.

In their article, RamanaMurthy Magapu and Sathish Sankaranarayanan show why agile approaches are critical to making established financial services firms grow more competitive, and serve customers better, especially online.