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The year your financial institution starts acting like a start-up

April 2, 2013 by Jim Ghiglieri — Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, SHAZAM

It's easy to write statements like "improve customer experience," "streamline processes" or "create a culture of innovation" in your financial institution's strategic plan. These are all admirable and valuable strategies toward making your FI more efficient and competitive.

Yet sometimes these lofty strategies are hard to implement. Often, approaching change in a completely new way is what it takes to make measurable improvements.

One way to shake up your approach: Challenge your FI management and staff to think like a start-up company. With limited capital, a wealth of energetic ideas, and people power, start-ups are forced to be both creative and aggressive when it comes to addressing challenges.

Consider these start-up techniques:

If your strategy calls for delivering services faster...

Consider what steps (within the confines of compliance) are unnecessary in current processes.

Look at your organizational chart and redefine roles and responsibilities. Consider combining supervisory roles to assign someone to a new customer experience position.

In a start-up, everyone does a little bit of everything, which means all employees understand how their performance affects the next person in the process. Cross-functional teams can simulate this start-up environment.

If your strategy directs that your FI should become more customer-centric...

Engage the customer through social media, surveys, or one-on-one conversations.

Trying to get more customers to utilize mobile banking? Reward early adopters through special offers delivered in frequent and tailored communications.

Partner with other innovative companies (maybe some of your commercial customers) or economic development groups to host educational events.

If your strategy includes becoming the preferred FI employer in your market...

Require key employees to spend an hour a week doing nothing but thinking about and researching solutions to specific challenges. Pull a cross-functional team together to attack a problem and map out a plan for implementing the solution.

Consider an incentive program to reward those who make radical suggestions that streamline processes or save money.

Make sure to communicate your FI's vision and goals to your employees and reward them when they take steps to help you get there.

These are just a few examples of how your FI can approach your strategic goals like a start-up. This can help your FI become closer to your customers, develop a culture of innovation, and challenge your best employees to bring you their best ideas for the most effective changes.

About Jim Ghiglieri

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