It would be easy for tourists wandering the streets of major European cities to confuse the building of a major bank with that of the opera house or parliament. Each are typically equally grand, with growling statues clinging to the rockface and high-arched windows giving a glimpse to the wood panelled walls inside.
For government, the purpose was to exude authority. For banks, it was to exude trust. In the age of digital disruption however, an impressive physical infrastructure was no longer enough for customers. They required something different.
These days, the Irish banking sector is going through a not-so-quiet digital revolution. From digital infrastructure, to digitising the customer experience across the board, Irish banks are reimagining and reorganising how they do business against a background of legacy systems, regulatory concerns and increasing competition.
In an ironic twist, traditional bank buildings are perfect for the Instagram age, but traditional bank processes are anathema to the Instagram generation looking for increased personalisation.
Transform the people, transform the business
Alongside these daunting challenges, the banking sector also needed to revitalise the way its people worked and how their leadership teams drove the digital transformation within the business. For those left behind, the case studies of HMV and Nokia loomed large.
"Digital advances in any organisation are driven by the people," says Seamus Murphy, chief digital officer at AIB. "It's no longer adequate to simply align job titles with resources, you need to collaborate across different functions and skill sets. When we get that formula right, we know that our customers are ultimately going to get the benefit."
Shifting the mindset in the banking sector firstly required active development of its leaders. It also required imbuing their leadership teams with a technological know-how a person in their position had rarely needed in the past. Finally, it needed collaboration across functions to encourage innovation and alignment as the technology was being imbedded across the organisation.
"When you get these exciting infrastructure developments in an organisation, it needs to excite the people leading and experiencing the change too," says Julie Ryan, head of Custom Solutions and Client Development at Irish Management Institute (IMI). "Without leaders setting out a vision for others to work within, and people at all levels using their skills and capabilities to link these new changes to that mission, the transformation will be superficial at best."
At IMI this challenge resulted in a customised programme unique to the sector's challenges. One such programme was for AIB, named the Future-Fit Leadership Programme. This programme focussed on developing the bank's future tech leaders.
Paper tiger to digital denizen
The AIB Future-Fit Programme was devised in the middle of a significant investment in the digitisation of the bank’s infrastructure and services. It aimed to act as a mobiliser for the workforce, to build momentum for the digital transformation amongst its people.
The AIB senior leadership recognised that without the people within the organisation to drive the change, and take advantage of it, that investment would not bear fruit.
"The programme content, which was designed and delivered with our partners in University College Cork, aimed at igniting a passion for learning about new technologies amongst the participants," says Colm Foster, director of Executive Education at IMI. "By stimulating their curiosity and giving them a core understanding of the technologies AIB was investing in, they would begin to see how technology would transform their business – all with the customer journey at its core."
This development had to be carefully balanced between the people in the room comfortable with technologies, and those that weren’t.
"I found the programme brilliant in that respect," says John Halpin, business manager at AIB Digital and a participant on the Future-Fit programme. "It was pitched at a level that accommodated people like me who, while not a novice, needed support on the technological level, and vice-versa for those tech-savvy people in the group."
By applying an approach that would personalise the development journey for each participant, the programme looked to both develop the understanding of the technological challenge and opportunities facing the banking sector, and to apply those innovations to the AIB context and vision.
Another aim, put simply, was to get people talking.
“One of the big outcomes of the programme is that I have a close-knit pool of people to pick up the phone to when a challenge comes along – and I do,“ says John. “Very early on, throughout and even now six months after the programme, there is an incredibly special bond between all the people that were there. We help each other out.”
Leading into the digital age
The AIB Future-Fit Leadership Programme was part of an overall transformation strategy within the bank. Its role was to align the technology leaders within AIB with the overall strategy and vision of the bank, change their mindset in terms of technological innovation, and drive the change forward within their departments.
"The programme allowed us to give clarity on a large scale - to create guard rails for the overarching strategy. If you provide the guard rails, people can move very fast within them," says Tim Hynes, chief information officer at AIB. "From a customer's perspective, the benefit is that AIB gets the ability to move faster in a continuous delivery cycle. We get the ability to be more efficient and to reduce the cost of change, which gives us greater capacity to deliver more for our customers."
By mobilising those leaders that would have to drive the bank’s technological changes under a unifying strategy, AIB was able to significantly shift the needle in the direction they wanted.
Greater collaboration, more focus on the customer experience, combined with a greater knowledge of tech’s possibilities and a thirst to innovate; these are the impacts that generates a cultural mind shift within an organisation looking to change.
The impressive buildings may become a thing of the past, but the people and technologies within are now pointed towards the future.