Building a Concrete Roadmap for Your Digital Transformation

Today’s consumer and commercial payments landscape demands digital solutions, making them a priority for community banks. According to the latest survey from the Conference of State Banking Supervisors, 99.8 percent of community bankers feel the adoption of new or emerging technologies to meet customer demand is at least somewhat important, with 64.7 percent labeling it “extremely” or “very” important.

Emerging solutions, added competition, and increasing demands have bolstered that priority level, calling for immediate action. That’s why we developed our Digital Transformation Workbook to help you strategize a digital transformation vision and execute. At ICBA Bancard we’re here for our members and want to ensure we’re giving community bank teams the resources to move their strategies forward.

“There’s a sense of urgency to begin your digital transformation,” said Patricia Hewitt, PG Research & Advisory Services, a recent speaker on ICBA Bancard’s webinar, How to Build Out Your Digital Payments Transformation Strategy. “That’s why the workbook was developed [through ICBA Bancard], in order to give you a jumpstart on getting that done” during such a critical time, she noted.

The big-picture view

Available to ICBA members, the workbook creates a deep dive into internal culture, procedures, approaches, and considerations. It offers a full-scale picture of organizational strengths, weaknesses, and areas of opportunity by offering a self-guided analysis of the following six areas:

1. Key business objectives for your organization’s digital transformation

2. Needs and market opportunities for digital services for your customer base

3. Technical and operational support structure and potential gaps in digital services’ capabilities

4. Current structure of payment offerings/portfolios, with an eye towards evolving for digital transformation

5. Return on value analysis of potential future digital payment strategies across three key benefit bands: revenue-generating, operational, and competitive

6. Development of a full digital transformation roadmap and implementation plan

Each of these areas is broken up into separate exercises, and they can be tackled in an iterative fashion or in one fell swoop, depending on bank preference.

Taking action

As you move through the exercises, it will illuminate gaps or areas of opportunity, while offering that bigger picture outlook that allows you to see beyond what currently exists to focus on what could be.

Banks are often faced with competing priorities, sometimes resulting in teams working at cross purposes. “The great thing about having a tool like [the workbook] is that it allows you to take a step back and look more objectively at your organization,” Hewitt says.

That independent review will take you down a path to new discoveries about the potential of digital offerings, and because every community banks is unique, no two digital transformation roadmaps will look the same.

The end result should offer directionality for your roadmap by helping to identify the processes and the products that best align with your key business objectives and give you the return on value that your specific institution wants.

Without a doubt, digital solutions are the future of our industry, and community banks that embrace this now will be suited for additional success. As Nick Denning, ICBA Bancard’s senior vice president of payments industry relations, summed up on the recent webinar, “If [community banks] can pair competitive digital offerings with the relationship-focused banking that there is such a demand for, [they] will be so well positioned for the future.”

For more information on digital transformation offerings, including the workbook, white paper, and webinar series, visit ICBA Bancard’s website.