Seems like every time I find something decent to read, Bradley Leimer’s pointed me to it. I ran across American Banker Magazine’s Big Ideas for 2014 in my Twitter feed yesterday thanks to him.
There’s plenty to chew on from pop-up branches to promotional pricing to talent retention in the branch. One of the topics is implementation of an iPad application for commercial customers at State Bank & Trust in Georgia. Given they are $2.5 billion in asset size I’m interested in whether this was actually developed internally vs. an integration of a packaged solution. As interesting to me is the way in which the project was approved in 2013.
The bank discovered during the year substantial demand for an iPad application for it’s commercial customers but there was no spot for this in the annual budget. The article quotes Mike Fitzgerald, the bank’s Chief Revenue and Deposit Officer, on planning:
“In this industry, we have written business plans forever,” he says, “and we’ve said, ‘Gosh darn it, we’re going to do those things because we said we’re going to do them; we worked really hard on those plans.’”
Unlike the legacy approach Mike describes, the bank’s governance processes were flexible enough to deal with this change in priorities instead of putting it off until 2014. My guess is the bank and IT strategic plans already outlined strategies to improve delivery to commercial customers. Further (again I’m speculating), there was a cross-bank governance process in place that provided the opportunity to add this initiative and re-prioritize others so that the bank could exploit this perceived opportunity consistent with its strategy.
Regularly revisiting the initiative roadmap during the year is a necessary and beneficial activity that ensures assumptions made in the planning process are still good and IT resources are devoted to the efforts most beneficial to executing strategy. A transparent governance process with cross-bank representation is key to this.