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Every Thursday, Leda Glyptis, 11:FS Chief of Staff creates #LedaWrites. This week she turns her attention to assets, habits and the wand that chooses the wizard.
Incumbent banks have amazing strengths, it’s true. Customers, coveted operating licences and symbiotic relationships with regulators are just a few. But they don’t come unencumbered.
The strengths exist, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to find. Your data is messy, your distribution network is creaking. Your clients don’t like you or dislike you, they just accept you exist. They won’t necessarily be interested in your innovation or forgiving of your iterations.
There are customers at incumbent banks, but they’re not your customers. They cannot be leveraged in a simple way.
Do you know which parts of “we have data, customers and scale” hold value for the future? They have value, but it’s value wrapped up in bad habits, dated models and static risk models. What was immovably true in the past is no longer unchallengeable today.
This whole mess is man made and that’s the beauty of it. What man made, man can change. And if man doesn’t, woman will. But there’s no clean slate in this scenario, just as Harry Potter’s wand chose him, let the solution to the problem of survival find you.
But survival isn’t always an attractive process. It might not be as trendy as using customer insights to make a new market or as affirming as clients choosing you to bank with above all others.
It might be the boring stuff, the rigamarole, your scale becoming a viable infrastructure for a segment of the industry through technology and attitude changes, or it could be something as simple as talent. Hiring the right people through the depth of your pockets to find the path to survival for you or changing what you look like entirely.
The hardest part is letting it choose you. Break bad habits so you can form new ones and become something new and continuously viable.
Read the whole story at Fintech Futures.
