Banking is an industry built on long-standing traditions. As the sector sees relentless change and digital innovation—often brought by newer, agile fintech companies—traditional banks must innovate to remain relevant. The question is, how to best address established environments to create and bring products to market faster and deliver more value to your customers?
Bank transformations to Lean-Agile ways of working show promise. Yes, they are hard. But banks adopting the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) are proving that institutions can transform, adopt new ways of working, deliver faster and more efficiently, and find new sources of growth.
- Nordea Bank created a bank within a bank to realign business and IT. By putting cross-functions together, they made one unit that can deliver faster. Implementing a cohesive approach to working, in alignment with SAFe principles, allowed the bank to extend Agile practices throughout the organization, involving over 100 Agile Teams and Agile Release Trains, encompassing various cross-functional roles.
- Standard Bank significantly reduced time-to-market for new products from 700 to 30 days and establishing predictability at 68% enhances their customer journey by swiftly and reliably delivering solutions customers want. Productivity increased by 50% and lowering costs by 77% means we offer our customers greater value while maintaining efficiency and affordability.
- CapitalOne uses Lean-Agile practices to coordinate multiple teams working on the same product simultaneously to speed go-to-market. The bank shifted the team structure to full-feature teams that can deliver working software independently in a two-week sprint.
Banks adopting Lean-Agile practices in support of transformation find they have the framework and tools to gain ground on aligning strategic objectives, talent, and culture. Research finds that a high alignment of these factors enables organizations to grow revenue 58% faster and become 72% more profitable than firms with less alignment.
How SAFe Helps Banks Align Around Objectives, Talent, and Culture
Getting Everyone Focused on What’s Most Important
Lean-Agile practices provide a structured approach for aligning around objectives by linking evolving strategy to execution. Doing so helps you decide what to fund—and why. This enables you to ensure the products you create serve the evolving needs of customers and the organization itself while keeping pace with market changes.
By putting customers at the core of everything your bank does, you create a meaningful vision for your strategy and people to serve. Connecting your strategic objectives to their work helps people understand the value and impact of their work. Extending SAFe beyond IT and assessing the dependencies across the organization helps to establish the cross-functional collaboration needed to remove barriers to create business agility.
As Deepak Sevak, Vice President, Payments PMO at Discover Financial Services, explains it, “…we didn’t have a good business prioritization process as well as kind of technical delivery model that was nimble enough to adapt to the changing dynamics of the digital world. … The idea is we were able to adapt in a new way, and we’re really driving that next step of business agility.”
Empower Talent to Retain Them
SAFe provides guidance on breaking down work into smaller, more manageable pieces and prioritizing work based on business value. This helps ensure that teams are working on the most important things first and that everyone aligns around the same goals.
It also helps to have a common language and framework for working differently. SAFe helps organizations achieve greater transparency, collaboration, and accountability, which are all critical for the successful execution of strategic objectives. In fact, SAFe builds on agile’s foundation of principles and values by providing specific guidance for scaling in large, complex, high-compliance environments, including banks.
Banks that adopt Lean-Agile practices can achieve business agility. True business agility means your firm can compete and thrive in the digital future because you’re equipped to respond quickly to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative solutions. Business agility is possible when your people are empowered and accountable for consistently delivering value to customers.
Monn Quial, Vice President, Business Engineer & Technical Product Owner at Credit Suisse shares his perspective, saying, “Working within an organization that utilizes SAFe offers several benefits… It emphasizes alignment, connecting strategic objectives with daily work, and providing a sense of purpose.”
With a framework that helps knowledge workers achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose, your bank will unlock the intrinsic motivation that results in higher performance. They’ll eliminate unnecessary work, identify and remove delays, continuously improve, and know they’re working on the right things.
Cultural Change is Hard: Adopting Lean-Agile Practices Makes it Easier
Change is easier when you can attract people to it rather than forcing it on them. People respond to the premise of change with statements like, “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” They will keep their existing behaviors unless there’s an excellent motivation to make a change. Something that makes the status quo unacceptable.
Creating a culture of continuous improvement to drive business agility helps by tasking banks to identify and address areas for improvement. Reaching the tipping point requires either a burning platform making change urgent or visionary leadership. Sometimes both.
Challenges in achieving cultural change include a lack of leadership buy-in and reluctance or inability to lead the change. Another is miscommunication due to the lack of a common language and framework for working, which helps break down silos and promotes cross-functional collaboration. These challenges are often rooted in your existing culture. SAFe provides guidance you can customize to address your situation. This guidance helps you create a more transparent and adaptable culture at your bank. You’ll also gain insight to the role of strong and open leadership and its necessity for a successful initiative.
Alex Rohrs, Enterprise Agile Coach with Agile Big Picture, shares a recent experience. “The President of the organization I was working with at the time was skeptical about SAFe, and Agile in general, but after attending a PI Planning meeting she pulled me aside and said ‘that was the best meeting I've ever been to in my career and I now have a far greater understanding of the complexities of the work that you guys do and why I would get so much push back when asking for accelerated release dates.'"
Internal Alignment Needs a Foundation
The four core values of SAFe guide organizations during and after their transformation as they adopt Lean-Agile practices and champion working differently to meet the future head-on. Alignment keeps your bank moving forward in one direction. Leaders who communicate a clear strategy and vision replace legacy command and control authority.
You’ll find that shared objectives and understanding how to work together best help your bank stay on course. Alignment around value delivery to customers brings better decisions. Transparency enables trust. Respect for people emphasizes the importance of treating people with dignity in a safe and trusting environment. And relentless improvement emphasizes the importance of continuously evolving processes, products, and people.
In essence, SAFe provides guidance around the critical components needed for the internal alignment that’s at the heart of successful strategic execution. And that sets up your bank to win in the digital future.
