Q&A Feature with Damien Scott, Financial Services Leader at Rightpoint

Published : 1 month ago, on 07/09/2024

 

Damien Scott serves as the Financial Services Leader at Rightpoint, bringing over 20 years of experience guiding business through impactful digital and technology transformations. Damien guides together significant domain knowledge in Financial Services and Insurance with a deep technical expertise to create alignment with business and technology leaders.

• Damien, can you tell us a bit about your role as Financial Services Leader at Rightpoint and your experience in the fintech and financial services industry?

I have always had an interest in how financial well-being impacts the lives of many and creates home stability which is the foundation of generational success.  This interest led me initially into architecting and building solutions for financial institutions and insurance companies to better serve their customers and create value.  My time at FICO solidified my understanding of the financial services value chain when I had the opportunity to modernize their full product suite across marketing, origination, servicing and fraud. As a leader in Rightpoint’s Financial Services business, I get the opportunity to work with clients and their customers to understand the next phase of challenges and opportunities within the space and envision digital solutions to address them.

• What are some of the key digital transformation trends you’ve observed throughout your career working with financial institutions?

This has been an age where changes in technology have enabled an increase in the pace of financial transaction execution. And with the onset of mobile devices, there is greater flexibility to access financial information and manage your money.  Most apparent is in payments and money movement where it used to take days, if not weeks, to transfer funds depending on the source and the destination. Changes in the ability to detect fraud, make real-time lending decisions, and move money safely have changed how we all interact.

Less apparent is the shift in trade settlement time, going down from T+5 to now in 2024 to T+1.  Yes the funds are available more readily but, for financial institutions, this shift created a need to digitally transform the middle and back office to increase automation to meet notification requirements and real-time compliance; simplify exception processing; and update front-office applications used to serve traders, customers, and financial advisors.  And, lastly, this shift created the need to move much of this to a mobile platform where it fits.

We are now at the cusp of the next acceleration in change within financial services and finance markets with the broad adoption of AI. This will enable financial institutions to increase the performance of their risk, compliance, and fraud detection solutions and also improve the accuracy of decisioning within all products. I am excited to work with them to drive the innovation that will impact the front and middle office digital products and solutions.

Digital Innovation in Financial Services:

• How are financial institutions leveraging digital platforms and technologies to improve customer engagement and communication? What are some best practices you’ve seen in this area?

I see three critical best practices:

1. Organize and enrich customer data
2. Understand the journeys and capture
3. Deliver personalized content and campaigns. 

The ability to effectively leverage digital platforms and technologies starts with quality data, both structured and unstructured, and a clean view of your customers and their behaviors. This does not mean that all of your information has to be cleansed and organized before you can get the benefits. Customers are implementing Customer Data Platforms, from vendors such as Adobe or Sitecore, to organize their customers’ data, enrich it, and make it actionable. Once these are in-place, you’re able to target customers with highly personalized messages, relevant to their journey and stage where engagement  becomes much easier and highly effective.

• Can you share examples of how financial firms are using tools like Microsoft, Adobe, Sitecore, and Optimizely to enhance their digital capabilities and customer experience?

Customers are investing in tools from Adobe, Microsoft, Sitecore, and Optimizely to increase customer identification, conversions, and retention for their marketing web site properties and digital products. This first begins with better organizing customer data and content assets, which enables improved content creation and targeting to improve how they are managing their digital assets and knowledge. A content supply chain improves this process from end-to-end.

Two recent examples I can cite are for a hedge fund and a top 20 financial services institution.

1. The Hedge Fund had information about investment products stored across many platforms making it complex to manage corporate compliance, reuse the research and other information to create new investment products, and manage content when team members left the firm.  In this case, they leveraged Microsoft Sharepoint to create a single knowledge management solution with automated content tagging.  This enabled all of the content to be consolidated and managed through a centralized area with a central workflow and approval process.  As an outcome, they saw significant increase in content reuse and were able to more quickly comply with content audit requests.
2. A Financial Services firm leveraged Adobe applications as the content and configuration engine for a number of products across their payments portfolio. Through the centralization of content and configuration, all of the customer specific and regional/international requirements were managed within the platform, enabling them to easily target a global customer base and deliver an experience targeted to the client domain.  This also  enabled high levels of reuse and cost savings.

• What role does the content supply chain play in helping financial firms keep up with the rapid pace of content creation needed to engage customers effectively?

There are five main benefits for leveraging content supply chains.

1. Streamlining, automating and accelerating the content creation and delivery process end to end, while maintaining brand standards and complying with regulatory, compliance and legal requirements
2. Eliminating errors
3. Improving content discovery
4. Supporting personalization at scale
5. Enabling content performance and measurement and ROI

These benefits apply to printed and PDF versions of sales and marketing materials like fact sheets, product brochures, and investment guides that contain performance information that require quarterly updates. Product distributors may also need channel- or firm-specific versions of these materials, creating a complex production and delivery ecosystem prone to errors, omissions, and delays. A robust content supply chain can help address many of the challenges associated with this process and others, ensuring timely, accurate, and compliant content delivery across various channels and formats.

• How can firms optimize their content supply chain? 

To optimize their content supply chain, financial services firms need to make content a strategic priority. This requires developing a comprehensive plan with key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure both the process and performance of content. By focusing on these KPIs, firms can optimize for speed, quality, and cost-effectiveness.

Firms should also reimagine their workflows and operations by empowering content creation beyond traditional marketing teams. This cross-functional approach can unlock new ideas, introduce new perspectives, and increase content production efficiency.

Leveraging automation is a must in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Firms should adopt AI and generative AI technologies to accelerate content creation and expand the breadth of content developed. These tools can help generate ideas, draft content, and even personalize messaging at scale.

Finally, ensure that all content assets are designed for reusability across various channels and geographies. This approach maximizes the value of each piece of content, reducing redundancy and improving efficiency in the overall content supply chain.

The Future of Fintech:

• Where do you see the fintech industry heading in the next 5-10 years? What are some of the key trends and innovations that will shape the future of financial services?

Everyone is talking about AI and Generative AI and how it will impact all businesses and the ways of working in the next 5 to 10 years. While I fully agree that this is an amazing capability that will speed the rate of transformation, I believe that the level of data consolidation, enrichment, and accuracy that financial institutions will achieve in the next 3 to 5 years will be the true enabler for their innovation.

Financial institutions are sitting on a treasure trove of information about their customers (individuals and companies) and financial markets that enable them to have a deep understanding of spending habits, trends, and other information. Today, using this data, they are able to predict many outcomes within their businesses and react early to improve products and drive growth. The upcoming innovation, accelerated by AI, is consolidation of that data coupled with the ability to make connections across products and Lines of Business (LOBs). Once in-place, financial institutions will be able to deliver a highly connected customer experience, linking products and services to drive revenue growth, improve revenue efficiency (dollars generated per dollar spent), and increase customer satisfaction.

All of this will enable operations optimization well above what has been achieved with the use of digital twins and other automation techniques and technologies. Operations teams will be able to see how a new product that a customer has recently implemented may be impacting the other services they are using, making it much easier to resolve any issues that arise and in many cases automate those resolutions in a way that cannot be achieved today.

• How can traditional financial institutions best adapt and respond to the rise of fintech disruptors and changing customer expectations?

With the rise of FinTechs, customers are expecting financial services to meet or exceed the experience provided by consumer products and those expectations are only accelerating. To head off some of the potential for disintermediation and expedite the rate of change, I am seeing lots of partnerships happening and, in some cases, larger financial institutions are purchasing many of the FinTechs and folding them into their other products or keeping the brand and investing in these products to accelerate innovation. One such example is Goldman Sachs acquisition of Greensky in 2021.

• What advice would you give to financial executives looking to leverage digital innovation to stay competitive in the evolving fintech landscape?

I would sum up my recommendations in three areas.

• Don’t wait: Technology advancements and changes are not waiting for you, and neither are your competitors!  If you cannot launch today due to lack of organizational readiness, start with experimentation and internal use cases to explore.
• Accelerate connectedness: Don’t just think within your business unit or products and services. There are techniques available, such as Service Design and Journey Maps, that let you look across the value chain for customers and employees to see how to better connect the experience and the solution. When executing, look at adjacent products and services in other LOBs for inspiration. Partner with other leaders to see how connected experiences can impact your business.

Don’t judge the outcomes too soon: We have a tendency to try and experiment and if it fails move to a new experiment. There is a lot to learn from deeper exploration in specific areas and trying new approaches when the outcome seems obvious.