You cannot buy a digital transformation, yet most banks try.
The script is familiar: leadership decides it is time to move, because a competitor’s app is better, customers have grown used to new digital channels elsewhere, and the board expects progress. A digital banking platform is selected, the contract is signed, and from day one the project carries the name of digital transformation. Six to eighteen months later the platform is live, the digital channels look new, the mobile app is available for download, and the project is closed. In the branch, however, the same form has to be filled in as before, opening an account takes the same number of days, only now there is a nicer screen to wait on, and the app has become a new front door to the old house.
I know this pattern from the other side. I worked as a technical lead at IND Group, a vendor of digital banking platforms, and watched the same product being rolled out at several banks. Two rollouts stand out, because their outcomes were opposites.
The first was a European bank where we renewed every channel: mobile banking, internet banking, and the bank’s internal admin portal. What they bought was a configurable, white label omnichannel banking front office platform that offered not only screens but the processes behind them. The bank took the screens. Paper documents stayed, the lending process stayed, and opening an account ran exactly as before, except that now it could be started from three new channels. Every workshop ended the same way: “this is how we do it here, please replicate it.” The project was delivered, and it worked. The bank had bought the technology and had taken care that nothing changed along with it.
At the second bank, the person across the table was not a project manager but a digital leader who, next to the CEO, was responsible for both the business and the technology, with the authority to change processes. In the first workshops the question was not how the platform could replicate what they did today, but how, according to the platform, other banks did it. Wherever the two differed, the software was not bent to the bank; the bank decided whether to keep its own step or let it go. Paper processes were retired, an approval layer was removed, and a product that could not sensibly be sold online was simplified. Same platform, less customization, shorter rollout. The difference was not in the software. It was in who decided, and what they were allowed to decide.
Those two rollouts taught me what can be bought and what cannot. Technology can be bought: the platform, the integration, the security, and with them time, because what others have spent years building does not have to be invented again. Other banks’ proven practice can be bought too, because a good platform carries the distilled experience of many. What cannot be bought is the decision to change your own processes. Nor can product ownership, which means that someone inside the bank is accountable for what the system should and should not do. Nor can data discipline, nor the commitment to retire the old system. A vendor does not supply these, because a vendor cannot.
You can outsource the build. You cannot outsource the transformation.
A purchase fails for three reasons when it takes the place of a decision.
01A platform encodes someone else’s processes. Behind every digital banking system there is a view of how a bank opens accounts, lends, and serves its customers. The rollout is where that view meets the bank’s own processes, and where someone has to decide which one yields. That decision is the transformation itself, and nobody makes it on the bank’s behalf. If the software yields at every difference, what remains at the end is an expensive copy of how the bank works today.
02The vendor delivers the contract, not the transformation of the organization. This is not a criticism; it is a clarification of roles. The vendor’s interest is that the agreed scope goes live on time. Reshaping the organization is not in the scope, and it cannot be, because that requires the bank’s own people to say no to their own habits. Whoever expects it from the vendor has put the accountability in the wrong place, not the money.
03It takes a leader who answers for both the business and the technology. A project manager’s job is to deliver what was agreed; this leader’s job is to make sure the right thing gets delivered. At the successful bank, that leader could touch the processes and had the room to carry the change through to the branches. At the other bank, the go-live date was the only goal, and it was met.
Both banks have a modern digital platform today. At one, it is a screen. At the other, a different bank stands behind it than before the rollout. Anyone preparing to buy a platform should ask one question before the selection starts, and ask it not of the vendor but of themselves: who in my organization decides what the system should do, and does that person have the authority to change how we work? If there is no name, the project can be completed, but the transformation cannot.
Who decides what your purchased platform should do? Tell me on LinkedIn.
