Digital is transforming everything about life worldwide, and the finance industry is no exception. Digital transformation has become a leading priority for financial institutions as they look to innovate to maintain relevance in a rapidly evolving market.

Mauricio Vianna is the co-founder and CEO of MJV Innovation, a global consultancy on digital transformation for financial companies. We connected with him on the most important digital trends financial firms must pay attention to in 2023 and how business transformation can help.

What Are Some of the Ways that Financial Companies Are Using Digital Transformation Right Now?

The digital transformation in the Brazilian financial market has been taking place since the launch of internet banking, when banks moved towards the clients putting all banking services in their hands, providing the first step towards mobility with self-service of financial products and transactions.

Of course, after that, there was a lot of evolution in this segment with new technologies creating new financial specialist solutions for advisory, customer relationship management applications to engage customers, ERP solutions for business execution and control, Business intelligence supporting decision making, new digital channels such as mobile banking and WhatsApp for transaction and attendance, mass personalization with data mining anticipating customer´s needs and retention triggers, RPA in the process automation and business integration of internal services and more recently, the focus on customer journeys with usability, transparency, fluidity, as well as the use of artificial intelligence to leverage best results in customer attendance, investment, credit/behavior scores, anti-fraud, AML algorithms, and others.

Now this transformation in the customer experience is being extended to other horizons, in the relationship with employees, partners, and suppliers, in the integrations of the entire financial market chain, and with the evolution of open finance, soon they will be within most marketplaces.

How Are Companies Using Digital Transformation to Build a Culture of Innovation Internally?

Methodologies such as design thinking, lean and agile have been intensely collaborating with digital transformation, from strategy and roadmap to product concept, prototype, and implementation, they could also be considered as leveraged methods to promote mindset changing to innovation inside companies.

What Are Some of the More Outdated Practices Within Financial Companies that Digital Could Transform?

Traditional methods used in project definition as well as in the development phase became obsolete to face competition, high pressure in business changes, and innovation in the financial market. Thus, the corporate culture required to be changed to promote and encourage innovation in all areas and teams, focusing in the customer’s needs, extinguishing their pain points, and using prototyping to test the customer journey before its development, in addition to adopting the agile method in the implementation phase incrementally in releases from the MVP established.

What Do You Think Will Be the Most Important Digital Trend Impacting Customer Experience for Financial Service Firms in 2023?

Large financial institutions and also conglomerates from other segments are rushing to make available and integrate their loyalty programs, measured through scores on their use of financial products, into already established marketplaces of different industries or even within their digital marketplaces, so the main trend of 2023 is in the experience of researching, comparing, proving and purchasing non-financial products and services from marketplaces, products that will be acquired through the granting loans or payments process available by open finance.

Stay Ahead of the Competition by Going Digital

As digital continues transforming industries across all sectors, it’s important to bring business operations and corporate teams digital-forward using modern methodologies like Design Thinking.

In addition to Mauricio’s impressive track record within the digital space, he and his team have also released books on Design Thinking and Gamification for business innovation and success.