Agile wisdom Shots #4,Banking Insurance and Financial Institutions benefit Embracing Agile ?

Agile wisdom Shots #4,Banking Insurance and Financial Institutions benefit Embracing Agile ?

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Unlike before conventional banks, Insurance and financial institution are not facing competition among themselves anymore, their competition increasingly comes from non-conventional Digital Banks, Insurance tech and Fintech companies; these companies are now disrupting changing and challenging the way the industry has been functioning all these years.

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Banks Insurance and Financial Institutions are now at break or make moment. Their new unconventional competition demands that they need to adapt themselves and react to digital transformation and faster adoption. Today BFSI institutions are not only facing challenges from market and competition its also facing challenges due to change in Digital adoption, technology, payment Processing, core banking financial system, insurance platform, Risk & Governance mechanism and Regulatory compliance from their regulators.

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Combine with the changing and difficult market condition in the past few years, the demand to retain their market share, sustain its revenue and have growth in profit in this increasingly competitive landscape increases the pressure to improve its efficiency and speed at the same time maintaining its control on Capital Cost. Unlike conventional BFSI companies the new age digital fintech and Insurance tech players focus on solving pain points in customers’ journeys with right sized teams that are fully responsible for developing solutions.

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Adoption of Agile in BFSI meets many of these requirements, delivers high value, meets its end user expectations, and reduces risk. Increasing digital adoption demand for convenience with mobile and online banking fuels agile adoption. Agile best practices focus on breaking long-term delivery into smaller increments for continuous delivery and execution. It also provides flexible process for determining which product features is to go for production next. It also improves the cadence of delivering new products faster to the market in these contexts:

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1.??????Continuous delivery and continuous integration (CI/CD)

2.??????Automated quality assurance (Agile QA)

3.??????Scrum adoption and product backlog planning

4.??????Infrastructure orchestration and optimization

5.??????DevOps and DevSecOps adoption

Adoption of SAFe helps to breakdown the complex software to be delivered incrementally and iteratively. It supplements with a series of steps and feedback loops.

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SAFe also improves and accounts to

50% Faster time to Market

50% Defect reduction

35% Increase in productivity

30% Happier, Motivated employees

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* Source: Scaled Agile — How SAFe empowers businesses to compete in today’s marketplace

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What sets these Agile Fintech companies apart is that they have a defined process of determining the execution by a multi-disciplinary, self-organised team, defining their product vison based on the feedback and ensuring alignment with their strategic vision. As a result of which Agile Fintech and Insurance tech companies can pursue their products in multiple vectors to achieve phenomenal growth at the same time to scale their business. Advantage of Agile adoption gives them opportunity to experiment fail ?fast and succeed, embrace change and work on the outcome that matters to their customers.

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Post Covid market conditions have put enormous pressure on the existing banking Insurance and financial firms in adopting to Agile and Scale. Major banking players HSBC, credit Suisse, ING, JP Morgan has shifted to adopting to Scaled agile, The benefits of Scaled Agile helped them to address their IT delivery bottlenecks.

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Let’s take a classical banking transformation of the BBVA group, the first large company to deliver an agile transformation across its central support service divisions.In 2019 BBVA Reached a landmark milestone by incorporating agile methodology into their daily business activities the entire central services division 33,000 team organises and works in agile This achievement 33,000 ?This phenomenal transformation achievement process was laid in 2014 and had been executed carefully in 3 phases with major milestone in

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·??????2014 - Phase 1: First scrum team was formed

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·??????2015 - Phase 1:with proven success of scrum team they moved to creation of the first digital factories in mexico and spain

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·??????2016 - Phase 1: the Single Development Agenda (SDA) is defined, applying a prioritization process to departmental and per-country projects.

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·??????2016 - Phase 1:A Major transformation Milestone about 3600 people were in scrum teams, accelerating the project deliverables

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·??????2017 - Phase 2:BBVA Realised the benefits of agile and decided to deploy agile methodology across all corporate divisions and decided that Talent & culture (HR) ?will be the first to embrace this transformation first

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·??????2017 - Phase 2:In BBVA Group the number of people working on agile methodology raises 4000 due to faster adoption.

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·??????2018 - Phase 3: The re-organisation of BBVA centralised department resulted in more than 30000 people adopted to the agile methodology.

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·??????2018 ?- Phase 3: looking at the importance ?A new Agile coach role was created and more than 300 people in the role rook up the Agile coach role, working with teams and helping them in Agile adoption.

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·??????2019 ?- Phase 3: BBVA Agile adoption hit a significant milestone when more than 33,0000 employees were working on the agile methodology and to make BBVA become the first large company to deliver an agile transformation across its central support service divisions

·??????Now BBVA is concentrating on the delivery of New leadership model which will enable and drive the cultural change and implementing a continuous improvement model that will foster the groups constant evolution.

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This Change has refined the groups concept of traditional functions and departments and creating a new structure with 5 main blocks for each department

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·??????Customer management: ?A small team that manages the relationship between the various departments

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·??????Project Teams: ?An autonomous multi-disciplinary team adhering to the scrum model are empowered to re allocate resources from different department on quarterly basis depending on the strategic priorities

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·??????Process teams: Tasked with executing recurring process working on Kanban model, supporting the project teams or the business activities.

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·??????Disciplines: these small teams are focused on sharing and Managing the banks best practices and knowledge in their areas of expertise.

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·??????Control: these teams cut across all the various business / operational or Management departments.

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·??????Community of Practise (COP): For each discipline, A COP was established to be expert communities that can share its expertise and knowledge to co-create tools and solutions that can be used by the whole group.

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Banking, Insurance and Financial Institutions work under the regulators regime and their system do have a lot of large and complex integration points. Most Importantly they deal with money Hence it requires detailed and methodical approach in managing the requirements which may often need to be validated and approved by the legal and the regulatory compliance team. ?Agile requires these validated and approved requirements which are good enough to defined as Definition of Ready for the team to pick and work on. large integration points in the existing system may require extensive testing and validation prior to the releases this would help when multiple teams are working on the competent which interacts with multiple integration touch points of the system. The team can also do a performance stabilisation sprints to address the extensive testing and validation. The embracing the agile culture and creating agile roles to support and nurturing the teams by appointing agile coach will definitely help in getting the real benefits of agile transformation.?