Simplify your way to growth through a cloud-powered bank

Let your people go

All businesses are numbers obsessed, yet there are times when other concerns need equal billing.

For CEOs pursuing a cloud strategy, now is the time to let employees think and dream beyond dollars and cents so they can help create the future version of your institution. Keep in mind that they may need upgraded skills to fully participate in the cloud revolution.

Our Pulse survey shows more CEOs are fully incorporating their bank’s technology leaders in corporate strategy. We believe that integration is necessary since a tech-powered, financial services company is unlikely to be able to unlock the cloud’s full value if IT is just a department as opposed to the institution’s central nervous system.

The first step is to be open to reimagining business operations and processes in the cloud. Examples include natural language processing and bots that now support customer service, as well as optical character recognition that streamlines accounts payable, account closure and credit card processing.

We believe these are urgent tasks as the next few years will determine which banks are winning with cloud.

Those winners will be known only after a bank-wide transformation takes place. Here are some ideas on how to foster and accelerate an evolution of your workforce.

• Use demonstration projects to show the power and value of using the cloud’s flexible and nimble architecture. Small successes can convince the rest of the organization that it’s worth the effort.
• Challenge your managers and employees to identify potential differentiated products and services that could leverage the cloud.
• Engage with the board to help prioritize the projects that would benefit the most from strategic cloud spending.
• Consider partnerships with cloud service providers (CSPs) to lower costs while adding computing capacity and efficiency.

What’s your return on innovation?

“Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.” — Albert Einstein

Embracing the cloud and becoming a data-driven bank comes with a conundrum for chief financial officers: How do we measure the cloud’s diverse set of benefits that go well beyond revenue and business resilience?

The question is whether you and your team can measure a return on innovation.

For example, what’s the value of an increase in income and acceleration in cash flow for a rural, home-based small business that’s able to use real-time, peer-to-peer payments with customers and suppliers? In other words, what’s the societal benefit of eliminating the friction-filled cash-based economy?

It’s that kind of “soft” ROI that CFOs might consider alongside standard, “hard” cost/benefit calculations.

Soft ROI can encompass many different social and organizational aspects, including the benefits of better strategic decisions, avoiding bad underwriting, enhancing the brand and building customer trust.

Making hard and soft ROI calculations isn’t easy but it is becoming more manageable. PwC’s cloud consumption and financial optimization tools may help increase ROI.

Combining hard and soft ROI is becoming an essential CFO skill as the cloud grows in importance. But many companies admit harvesting that value remains elusive. In PwC’s inaugural cloud business survey, only about half of the respondents said they had realized substantial value.

That gap is partially the result of mismeasuring the cloud’s value to your organization.

As companies navigate today’s uncertain economy, CFOs may find it rewarding to step outside their comfort zone and embrace the soft possibilities the cloud has to offer.

They’re chief transformation officers, too

A chief information officer may be the C-suite executive who most keenly feels the gap between pushing for more innovation while others focus on a wholly different metric.

When PwC asked about cloud value, 39% of CIOs and CTOs told us they’re most focused on innovation, while CFOs and COOs prized improved resilience (25% each).

The results show how difficult it is to find the right level of thinking that combines tech with overall business strategy.

For colleagues outside the IT department, it can sometimes be difficult to grasp the power of data and analytics or the possible new horizons that open for a bank that embraces artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The issue highlights the breakdown between innovation and strategy, a mismatch that hampers strategic choices about how and where the cloud will bring differentiated value.

That’s why it’s so important for CIOs to work closely with CEOs, COOs, CFOs, tax leaders and other executives. CIOs play the pivotal role of educating and convening their C-suite peers around cloud decisions.

With executives split on how their organizations primarily measure value from the cloud, CIOs have work to do to help get everyone on the same page. That will require closing the strategic gap that exists between different executives pushing their own goals for innovation, revenue growth and resilience.

While those goals aren’t mutually exclusive — cloud-based products and services should yield additional revenue and resilience — having a shared strategic vision of where to build value and how to measure it is critical.

And that can come only from marrying a cloud transformation to strategy.