Applications are currently open for Deloitte's inaugural Financial Services Innovation Awards, in partnership with Financial Services Ireland, Banking & Payments Federation Ireland, and The Irish Times.
The awards will recognise the individuals and companies in financial services that are developing new and transformative processes to address challenges, create opportunities, improve user experience, and change the way business is done.
Awards will be presented in eight categories: Product or Service, Operations, Customer Experience, RegTech, Social or Sustainable Entrepreneurship, Learning, Leadership, and Most Disruptive FinTech. An overall winner will also be selected.
With an unprecedented level of innovation taking place in the financial services industry, establishing Ireland as a global financial services hub, here we explore successful innovative practices in five key areas which can create value for organisations.
1. Talent
Innovations in this area involve restructuring companies internally to create a culture that facilitates learning and development, enabling employees to contribute to and cultivate new ideas which can deliver value for the organisation. In the war for talent, creating highly productive working environments and fostering a level of performance that competitors can’t match will serve to attract talent to your organisation.
Top tip: Encourage responsible risk-taking, and invest in R&D as well as innovation-led metrics. Empower, engage and look to retain your talent by investing in employees for new and emerging roles.
2. Customer engagement
Advances in customer engagement tools are helping organisations realise deep-seated aspirations to develop meaningful connections with customers. AI is changing how financial institutions attract and retain customers, and as the customer experience becomes automated, fewer person-to-person interactions take place between provider and customer. However, those interaction points that persist through traditional channels, usually focused on more complex or advisory services, become increasingly important.
Top tip: To capture the hearts, minds, and subsequently, the business of customers, organisations must adopt multiple but complementary ways to serve them. At the strategic level, a fundamental rethinking of the client engagement model should be considered with a view to pivoting from product orientation to a client-centric, bespoke delivery of services. To execute, it will be necessary to think more broadly about using third parties and utilities for non-core activities.
3. Collaboration
Leveraging other companies’ processes, technologies, offerings, channels, and brands enables a firm to capitalise on its own strengths while harnessing the capabilities and assets of others. Network innovations also help to share risk when developing new offers and ventures. In the insurance sector, we are already seeing that partnerships between InsurTechs and incumbents can help build a connected community that is more flexible and customer-centric.
Top tip: Collaborations can be brief or long-term, and they can be formed between allies or even competitors. In addition, acquiring or collaborating with a FinTech to solve a specific business challenge can enable incumbent businesses to bring new products and services to market. FinTechs must align their pitches to real-world challenges and demonstrate both industry and technical expertise.
4. Products and services
Product innovation involves not just new product offerings but also updates and line extensions that add significant value to existing ones. Enhancing the utility, performance, and apparent value of an offering makes existing products easier to try, use, and enjoy, while service innovations reveal features and functionality customers might otherwise overlook; they fix problems and smooth rough patches in the customer journey. Done well, even average products can be elevated into compelling experiences that customers come back for again and again.
Top tip: As product or service performance can be easy for competitors to copy, resulting in an expensive rush to parity, developing distinguishing features and functionality will set your offering apart.
5. Profit model
In financial services, as in most other industries, the dominant profit models have tended to go unquestioned for decades. Innovative profit models challenge traditional assumptions and find new ways to convert a firm’s offerings and other sources of value into cash.
Top tip: Understand your niche. Financial services innovators increasingly fall into one of four categories: customer experience leaders, distribution platforms, product manufacturers, and infrastructure providers.
Showcase your innovation
Deloitte is inviting individuals and companies across the island of Ireland to share examples of their own innovation by entering the inaugural Financial Services Innovation Awards.
“There has never been a time when financial services are more in need of innovation and transformation than now. So we feel it is very important to celebrate those who are pioneering innovation and leading this transformation,” says David Dalton, partner and head of Financial Services at Deloitte Ireland.
“These companies and individuals are delivering new kinds of value, reforming operating models, upending competitive dynamics and shaping the future of financial services with the customer in full focus.”
Leaning on an innovation template developed by Doblin, a Deloitte company, the judging panel will examine applications in each category on the novelty of ideas, cost-benefit, end-user benefits, and/or contribution to the financial services industry.
Eligible companies are those which are operating on the island of Ireland (including Northern Ireland), have been in operation for a minimum of three years, and have annual turnover in excess of €1 million/£850,000.
Judges include Enterprise Ireland chief executive, Julie Sinnamon; Brian Hayes of Banking & Payments Federation Ireland; Joe Duffy of Ibec’s Financial Services Ireland; Deloitte’s financial services industry leader in Ireland, David Dalton; and Mai Santamaria, senior financial advisor at the Department of Finance.
The deadline for applications is Friday, August 16th. Winners will be announced at a lunch celebration on Friday, September 20th. Enter now at deloitte.ie/fsia