…Are We Guilty of Blowing Smoke?

In my last blog I talked about recent increases in lending being a good thing, as long as lending policies remain prudent and conservative. Now, I want to look at transforming the low risk = low growth challenge. For me, a big part of this is about making real what our customers actually believe is true right now. I think we (the lending industry) are a little guilty of what I call the ‘Great and Powerful Oz’ syndrome. The customers see this impressive façade, with fancy Web pages and that robot voice when I call in. It gives the impression of great mystery and power. But we all know (wink wink) what really happens behind the curtain is far from that!

Yep, we are all pulling levers and blowing smoke! That technologically mystifying and enigmatic organisation we all portray is smoke and mirrors. Our systems simply don’t speak to each other, our besieged staff are all cutting and pasting like crazy playing the ‘human integrator’ plugging the gaps in our solutions that cannot provide an end-to-end solution to what our customer take for granted as being kind of straightforward!  Current systems are like bananas and frozen peas. Sure, both are food groups, but if you try to integrate them, you get something unmentionable! What we need are systems that are more like a Rubik’s cube, readily integrated, and you just swivel them about a bit and they create a pattern. That pattern can still change, but it’s still integrated, it fundamentally retains its shape, doing its job.

Lending organisations can still achieve growth, even in a risk-averse and highly regulated market, but they will need to be more significantly ‘joined together’; able to deploy end-to-end processes with business-friendly tools embracing innovation and agility; and also able to both transform existing processes and exploit new opportunities  simultaneously.