DOING DIGITAL

All companies need to rewire their culture and mindset to leverage digital technologies, whether they be artificial intelligence, analytics, APIs, blockchain or other. You can no longer just add these to the organisation.

After writing several books about how to become a digital bank and the implications of the digital revolution, bestselling author Chris Skinner turns his focus to the implementation of digital transformation. Many new firms are doing digital, but it’s hard for a large, traditional firm to do digital because so much must change. Everything must be converted from industrial to internet, from physical to remote, from analogue to digital. It demands new behaviours, new cultures, new structures, new systems. This is incredibly challenging for an organisation embedded in the industrial age, with millions of customers and centuries of history.

Some people say that it is not possible to change such an institution. Others say that incumbent banks will be destroyed and disrupted. This book disagrees with those suppositions and seeks to find out how banks are successfully turning their operations into digital structures. Selecting five of the world’s leading banks—JPMorgan Chase (USA), BBVA and ING (Europe), and DBS and CMB (Asia)—Chris spent a great deal of time analysing, interviewing and talking with these banks and others to find out what lessons we can all learn about doing digital.

The result is Doing Digital: Lessons from Leaders, a detailed guide for large existing institutions on how to approach digital transformation. These lessons are specific to banks but could equally be applied to any large organisation wishing to convert to the internet age.

For businesses that aren’t born digital, traditional mindsets and ways of working run counter to those needed for today’s world.