100 Financial Services Executives’ Top Insights on Digital Transformation Success

CEOs across industries continue to work toward transforming their organizations into highly intelligent, automated and digitally native enterprises. This especially holds true within the financial services industry. Long-standing institutions of all sizes and sectors are investing aggressively in generative AI, cloud computing and new, digitally native customer-facing platforms.

Their intent with these game-changing, transformative initiatives is to win over mind and market share. This is especially critical as competition increases from both incumbents and digitally savvy fintechs that had their beginnings in the cloud. As bold steps to embrace modern technologies are taken, certain questions may be on the minds of executives and stakeholders:

• What does it truly take these days to support digital strategies and journeys?
• How prevalent is cloud computing in the current enterprise and what capabilities are companies investing in?
• What are the top data-related challenges when modernizing applications, analytics and infrastructure to the cloud?
• What’s important to address when it comes to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) mandates and why?

These are in fact just a few of the questions that were addressed in a survey conducted by WBR Insights, the organizers of FIMA Europe, whose conference is being held November 28-29 in London at the QEII Centre. Co-sponsored by Informatica and Cognaize, WBR Insights surveyed 100 of the most senior figures in financial data such as chief data officers and heads of data across Europe, the U.S. and Canada. The report focuses on three areas of digital transformation, including:

• Part One: Choosing the Right Cloud Solutions: Composable Cloud Services
• Part Two: A Data-driven ESG Strategy
• Part Three: The Journey Towards a Fully Automated Future in Data Analytics

This year’s survey results reveal a few noteworthy insights as I engage with data, technology and business leaders across the global financial services industry. 

The digital transformation journey has many different paths and timeframes to consider as there is no one universal plan for companies to adopt. However, a clear certainty lies in the pace of innovations in analytics, generative AI, data management, data governance and cloud-based business applications. These innovations originate from the cloud community, operate in the cloud environment and leverage the extended cloud ecosystem to deliver business value to end users.

Generative AI, large language models, advanced machine learning and natural language processing technologies are poised to transform the financial services industry similar to how the manufacturing sector was revolutionized by robotics. The rate of adoption is outpacing companies’ understanding of how to fully harness these technologies or their associated benefits. Nevertheless, it is imperative to emphasize that the data used to develop these models and execute them with precision and rigor will be dependent on having data that is fit for business use.

Financial services’ focus right now for ESG is complying with the multitude of regulations that have already arrived on the shores of certain countries, with more to come in 2024 across Europe, North America and Asia. From a data standpoint, it is nice to see — as evidenced in the report — the understanding of the importance of having a capable data architecture, data management practice and a set of agreed upon data governance policies to support the regulatory aspects of ESG practices in the coming years. 

If you’d like to gain more insights into how 100 financial services executives are navigating their digital transformation journeys, download a copy of the WBR Insights report, “Exploring the data analytics of the future.” To learn more about FIMA Europe, November 28–29, 2023, at the QEII Centre in London, visit the website.

See how Informatica supports financial services’ digital transformation and ESG priorities with fit-for-purpose data.