Are challenger banks better placed to accelerate growth than their high street peers?

A challenger bank aims to compete for business with large, well-established high street banks. Well known examples are Monzo and Revolut.

In the last decade, challenger banks have grown massively in their stature and credibility: by 2018, one in four of people under 37 were challenger bank customers (1).

One of the primary reasons for the growth of challenger banks has been to increase competition, and these organisations have been early adopters of new technologies to drive a differentiation and a competitive advantage. However, like many of the long-established high-street banks, there is a decision point coming for such organisations. Do they continue to evolve and grow their technology strategy to leverage the next generation of technologies and capabilities? Or do they double down on their historical investments to maximise the value of their investment? 

Many of the challenger and digital only banks have a wide array of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription services already in place today, including Metro Bank and Aldermore. Most of these have been deployed for specific purposes. Unfortunately, many enterprises are unaware of the potential value that these incumbent vendors (such as ServiceNow) can bring; vendors such as these can come with prebuilt solutions and rapidly scalable low code capabilities, offering quick time to value and a reduction in estate sprawl.  Across financial services, we are increasingly seeing a drive towards simplifying the employee experience with high quality self-service portals, as these provide easy access to well-designed business service catalogues. This is enabled through consolidation of working practises into a small subset of core platforms, allowing teams to break down silos and remove technical complexity when integrating their processes.  

At Unifii, we work with customers to educate their leadership and enterprise architecture teams on the power of the ServiceNow platform. Using the extensive capabilities of the platform allows our clients to accelerate their growth and build scalable solutions with easily measured benefits. This means that their teams are then freed up to focus on the most important tasks. One of our most successful use cases was helping a large FS organisation move all of their critical finance department services smoothly onto ServiceNow. The project gave them clarity around their case loads, as well as ensuring their customers were kept informed throughout the lifecycle, reducing the call rates to the teams by 60%. For challenger and digital only businesses looking for the next competitive advantage, can they afford not to be breaking down silo’s and improving efficiency? 

If you think your team, department or business could benefit from better working practises then we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch with one of the team here.

References:

1. - https://www.fstech.co.uk/fst/Crealogix_Millennials_GenZ_Banking_Habits.php