In the last 18 months, we have witnessed disruptive changes in everyone's personal and business life: only few months ago, digital channels were an alternative. Now they are the daily solution to carry on activities and processes fast and safely, maintaining social distancing without losing business opportunities. A transition happened at ferocious speed, never seen before, but that now is here to stay.

Now more than ever, digital innovation is a key lever to stand out from the competition and satisfy the new customers' needs. In a blink of an eye, face-to-face transactions became a thing of the past. Activities that have historically taken place in-branch, such as opening a new account, acquiring a policy, checking balances, visiting an advisor, or interacting with insurance sales managers, were changed to digital-first environments made available by banks and insurers.

This revolution has involved digital channels and operations, taking on strong pressures to reduce costs and improve their speed by streamlining workflows and automating tasks. Embracing the digital transformation allows competition in a crowded market where UX and service quality are critical success factors.

Today banks and insurers struggle to plan, set up, and realize technological projects to bridge the gap between their services and the new customers' needs in a race against time.

Companies are now forced to redesign processes across people, systems, and data to deliver a new service model. A big step change that requires agile governance to produce great results already in the short term.  

So, the common question for bank and Insurance CEOs in this period is: "How can I leverage the digital transformation to be at the cutting edge?" 

First of all, bank and insurance Executives should focus their attention on delivering new functionalities and tools to keep customers satisfied and improve workflows while increasing transparency and productivity.

Customers require consistency along their journey, from onboarding to everyday operations. Companies should offer appropriate digital services enabling users to carry out self-service activities 24/7, wherever they are, but allowing reactive remote support when needed. A win-win approach for financial services and insurers can satisfy customers by avoiding repetitive tasks to their resources.

This goal could be reached with modern and modular front ends, developed with the best of breed technologies and well-integrated with back-end systems able to provide updated information to front ends, managing high volume and peaks of requests without disservices and mainframe overloading. 

For sales and internal teams, innovative front ends are also essential to quickly find the information they need and carry out tasks with efficiency, inside and outside the company building, with any device. Digital channels have become indispensable for every user, and as such, they should ensure top performance, reliability, and high service quality.

By using digital integration hub pattern, modern front-end applications can retrieve the required data through APIs that access a single high-performance data lake fed from the legacy systems with a near-real-time highly engineered ingestion procedure. Even when a company's IT architecture is founded on siloed and legacy systems, a reliable and skilled system integrator can support in an effective way an Institution to reach its business goals without revolutionizing the entire IT environment.

Furthermore, digital transformation offers huge opportunities for cost and time saving, streamlining processes and workflows to increase margins and profit.

The crucial way to streamline processes and activities, from front to middle and back office, is via a case management platform able to orchestrate structured and unstructured tasks, solve bottle necks, pockets of inefficiency, and unnecessary iterations.

Moreover, when tasks are frequent and repetitive, financial services & insurance CIOs can put RPA e AI technologies beside case management to fully automate activities reaching the best results.

Acting in parallel to front ends and back end sides, reducing time to market, could be a hard challenge for many Institutions. Still, thanks to low code platforms, based on pre-packaged, pre-architected, scalable, and ready to use configurable components, banks and insurers can create smart web-responsive apps to manage the whole client lifecycle, connecting front end to back end, reducing projects elapsed time at competitive costs and with high quality.

Along this transformation journey, system integration partners can play a fundamental role, supporting Banks and Insurances in identifying the best of breed technologies and solutions to realize their use cases, ensuring, on the other hand, frictionless integration between these modern technologies and pre-existing companies' systems.

Technology is widely available, but the real challenge is choosing, combining, and integrating it along companies' digital transformation journeys to support new user behaviours effectively. Innovation is no longer an option but a course set to approach the right mindset, supported by reliable technology and business partners.