I want to say something about digital transformation in banking that some of your board members will find uncomfortable. Not because it is provocative but because it names something that tends to go unnamed until the cost of not naming it becomes impossible to ignore.
Your transformation programme is a capability programme in commercial language. Those are different things. Capability is necessary. It is the floor, not the ceiling. The banks and fintechs that are winning commercially are not the ones that completed their transformation. They are the ones that built a commercial system on top of their capabilities that connects technology investment to customer outcomes in a way that can be measured honestly, governed clearly and improved in the right sequence.
I have sat with leadership teams who crossed the finish line on a major transformation programme and felt, in the weeks that followed, the particular discomfort of realising that the commercial problem they had going in was still there, now sitting on top of a more expensive technology infrastructure.
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