Speaking at the 麻豆原创 Executive Exchange for CIOs and CFOs, , financial services industry head at 麻豆原创 Africa, shared insights into how companies can make smarter decisions over their digital transformation initiatives.

When organisations buy new application software, the decision usually starts from one of two fundamentally different positions:

• The first is a solution-led approach: find the best solution that fits user needs and implement it.
• The second is architecture-led: find the software that integrates best with your existing technology stack and plug any feature gaps where necessary.

Both approaches are valid. But they set companies on very different digital transformation journeys, each with very different consequences.

Two competing approaches to transformation

In the best-of-breed camp, organisations cherry-pick top-performing software for each business function: the best CRM, the best HR tool, the best marketing automation platform.

This can deliver powerful business capabilities and high levels of user satisfaction, but often at the cost of complexity. Integration becomes more difficult, reporting gets fragmented, and processes, data structures and upgrades become harder to manage. As complexity increases, so do costs. And these negatives tend to be permanent.

In contrast, the architecture-led approach prioritises alignment with existing platforms and investments. Solutions are selected based on their ability to integrate quickly and seamlessly with current systems. This simplifies data models, reduces disruption, and accelerates value delivery. However, it may require teams to compromise on specific features, supplementing with additional tools or workflows where needed.

It all comes down to the trade-offs

Best-of-breed systems often appeal to business units because of their user-centric features and slick interfaces. But the real question is: how well do they fit within the broader enterprise architecture?

Ironically, best-of-breed can slow down agility. Disconnected tools require more coordination, more project time, and more negotiation between business and IT. A change in one system can trigger unpredictable consequences in another, driving costs higher.

Another overlooked trade-off is innovation velocity. Best-of-breed may offer short-term gains, but each new system introduces integration debt, consuming time, budget, and IT resources that could be spent on innovation.

麻豆原创鈥檚 Business Technology Platform (BTP), for example, provides a foundation for extensibility, analytics, AI, and automation, enabling innovation听within听the ecosystem. This reduces the need to bolt on new tech and maintains architectural simplicity.

In short: The more fragmented your systems, the more your business is defined by its IT constraints. The more unified your platform, the more freedom you have to innovate.

Five neglected elements that derail transformation efforts

• Integration is always harder than expected 鈥� Very few teams accurately estimate the integration effort. Two proprietary customer data models, for instance, can trigger downstream complexity in reporting, security, and process management.
• Ongoing complexity isn鈥檛 priced in 鈥� Evaluation committees rarely account for the long-term cost of maintaining inconsistent data models, process duplication, or custom security protocols.
• Supplier leverage is lost 鈥� Fragmenting your stack across too many vendors dilutes purchasing power. The result? Higher costs, less influence over product roadmaps, and scattered support.
• Talent becomes siloed 鈥� Best-of-breed systems often require specialist skills. Instead of building shared knowledge and cross-skilling opportunities, companies create isolated teams of 鈥渕issionaries鈥� to support niche tools.
• Complexity becomes permanent 鈥� Once embedded, complexity rarely goes away. In a cloud environment, customisation can鈥檛 easily be transferred to a vendor, meaning the cost of uniqueness stays with the business forever.

A better path to digital success

This isn鈥檛 to say that best-of-breed is always the wrong choice. But it is often misunderstood, or worse, misapplied. Too many transformation programmes focus on immediate functionality rather than long-term capability.

In contrast, building within an existing, broad-based platform can reduce integration costs, accelerate delivery, simplify maintenance, and scale far more effectively.

It鈥檚 not just a technology decision. It鈥檚 a strategic one, and it pays to get it right from the start. IT capabilities are built to endure and need to be able to respond quickly to business changes 鈥� in this regard complexity remains a permanent enemy.

This article first appeared on

The post What Companies get Wrong with Digital Transformation appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

As finance professionals, we鈥檙e becoming more and more relied upon to steer businesses, even going as far as exiting things that don鈥檛 work and supporting innovations that new technology enables. By applying the example of Tesla to the finance world, one can learn about ambition and how to do things that are dramatically different from the status quo, said听Darrel Orsmond, industry head of financial services at enterprise application software company,听Africa.

鈥淧eople think about change in different ways,鈥� he says. 鈥淐onsidering the fact that certain cultures are ingrained in companies, you therefore have to think really hard about what you鈥檙e trying to do. If you get things marginally wrong, the failure is business wide.鈥�

The convergence of industries that has been accelerated by COVID-19 has facilitated a more integrated network economy and reinforced the fact that change is inevitable. 鈥淎s industries converge and we all move into one another鈥檚 spaces, business demands fundamentally shift,鈥� said Darrel. So how do we equip ourselves to be prepared, especially considering predictions that by 2024, tiny bits of legacy infrastructure will be left in functions like finance?

鈥淐ompanies are recognising that there鈥檚 another way to run their businesses, which necessitates reporting in a completely different way,鈥� said Darrel. For example, existing bank structures are trading themselves out of business, he said, as boundaries between business and borders change. 鈥淎s this happens, the ability to control the processes banks traditionally run disappears.鈥� No one cares where debit processing comes from: they care about the transaction itself, no matter who facilitates it. This completely changes the way banks think about what they do. Consumers are ultimately driving such changes through their behaviour.

鈥淭he notion of defined boundaries in business is completely flawed,鈥� Darrel continued. 鈥淭he value-driven question for finance is: why are the most valuable customers in our business transacting less on channels we built for them?鈥� It鈥檚 difficult to answer such questions and others that go beyond finance. 鈥淵et the nature of finance function is now having to answer value function,鈥� he added, 鈥渂ecause the finance function has the role of steering the organisation, because they are ultimately the custodians of the truth.鈥�

Applying the example of Tesla, Darrel spoke of the way that Elon Musk decided that the future is in battery-driven cars 鈥� which at the time didn鈥檛 exist. 鈥淗e therefore needed to build every single thing that was required from car charging points, to special lithium batteries, to a completely new vehicle production line.鈥� The rate of the change that Tesla brought was so fast that there was no need to even patent this new technology.

This rate of innovation is key when we decide how we compete in the business space, whether we鈥檙e a big or small organisation. Like Musk, we need to completely redesign things. All of us face constant changes happening around us 鈥� every organisation is in a state of flux. 鈥淵ou therefore need to move your ambition as far out as you possibly can 鈥� learning from the example of Tesla,鈥� said Darrel.

鈥淵et, while marketing people may sell you the future, finance people need to account for it. It鈥檚 important that in thinking about where we are and we need to be, we all support all the people we work with to be as ambitious as possible.鈥�

Yet, he added, we need to marry ambition with a clear plan that鈥檚 facilitated by carefully architected platforms based on the data that we as finance professionals collect. We therefore need to start building our capabilities with an end goal in mind 鈥� while accounting for real-time information that allows for immediate course corrections.

This article first appeared on .

The post Lessons in Change for Finance Indaba Attendees from Tesla appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

Despite the shock to the banking system, South Africa鈥檚 banking sector performed well and are currently sufficiently capitalised to withstand short term shocks. According to a report by PwC released in June, measures implemented in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis have helped banks absorb some of the initial shocks from Covid-19.

The Reserve Bank also cut rates by 300 basis points this year to bring the prime lending rate to historic lows. It has relaxed some banking rules to support local efforts providing relief to businesses and consumers, including easing liquidity requirements for restructured loans and rules for when such loans attract additional capital charges.

And in a rare relaxing of regulations, the trade and industry minister also exempted banks from some provisions in the Competition Act to allow them to come together to find joint solutions to the current crisis.

Race for customers is on

However, the speed at which things are changing and the pressure on consumers and businesses mean banks are in a race against time to refine their delivery, streamline their service, all while developing new products and services so that they can easily retain their existing customers and attract new ones.

Finding good new customers in a post-Covid-19 world will be tough. Banks need to minimise reasons for customers to defect to other providers.

Digitisation is the top priority. Banks need to deliver products, services and experiences tailored to customer needs enabled by a 360-degree view of each customer. Banks that struggle to digitise processes and give customers value in more convenient, personal and cost-effective ways will risk losing their customers to competitors that do.

The problem statement for all banks is similar: deliver integrated, data driven products and services uniquely to customers seamlessly through digital processes. South Africa鈥檚 banks have largely the same proporrtion of spend on technology, but some consistently deliver better, more integrated seamless offerings to the market, and maintain momentum doing it.

The challenge is to close the gap between investment into new technologies and the impact they have on the customer experience. In general, money spent doesn鈥檛 move the business far enough into the future for the money spent.

Consumer behaviour has also not been static during this year鈥檚 events; in fact, it is shifting in dramatic and consequential ways as customers exercise their choices from the comfort of their homes on digital devices. Banks need the analytical power to track and measure consumer behaviour in real time and at an individual level, and the agility to maintain and introduce new products and services at speed and scale.

To achieve this, banks need to develop streamlined and automated banking operations that seamlessly integrate finance, risk, and compliance across their retail and banking operations, coupled with individualisation and compelling offers, delivered in real time This is all enabled by a business technology platform that integrates operational and experience data for a holistic view of the organisation.

While banks continue to face pressure from upstart fintech innovators and non-traditional competitors such as telco companies, they remain in a uniquely powerful position. With access to customers鈥� most private financial information, banks could analyse and leverage both the operational data as well as new forms of experience data to better serve customers and win in the experience economy.

To enable this, banks should prioritise investment in four strategic areas, namely:

One: Seamless connectivity

Consumers are so used to the convenience of digital services that they now expect immediate fulfilment of their needs from their service providers. Banks are not designed for this: product systems, channel partners, risk and compliance – all these departments operate separately in a traditional bank setting, with little in terms of a total view of each customer, and limited integrated delivery

Banks need to transform their end-to-end processes across departments and lines of business to analyse each customers鈥� behaviour at an individual level. Using these insights, banks should design and offer personalised products that directly address a customers鈥� needs.

Two: Data-driven intelligence

This level of personalisation requires that banks collect and process operational data as well as experience data. Banks should build intelligent enterprise capabilities that can seamlessly integrate all data and apply machine learning and AI to create and simulate various business scenarios to understand how new products and services could impact their customers and operations.

This can deliver value across four key areas, namely faster time to market; lower research and development costs; an increase in revenue from new products; and a better understanding of their customers鈥� experiences and needs.

Three: Operational effectiveness

Banks need to break down data silos and become more connected to their customers through personalised services and consistently-positive experiences. Using customer and employee insights, banks could anticipate opportunities for new products or services that can create loyalty, boost retention and increase revenue.

Core to this is the automation of low-value manual processes to free up valuable internal skills for higher-value, revenue boosting tasks. Ultimately, banks can leverage their data further by opening it up to trusted external partners in an open banking ecosystem that radically improves opportunities for customer-centric innovation.

Four: Financial insight

Banks are subject to immense regulatory oversight. Remaining compliant to regulatory requirements can be costly and resource-intensive. Current processes are often overly manual and reactive, with entire teams dedicated purely to compliance. However, marrying operational and experience data in a business technology platform that delivers real-time insights can be a game-changer.

Banks can use operational and experience data to simulate financial market conditions in real time, allowing decision-makers to forecast various business scenarios and their financial impact. With more seamless risk and compliance management, banks could be better placed to enable third parties such as fintechs to share data and control via APIs, thereby accelerating the development of customer-centric and compliant product innovations.

The post Four Ways Banks can win the Customer Affinity Battle appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.