Spinnaker Team

The Big Picture The last thing banks need when they pursue a digital transformation is a digital strategy. Not many banks get this right. Organizations need one enterprise strategy for how to be the best in their business. If you set up different internal strategies, all you really have are a bunch of disparate go-to-market ideas. Spending time crafting a savvy digital strategy signals that you have a separate approach from the rest of your banking channels. That very narrow digital strategy puts you on a road to failure, because it forces competition and conflicts as teams vie for differentiated levels of support and resources to strengthen their now-competing channels. Instead of standing on its own, digital should shape and help drive your single banking strategy as yet another tool in your arsenal. You might think your current approach is setting you up for an omnichannel delivery, but you’ll end up with disjointed services that create friction for customers if digital is treated distinctly. Even if you want customers to handle the overwhelming percentage of their banking online, many will continue to walk into branches, particularly for complex transactions like mortgage applications, and end up calling you with questions. Granted, 2020 and safer-at-home guidance as the coronavirus arrived have pushed digital adoption forward more by necessity than desire. In July, nearly five months after the pandemic started, 91% of consumers conducted banking online, mostly to deposit checks or review their account balances. Even more striking: 40% of consumers reported using their bank’s mobile app more often. Some of the elasticity in consumer preference may be tightening. Still, a successful transformation is about integrating digital with your enterprise strategy to be more available and flexible as consumers speed up their digital adoption. With the onset of the pandemic, people are now using online banking daily. Not everyone is going back to your branches. You can’t afford to not meet them on a journey they’re already taking.

The Big Picture I went into a bank branch not too long ago. Only because I didn’t have another choice.

The Big Picture For years, financial institutions have been prodding their customers to take care of more of their banking tasks online. After all, digital experiences offer customers with the ease of handling routine tasks such as depositing checks and transferring money between accounts whenever and wherever they want. For banks, creating end-to-end digital channels offered the potential to generate savings, but only if customers went online and consequently retired their branch and telephone usage patterns. Then came the coronavirus pandemic – which created the perfect opportunity for banks to broaden their digital transformation. And customers have never been more ready to bank online.

The Big Picture The coronavirus pandemic has taken a still-almost-unimaginable hit on our nation’s economy. Millions of people have lost their jobs, and millions more are facing financial insecurity with paychecks that cover fewer hours. With concerns rising over an imminent recession, is your bank prepared to offer consumers the right help and resources to prevent charge offs with its Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) business?

The Big Picture Suppose you go to your doctor with a nasty cough or nearly bent over with stomach pain. You wouldn’t be too happy if your provider barely looked at you, jotted off a quick prescription and sent you away. Instead, you’d want your doctor to do a full exam, check your lungs for that cough – maybe run a blood test or order some sort of imaging on your abdomen.

In the 10 years following the Great Recession, significant numbers of home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) were booked. Now, as we navigate another recession, the balances on those accounts are catching up with customers – and the banking industry – in a big way.

Not too long ago, banks were concentrating on how to charge and keep more – more of the fees customers pay to use an account or as a penalty for not holding up their end of the deal.

Before I invite guests to visit, I always clean my house. I tell companies striving for a winning digital transformation, particularly in my industry niche, to do the exact same thing.

Everywhere you turn or click these days, there’s a new story about how COVID-19 is impacting every aspect of the global workforce for the foreseeable future. Thanks to this giant disruptor, such is the case with Fortune 500 financial organizations who’ve uprooted Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) from contact centers into the comfort (or depending on their personality or circumstances, discomfort) of their home.

As the world braces itself for the economic impact of COVID-19, banks are looking to credit risk models in an attempt to quickly understand and forecast the effects of such rapid change. But putting these models to work is no easy task.

Normally, we don’t get confirmation from the National Bureau of Economic Research on whether we’ve hit a recession until long after its start. Whether that confirmation comes sooner during the COVID-19 crisis is beside the point – many experts agree that as of March 2020 we’ve entered a recession.

Where are you on the path to making more informed, data-driven decisions? Have you identified the metrics? Do you have the right people? And most importantly, do you trust your data?

If your customer is in the throes of a major hurricane, is it the right time to attempt collections?

Spinnaker recently turned the tables and led our own internal change management project, unleashing a series of positive changes to position Spinnaker for continued growth. Rather than our usual focus on client work, we shifted gears and leveraged our team’s deep experience and knowledge to prepare Spinnaker to operate successfully at the next level. Here’s a peek behind the curtain at our own change management experience and the 8 change management lessons we have to share:

If you see real value in bringing machine learning to your organization and you’re not sure how to begin, Spinnaker is here to help. Here’s a primer on what you need to know to take your organization from zero to machine learning.

Question: Is your organization staying busy with things that are keeping everyone busy, or is everyone working toward achieving your core business objectives?

Data is at the heart of nearly everything we do in business. From hiring new people to determining future revenue to deciding on the right new product offering how we use data to make decisions drives business value. But what about the data itself? Decision-making is only as strong as the data you’re using. Data quality is essential.

AI — artificial intelligence — is all the rage in the world of business analytics. But, focusing on AIGT — all in good time — may serve your organization better, today and tomorrow. Developing and building an intentional analytics progression plan toward AI will not only help your organization now, it will make future jumps into AI and other emerging business analytics capabilities much easier.

Do you know the difference between data and metrics? Data will do little for you until you transform it into the metrics that directly correspond with your firm’s imperatives. Leveraging those metrics to support and inform your decision-making process is what business analytics is all about. Ultimately, business analytics can help you grow faster, be more profitable, and improve nearly every function of your business, from call center operations to customer satisfaction, from marketing performance to product innovation — and more!

What if there was a simple tool that would enable everyone in your organization to be aligned to a common set of team goals and priorities? What if the same tool could enable the team to drive results faster and track progress? And if that tool were also easy to implement and maintain, we would have a winner on our hands! Fortunately, such a tool exists. It’s called visual management.

Have you ever experienced that moment of frustration when you realize a project nearing final implementation does not meet your expectations? Everyone started on the same page, but somewhere along the way, the project team deviated from what you were expecting. Consider inserting a checkpoint, called a “planning tollgate”, to explicitly review and approve the project team’s proposed solution prior to the beginning of project delivery. Here are a few reasons why a planning tollgate makes sense: