NAILING THE CULTURE
CULTURE WARS: SHAPING A DIGITAL BANK
How can banks, fintechs and other financial institutions make sure they adopt the right culture to fuel rapid growth and success as banking services digitise? The interface between culture and technology has never been more important, writes James Tall Around 10 years ago, staff at Amazon received a memo from the big boss, Jeff Bezos. In a five-point mandate, he instructed all Amazon teams to henceforth expose their data and communicate only via service interfaces, now known as application programming interfaces (APIs). This required planning and designing interfaces from the ground up, so that they could be exposed to outside developers.
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The memo sparked a huge transformation in terms of technology, governance and culture within the company – without it, maybe Amazon Web Services and the Amazon marketplace wouldn’t exist in the way they do today. And, in writing it, Bezos showed he’d not only understood that data needed to be ingested and used in a dramatically different way, but that the culture of an organisation has to change, too. In other words, there has to be an open culture for an open technology platform to exist. The interface between culture and technology is crucial to unlocking innovation and growth. And it becomes especially important when companies enter the much-sought-after rapid growth stage. What was central to Bezos’ vision is also critical to open banking – how many times have you heard Amazon invoked by neobanks and others as the totem for a customer-centric business model? But when it comes to implementing measures to achieve Amazon-shaped goals, commitment can be more sketchy – especially when other, often technology, issues are front of mind. So, it’s worth considering: does culture prompt the adoption of
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certain technologies, or does the appearance of new technology produce changes in culture? Financial organisations are often guilty of drooling over the shiny new tech without actually considering what behaviours could influence its success or failure if it’s adopted. In fact, there’s a strong and increasingly popular argument that the right culture is more important than the technology. Tandem’s CEO Ricky Knox told an audience at Paris Fintech Forum earlier this year: “The shifts in technology that have occurred in the past five years or so have enabled banks to bring a better product to market that appeals to customers and attracts a large number of people into the business. If it wasn’t for the Cloud, agile methodologies, AI (artificial intelligence) and so on, we couldn’t do what we do today. However, I don’t think that our competitive advantage in anything beyond
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