Multi-Billion Dollar Acquisitions and Digital Transformation in Banking and Beyond
Yesterday’s announcement of BB&T’s $28 billion acquisition of SunTrust represents the first major banking merger since the financial crisis. While newsworthy in its own right, the multi-faceted strategy behind the acquisition is worth a second look. First, regional banks are being forced to reconsider how they compete with national banks like JPMC. What’s interesting is that digital experiences are what’s driving much of the share gain by the larger, national lenders. Consider that the press release used the words “digital,” “innovation” and technology more than a dozen times!
Many of us likely think of the mobile banking revolution when we here “banking” and “digital” in the same breath. However, digital in banking is making its way into far more places than just your mobile phone. If you have not made your way into a Capital One Café format, I would encourage you to do so and make note of the amount of technology being used to deliver that new bank branch experience.
But technology in the bank branch and even banks’ offices goes beyond just what you can see. Companies like Current by GE work with banks like JPMC to create optimized environments that deliver the right environmental conditions while reducing energy costs and improving sustainability metrics. While impressive, the opportunity to transform the physical space using digital technology is just getting started. Using a common digital backbone, banks can start to optimize branches by leveraging technologies from the retail sector that improve customer experience and branch throughput. Their office space, and really anybody’s office space, is another wide open opportunity to improve worker productivity, retention and attraction by providing a next generation workspace experience.
Even beyond banking, digital in the built world is only now starting to be explored with IOT enabled environments. What it ultimately looks like is anybody’s guess at this point, but my money is on a more dynamic and user-centric world through which we will all start to navigate starting…now.