Across industries, digital innovators are pushing customer service standards higher every day, offering ever-expanding arrays of cutting-edge, digitally enabled services and features. Prominent examples include
These new offerings and enhancements are driving customers’ expectations higher for all businesses, including banks and insurers—and these institutions are being forced to respond. The need for banks and insurers to improve their digital capabilities is becoming even more urgent with the emergence of new market entrants and services (such as Apple Pay) from the “fintech” and technology sectors, which are attacking banks’ and insurers’ core businesses and reshaping those industries.
Para enfrentar esses desafios, bancos e seguradoras estão embarcando em uma jornada de digitalização abrangente, que é diferente do caminho em que estavam há apenas três anos, quando seus esforços foram limitados em grande parte a iniciativas isoladas, como projetos de big data focados em divisão, lançamento de aplicativos individuais e melhorias em seus canais on-line e canais on-line. Hoje, bancos e seguradoras estão mudando a maneira como interagem com os clientes, oferecendo aos clientes uma gama mais ampla de opções e um maior controle sobre a própria interação. Bancos e seguradoras também estão fornecendo aos clientes novas funcionalidades digitais e ativadas digitalmente, como
But banks and insurers are not focusing solely on improving the front end. Several institutions have also started to upgrade their back-end operations, which is often a much more complex challenge. A number of banks, for example, have begun to establish multidimensional master-data-management capabilities, strengthening their ability to leverage big data, meet regulatory requirements, and ensure consistent and timely reporting. Others are adopting agile ways of working, deploying
Some financial institutions are enhancing these efforts by increasing the standardization of their infrastructure as well as their use of automated deployment, measures that can support a more rapid software-release cycle and better leverage front-end development. GE Capital, for example, developed its innovative Fleet Optimizer application, which is aimed at optimizing spending and utilization rates for clients of the company’s Fleet Services business, within 70 days—from whiteboard to production—aided by continuous delivery and greater standardization.
Some banks and insurers are also experimenting with new and evolving digital technologies, such as robotics process automation and self-learning machines, which together have the potential to deliver step changes in speed and efficiency. Arago’s AutoPilot, for example, can complete 80% of all IT service management tasks autonomously. In addition, these institutions are experimenting with new, customer-facing technologies. Deutsche Bank, for example, has added to its online investment platform a “robo advisor,” which uses algorithms to create portfolios for investors.
Overhauling their digital capabilities promises to have a transformative effect on banks’ and insurers’ business. But getting there will put a significant strain on IT departments and, especially, chief information officers, who can play a determining role in ensuring that their companies are ready and able to become truly digital enterprises. (See
Reconhecendo -o para a era digital
, BCG Focus, março de 2016, para uma visão mais profunda de oportunidades e desafios relacionados ao seu papel corporativo na transformação digital.)
Habilitando a transformação
To successfully transform themselves into truly digital enterprises, banks and insurers must adopt or develop four critical elements or capabilities (see Exhibit 1):
- Uma paisagem e infraestrutura de aplicativos simplificados. Negócios. Eles foram criados aplicativos por aplicativo ao longo do tempo e agora incluem várias plataformas, pilhas de infraestrutura, tecnologias e aplicativos personalizados ou cultivados em casa, geralmente com várias versões ou variações de cada uma. Como resultado, eles geralmente são incapazes de capacidade de resposta em tempo real. Eles também são difíceis e caros de manter, o que significa menos valor entregue por dólar gasto nele. Esse é um enorme responsabilidade em um mundo em que os clientes esperam que os serviços digitais estejam disponíveis 24/7. Além disso, a mistura de tecnologias e metodologias empregadas-por exemplo, componentes de lote e diálogo-torna muito difícil implementar o processamento de ponta a ponta em tempo real (um componente crítico dos serviços digitais, como a verificação de empréstimos e os pagamentos em tempo real. Seguindo o líder de empresas nascidas na Web, como Spotify e Netflix, elas estão substituindo interfaces complexas e ônibus centralizados por interfaces mais flexíveis e descentralizadas, como como
- Multidimensional master data management.
- Fully automated delivery processes based on the principles of continuous delivery and DevOps.
- An agile workforce, and a new way of working, across IT and the business.
A Simplified Application Landscape and Infrastructure. The application landscapes and infrastructures of most banks and insurers are complex, fragmented, and full of legacy assets. They were built application by application over time and now include various platforms, infrastructure stacks, technologies, and customized or home-grown applications, often with several versions or variations of each. As a result, they are typically incapable of real-time responsiveness. They are also difficult and expensive to maintain, which ultimately means less value delivered per dollar spent on IT.
In addition, these environments are susceptible to broad reductions in service availability if one part of the chain breaks down. This is a huge liability in a world where customers expect digital services to be available 24/7. Further, the mix of technologies and methodologies employed—for example, batch and dialog components—makes it very difficult to implement real-time, end-to-end processing (a critical component of digital services such as real-time loan verification and payments).
To remedy this and ready themselves for digital transformation, banks and insurers are striving to simplify their application and infrastructure architectures and decouple their application landscapes. Following the lead of Web-born companies such as Spotify and Netflix, they are replacing complex interfaces and centralized service buses with more flexible, decentralized interfaces, such as
Financial institutions are also replacing their legacy applications with new technologies to enable straight-through processing. Our experience suggests that banks and insurers can gain outsized benefits by decommissioning not just some applications but entire platforms—for example, replacing mainframe hardware and software with a fully automated (and hence considerably cheaper) x86-based cloud server.
A success story here is Australia’s ING Direct, the country’s first fully cloud-enabled bank, which transformed itself with its Bank in a Box platform. By replacing its legacy infrastructure with “zero touch,” cloud-based hardware, ING Direct has gained several critical advantages, including greater automation and scalability of processes. This encapsulation of infrastructure is allowing the bank to focus on the development of digital services—a core competitive differentiator—rather than on infrastructure, which is essentially a commodity. The effort has been such a success in Australia that ING Direct is deploying it globally. The availability of new virtualization technologies, such as those produced by Docker, will make it easier for other financial services companies to go down this path.
Leading IT organizations at financial services companies are supporting these measures with significant efforts toward standardization and complexity reduction. We have observed that standardization works best when it is driven centrally and when it is mandatory for all parties. This approach translates into accelerated automation, leading to faster, more efficient development of digital services (as well as greater value per dollar of IT spending).
Coletivamente, ações como essas podem criar uma arquitetura simples e desacoplada que permite alterações rápidas e reduz a necessidade de teste. Os custos de infraestrutura caem significativamente porque o hardware barato e automatizado de commodities substitui o hardware legado caro, liberando o orçamento para desenvolver serviços digitais. E o uso de APIs e microsserviços reduz as dependências entre as aplicações. Isso, por sua vez, melhora a disponibilidade de serviços - um diferencial principal em um modelo de negócios digital. Essa base arquitetônica também é um bom ponto de partida para liberar todo o poder das metodologias ágil e entrega contínua, o que pode permitir lançamentos rápidos na produção e acelerar a transformação digital da empresa. (Consulte Anexo 2.)
Multidimensional Master Data Management. A consistent view of the company’s data—meaning that all data related to a particular service, customer, or other business-related object or process, as well as relevant data from third-party providers, is stored together in a consistent way—is a foundation for most digital applications. For example, integrated customer journeys (with the customer initiating a transaction or process in one channel and continuing or finishing it in another) require a high degree of data consistency to permit seamless switching among channels.
Most banks and insurers, however, still struggle to get consistent, high-quality sets of data that are free of redundancies. They employ several different database management systems and data models. Legacy applications are often connected to their own databases, translating into a high level of redundancy in physical and logical data storage across the organization. Typically, such systems can store, process, and analyze only structured data—meaning that these institutions can only leverage approximately 20% to 30% of the data potentially available to them. (This is because their legacy systems typically cannot store unstructured data, which includes such things as pictures, movies, tweets, and Facebook posts.) And the high cost of proprietary storage systems drives up data-related costs materially.
Some banks and insurers, however, have substantially elevated their capabilities on this front. They are working to revamp their data management practices and provide a digital-ready data infrastructure. They aim to replace inconsistent data pools with shared-data clusters to ensure data integrity and data access by all systems, enabling seamless customer journeys and end-to-end processing. Note that these efforts do not entail replacing all existing data stores; rather, they require the use of technical and conceptual layers to eliminate or manage redundancies and ensure consistency.
Several leading banks and insurers are also considering the use of
Fully Automated Delivery Processes Based on the Principles of Continuous Delivery and DevOps. Banks and insurance companies often release software according to fixed, unyielding schedules. Testing is often still performed manually or in semiautomated fashion and primarily occurs at the end of projects or “sprints,” after hundreds to tens of thousands of lines of code have been written. There are long cycle times for deployment and lengthy lead times for infrastructure provisioning.
Essas instituições podem levar suas práticas de desenvolvimento para o próximo nível usando engenharia de software de entrega contínua e DevOps para automatizar totalmente seus processos de entrega. Mas isso isso requer uma mudança na linha de demarcação entre desenvolvimento e operações e infraestrutura: desenvolvedores e funcionários de operações devem trabalhar juntos em equipes conjuntas, e as equipes acessam a infraestrutura padronizada com base em um modelo de infraestrutura como serviço (IAAS). Mas uma construção diária sem erros no ambiente de desenvolvimento pode levar a uma mentalidade de defeito zero entre a equipe e eliminar a necessidade de enormes ciclos de teste no final de projetos ou sprints. Também aumenta a qualidade do software produzido e, portanto, a estabilidade do provisionamento de serviço digital. Isso pode reduzir os erros em até 50%, liberando fundos que podem ser usados para transformação digital. Outra vantagem desse ambiente é que os desenvolvedores podem se autodeusentar usando portais de autoatendimento (em vez de ter que envolver o departamento de infraestrutura), o que pode aumentar a velocidade para comercializar novos serviços em até 20%. Os ciclos de liberação rápida resultantes também permitem uma rápida implantação de novas funcionalidades, que podem diferenciar ainda mais a instituição dos concorrentes. O Union Bank, por exemplo, realizou uma redução de 80% nos custos de teste e reduziu o tempo necessário para a criação de ambientes de desenvolvimento de 42 para 3 dias. O seguro nacional reduziu os defeitos críticos em 80% e aumentou a disponibilidade do sistema em 70%. As equipes de desenvolvimento permanecem intactas apenas pela duração de seus respectivos projetos e trabalham isoladamente do negócio. Os desenvolvedores se concentram na conclusão de projetos e não se responsabilizam pelo ciclo de vida completo dos aplicativos que eles criam; Em vez disso, eles passam seu trabalho para operações, que cuidam da manutenção e da fixação de bugs. Os membros da equipe são frequentemente dispersos geograficamente, dificultando a mudança de mudanças nos requisitos de mercado. O sucesso, no entanto, depende de como eles são implantados. As equipes ágeis têm melhor desempenho quando são multifuncionais-o que significa que incluem equipe de negócios, desenvolvedores, pessoal de gerenciamento de produtos, equipe de análise de dados e pessoal de interface do usuário e design de experiência do usuário, entre outros-e quando seus membros são co-localizados. Eles também tendem a se sair bem quando se concentram nos recursos e não nos componentes. Esse modelo fornece a cada equipe um mandato de longo prazo, promovendo a responsabilidade de ponta a ponta, bem como o acúmulo de conhecimento profundo e específico dos desenvolvedores, o que pode aumentar significativamente sua produtividade. Ele também permite que as equipes operem com um grau relativamente alto de autonomia quando se trata de lidar com incidentes e estruturar o processo de desenvolvimento. (Consulte o Anexo 3.) Essa interação estreita entre os negócios e a TI, combinada com a propriedade de cada equipe do serviço digital em que está funcionando, aumenta a eficiência e garante que apenas os recursos que o negócio e o cliente realmente precisam sejam desenvolvidos. As seguradoras hoje estão pelo menos experimentando ágil. Muitos lançaram pilotos que o implantam ou possuem equipes de desenvolvimento (focadas em aplicativos móveis, por exemplo) que o estão usando. E alguns desses esforços foram bastante bem -sucedidos. Mas muitas instituições estão lutando para aumentar o ágil em toda a organização de maneira benéfica. Aqui, bancos e seguradoras podem aprender muito com vários "disruptores digitais", empresas que encontraram uma maneira de implantar o Agile em escala. O Ing Bank, por exemplo, adotou com êxito a abordagem de base ágil do Spotify, que usa "esquadrões"-equipes de vida entre os componentes cruzadas e de vida cruzada, dedicadas a recursos específicos do cliente e que permanecem juntos por anos, não apenas pela duração de um projeto. (Para saber mais sobre como os bancos estão escalando ágil, veja
To be sure, most banks and insurers will not be releasing software to production on a daily basis. But a daily error-free build in the development environment can lead to a zero-defect mentality among staff and eliminate the need for huge testing cycles at the end of projects or sprints. It also increases the quality of the software produced and therefore the stability of digital-service provisioning. This can reduce errors by as much as 50%, freeing up funds that can be used for digital transformation. Another advantage of such an environment is that developers can self-deploy using self-service portals (rather than having to engage the infrastructure department), which can increase speed to market for new services by up to 20%. The resulting rapid-release cycles also enable fast deployment of new functionalities, which can further differentiate the institution from competitors.
Multiple companies can attest to the benefits of this approach. Union Bank, for example, has realized an 80% reduction in testing costs and slashed the time necessary for setting up development environments from 42 to 3 days. Nationwide Insurance has reduced critical defects by 80% and increased system availability by 70%.
An Agile Workforce, and a New Way of Working, Across IT and the Business. Our observations indicate that the software development process in many banks and insurance companies is far from optimal. Development teams remain intact only for the duration of their respective projects and work in isolation from the business. Developers focus on completing projects and take no responsibility for the full life cycle of the applications they create; instead, they pass their work along to operations, which takes care of maintenance and fixing bugs. Team members are often geographically dispersed, making it difficult to react to changing market requirements.
Agile methodologies can help overcome these problems. Success, however, depends on how they are deployed. Agile teams perform best when they are multifunctional—meaning they include business staff, developers, product management personnel, data analytics staff, and user-interface and user-experience design personnel, among others—and when their members are co-located. They also tend to do well when they focus on features rather than components. This model gives each team a long-term mandate, fostering end-to-end accountability as well as the accumulation of deep, specific knowledge by developers, which can increase their productivity significantly. It also allows teams to operate with a relatively high degree of autonomy when it comes to handling incidents and structuring the development process. (See Exhibit 3.) This close interaction between the business and IT, combined with each team’s ownership of the digital service it is working on, boosts efficiency and ensures that only the features that the business and client really need are developed.
Most banks and insurers today are at least experimenting with agile. Many have launched pilots that deploy it or have development teams (focused on mobile apps, for example) that are using it. And some of these efforts have been quite successful. But many institutions are struggling to scale up agile across their entire organization in a beneficial way. Here, banks and insurers can learn a lot from a number of “digital disruptors,” companies that have found a way to deploy agile at scale. ING Bank, for example, has successfully adopted Spotify’s agile-based approach, which uses “squads”—long-lived, cross-functional, cross-component teams that are dedicated to specific customer features and that stay together for years, not just for a project’s duration. (For more on how banks are scaling agile, see O poder das pessoas na transformação bancária digital , BCG Focus, novembro de 2015.)
A implementação do Agile não apenas melhora a eficiência da equipe de desenvolvimento, mas também ajuda a atrair talentos de TI de alto desempenho. A pesquisa do BCG mostra que um ambiente ágil promove as qualidades que são altamente valorizadas pelo talento de primeira linha de hoje-em particular, uma apreciação pelo trabalho de alguém e um bom relacionamento com os colegas. Atrair o talento certo pode ser um diferenciador crítico para bancos e seguradoras no ambiente digital em rápida evolução de hoje. (Ver "
Making the Right Moves
For banks and insurers, digital transformation can be an exciting journey as well as an extremely rewarding one commercially. (See “ Construindo uma função de TI bancária de ponta , "Artigo do BCG, dezembro de 2015.) Acreditamos que as etapas a seguir são críticas para um forte sucesso de início e final:
- Projete uma arquitetura de alvo áspera - aplicações, infraestrutura e dados, a operação de TI e o esforço de operações e a base de parte de cima. deve ser detalhado sucessivamente nos meses seguintes. maneira. The design effort should be a joint initiative that involves the entire IT organization: architects, application domains, operations, and infrastructure. The target architecture should be successively detailed in the months ahead.
- Be agile in planning but apply rigorous program management to ensure progress. Move toward the target architecture, even if the path is not fully visible. A wave-based approach (allotting, for example, six months per wave) can help the company deal successfully with uncertainty. It can also help it to quickly embark on the transformation and adjust to requirements that change along the way.
- Faça a automação do processo de entrega uma prioridade superior. Como regra ao migrar para uma nova paisagem -alvo, foco Strive for fast automation of core systems and the application and infrastructure delivery process. As a rule when migrating to a new target landscape, focus
primeiro na migração e segundo na automação. 6 6 Uma exceção pode ser quando os componentes herdados permanecerão no local por vários anos. Nesses casos, pode ser benéfico também automatizar essas partes do cenário do aplicativo. - Escala ágil. Observamos que nas empresas líderes, a maioria dos pilotos e iniciativas ágeis começa antes de serem expandidas em todo o negócio. Os pilotos são o ponto de partida para a construção de uma organização ágil em escala que está alinhada com a visão e os objetivos da empresa. e infundi -lo com talento digital. Contrate treinadores e desenvolvedores ágeis de fintechs, empresas de tecnologia e fornecedores de software ou oferecem destacamentos ao seu pessoal. Crie um ambiente físico apropriado (como a equipe de colocação) e uma cultura de TI de acordo com a das “verdadeiras” empresas de tecnologia - uma que atrairá e ajudará a manter os melhores talentos. Start with pilots and quickly roll agile out to the whole organization. We have observed that at leading companies, most pilots and agile initiatives start in IT before they are expanded throughout the business. Pilots are the starting point for building an at-scale agile organization that is aligned with the vision and aims of the company.
- Build DevOps teams. Best-practice companies break down the silos that separate development and operations by forming joint DevOps teams and applying the principles of continuous delivery, which encourage teams to be fast and flexible.
- Train your team and infuse it with digital talent. Promote an engineering culture and the development of deep technical expertise—for example, by staging events such as hackathons and discussion panels comprising the CIO and developers. Hire agile coaches and developers from fintechs, technology firms, and software vendors or offer secondments to your people. Create an appropriate physical environment (such as by colocating staff) and an IT culture in line with that of “true” technology companies—one that will attract and help retain top talent.
