Marketing to the CIO of a retail bank

The Sales & Marketing ForumWhen the earth moves:Supplier marketing in times of transformation 5.30-8.30pm, Tuesday 24 January 2012, The Soho Hotel, London

Marketing to the CIO of a Retail Bank


John CraneFormer CIO, National Australia Bank

and Divisional Director, Group Transformation,Nationwide Building Society

The Sales & Marketing ForumWhen the earth moves: Supplier marketing in times of transformation 5.30-8.30pm, Tuesday 24 January 2012, The Soho Hotel, London

UK Retail Banking

• Concentrated in a few major players• Two or three challenger brands• Smaller, regionally-based building societies focusing on

Savings and Mortgages• Conservative customer base• Branch-based channels remain all-important• All the main players are pursing a transformation agenda

— holy grail of integration across channels, products and information


The Role of the CIO in Retail Financial Services

Main Responsibilities:

• Keeping the lights on 24/7 (processing failures big news)• Corporate cost reduction (process and customer service

improvement)• Reducing the cost of Technology for the organisation• Satisfying the demand for new Technology (mobile

banking, social networking)• Delivering major transformational programmes of work

(including integration work from M&A activities)


The Role of the CIO in Retail Financial Services

Main responsibilities continued:

• Leadership of a large, diversified group of Technology professionals• Managing complex external partnerships for the benefit of the

organisation• Educating peers and colleagues on the value of technology

deployment – creating a compelling vision for IT

The CIO will be a senior Bank Executive, with a voice on the Bank’s EXCO but probably not with a place on the mainBoard, despite the fact that Technology plays a key strategic

role in retail financial services


Main Obstacles to Success

• Age of the Technology estate (core banking system likely to be very old)

• Provides stability (minimises outages) but hard and risky to change

• Therefore inhibits the level of integration across different platforms and the ability to introduce new technology — hard to achieve a single customer view, joined-up business intelligence, exploitation of mobile technology

• Risk and cost of change to the core banking system is enormous (at least two UK Banks wrestling with core system projects)

• The order book is unaffordable and therefore requires prioritisation

• Regulatory and compliance demands


Main Obstacles to Success

• Complex portfolio of change to oversee — time-consuming from a prioritisation and control perspective; projects not delivering

• Shortages of critical skills, not just in new technology but also for legacy systems

• Complex processes not well understood• Poor data quality• Reduced funding• Periodic crises to manage (outages and process

failures)


typical CIO organisational structure

IT Strategy and

ArchitectureBusiness

Transformation

Applications Development

Services

Operations and Services

Governance and Risk

CIO


Typically, the CIO’s executive peer group: • Will be frustrated with the pace and cost of change• Disappointed that their key projects have been deprioritised in favour of

others• Perceive IT as costly, bureaucratic, not agile — the Business Prevention

Police• Perceive the CIO as process and technology bound, not a business leader• May not be Technology literate and therefore not understand why it all so

difficult• May not consider IT as a critical part of the company’s products and

services• Will have an array of suppliers (consultants, technology firms) who have

the solution to their problems• Attempting to wrest control of bits of the Technology empire in

order to drive their own agendas


The best CIO’s will recognise this political reality, will not feel threatened by it, will relish the complexity and challenge. His or her prime skill in dealing with this is through building strong and trusting relationships with senior colleagues.

Communications and relationship-building skills are critical competences for the CIO.


From a supplier perspective • Important to recognise the competing demands on the CIO — it is not a simple

job• In his complex world, your product or service just may not be very important to

the CIO• Build relationships across the business but the CIO also needs to be onside• Be aware of but don’t try and play the internal politics• Recognise that your product/service is unlikely to be the silver bullet• Don’t overstate previous experience in other organisations• Be prepared to start small and demonstrate capability and competence• Demonstrate thought leadership but based on real world experience• The CIO will have the power of veto • The CIO will rely on trusted partners, people or firms that

he/she will have worked with extensively


PUT A LITTLE S&M IN YOUR DAY

Marketing to the CIO of a retail bank

Business

Transcript of Marketing to the CIO of a retail bank