4 Trends Shaping the European Banking Sector, Part 1

In fact, Deloitte, in its "2022 Banking and Capital Markets Outlook" report, points to the lack of a "common, strategically linked, business-first language for digital transformation across the institution."

Neither banking nor the broader financial services sector are alone when it comes to aligning and understanding the organisational impact of digital transformation. The sheer scale of change and its never-ending nature lead to disparate transformation programmes, run in silos, that fail to ladder up to broader organisational objectives.

This is evident in the modernisation of core systems. The banking sector has seen huge investments in the front office with customer-facing technology, while the back office is still running on legacy systems and old data models. According to Deloitte, "just 11% of banks have fully modernised core systems to the point where they can easily integrate emerging digital technologies."

During the global lockdown, financial services organisations recognised the need to digitise the back office, to drive more value from the whole enterprisewide system, and to connect those processes and the data that underpin them. There's still a great deal of work to do for the banking sector.

Viren Patel, strategic industry advisor for financial services at Workday, says, "It's about having a platform that's going to give you the ability to react, to be agile, and to be resilient to all those changes in the industry. With banking, there are constant shifts in regulation. There are new disruptors entering the market all the time. So the ability to bring in new measures, to add new dimensions as the market changes with a flexible data model is key."

Similar questions persist around how banks can benefit from deploying artificial intelligence (AI) at scale and fully embrace robotic process automation (RPA) both on the front and back ends of their operations.