This article was originally published on Data Driven Investor.

The Pandemic crisis has created turmoil in the global economy and challenged the traditional ways of working and delivering value.

The upside is that it has provided an opportunity to REVIEW what we were doing, RE-PLAN based on new customer needs and RE-LAUNCH the right initiatives and projects.

It has shown large financial institutions that digital transformation projects do pay off, they should be a continuous investment and that the “new normal” will be a continuous re-invention based on new tools and technologies in the market.

During the initial stages of the crisis, financial institutions had to quickly cut back to the core of the business, ensuring BAU and essential activities were continued as normal. Additionally, financial institutions had to refocus some of their effort into new areas impacted by the crisis.

Back to Core

As countries across the globe started restrictions, large global financial institutions were faced with the challenge of having a global workforce working from home.

Challenges like ensuring the internet connection was strong enough (in some countries) and ensuring balance between workload and childcare were at the core of the leadership.

Financial Institutions decided to Go Back to Core: stop non-essential activities and only deliver BAU activities, regulatory requirements and customers support.

As we move out of the crisis, financial institutions should review initiatives and activities that have been stopped:

• Activities which will bring additional value but were stopped due to prioritisation should be restarted. The potential to automate or simplify some of the activities should be considered

• Activities which will not bring additional value for the new customer needs should be stopped. Stakeholders of those activities should be involved in the decision and any additional recipients informed.

Refocus and support additional streams

Institutions have focused on pressing new areas, for example supporting new requirements from regulators (namely liquidity reports) and providing smaller customers access to loans and support.

The quick shift to support new streams was only possible due to previous investments in digital (Automation, Artificial intelligence and in some cases Cloud). Imagine having to produce a new detailed report on liquidity in weeks or even days, if your reports are manually created and data is extracted from different systems via excels that are too big to be held in your laptop. Needless to say that would not be possible.

Overall, it has indicated that digital transformation and adoption of new technologies was not only beneficial but essential to survive in the early days of lockdown.

As we move out of the crisis, financial institutions should review and re-plan their strategy and digital adoption.

• Digital adoption should be continued across the organisation with RPA (Robotics Process Automation) replacing repetitive activities, NLG (Natural Language Generation) and Chatbots used for reporting and queries support and Cloud platform as system layer to provide data flow, transparency and completeness

Although large financial institutions have worked on digital adoption and transformation for years, the journey has only just started with new and upgraded technologies coming out at a faster pace.

The “New Normal” will be a continuous investment in new technologies and re-invention of the operating model. In order to do so, digital transformation and innovation (pure experimentation) will be at the core of financial institutions more than ever.

The crisis has provided the final push to invest in digital and innovation.

Any views or opinions represented in this article are personal and belong solely to the blog owner and do not represent those of people, institutions or organisations that the owner may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated.