Disruptive forces—like open data, changing customer expectations, disintermediation of the value chain, and more—continue to shape the future of financial services. Many financial institutions are embracing digital innovation to help them tackle these shifting market dynamics.

But what does digital transformation success look like in financial services?

The Institute of International Finance and Deloitte have joined together to explore this question and how financial institutions can realise the promise of digital transformation. We have spoken with more than 60 executives, regulators, and policymakers at leading financial institutions globally, asking what digital transformation means and what challenges financial institutions may experience along the transformation journey. We will summarize our findings in three papers.

The first paper in this three-part series—Realising the digital promise: Top nine challenges to digital transformation for financial institutions, frames nine factors that can shape the success of digital transformation. We look at these factors from internal and external perspectives to see how they are commonly impacting the digital transformation journey of financial institutions. We have identified the following challenges:

External challenges

• Investor expectations for financial institutions constraining digital transformation efforts.
• Inconsistent data regimes restricting financial institutions’ ability and appetite to generate value
• Lack of enterprise readiness and capability by FinTechs limiting the ability for partnerships with mature financial institutions
• Prescriptive and/or outdated regulations constraining large-scale digital transformation initiatives

Internal challenges

• Evolving talent models forcing many financial institutions to rethink the workforce of the future and the environment needed to retain talent
• Lack of enterprise agility, understanding and coordination for activating innovation partnerships
• Traditional risk-conscious culture clashing with a higher risk appetite for pursuing innovation
• Management ambition to meet short term business targets misaligning with organisational needs for longer term transformation
• High regulatory-driven change burden leaving insufficient budget, resources and management attention for digital transformation initiatives

Read the report to learn how we can assist you achieve both business and organisational transformation to reap the full benefits of digital transformation.

Stay tuned for the second and third papers which will explore enablers for financial institutions to capture more value from digital transformation; and the impact of risk, legal, and internal and external stakeholders on the transformation journey.