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Business models don’t last forever – especially in these fast-moving times. Entire markets and industries are undergoing profound transformations. Sooner or later, you’ll have to consider whether your current corporate strategy is still giving you an edge over your competition. The time has come to remodel and/or reconfigure existing sales channels and formulate digital business models.
Even banks are finding this out – from first-hand experience. Europe’s banking sector is in urgent need of an upgrade, especially in terms of IT. Outdated software is frequently vulnerable to security breaches and cyberattacks.
In Q1/2019, a survey of Europe’s banking supervisory authorities highlighted the correlation between a bank’s cyber-resilience and the level of IT expertise on the bank’s management board. The higher the level of IT know-how in a bank’s senior management team, the more advanced the bank’s IT innovation and oversight of internal IT risks tends to be.
Conversely, banks with management boards that only possess limited digital literacy suffer more frequently from serious cyberattacks. Because banks are obliged to report these incidents to the ECB, it’s possible to carry out detailed, real-world analyses of this phenomenon. And in fact the number of incidents reported under this Cyber Incident Reporting Framework is rising year on year, with malicious or criminal intent behind the majority of them. According to SSM, the “SREP IT Risk Questionnaire” also indicates that a large number of critical business processes are heavily dependent on systems that have reached end-of-life (EOL) status – including systems that support key processes in banks and financial institutions.
To date, only a limited number of companies have taken full advantage of the possibilities offered by digitisation. Meaning there are still plenty of opportunities in this space for those companies able to recognise and exploit them. Over the next few years, efforts to ensure that your relationships with customers are even more precisely adapted to their (ever-changing) needs will be more important than ever. By establishing processes and mindsets that prioritise customer needs within your company, you increase the likelihood that you’ll achieve a leading position in your industry – or at least position your business securely enough to withstand market disruption by third parties.
You build a stable platform by establishing a functional, state-of-the-art software construct. Even today, you rarely need to adopt a totally novel approach when developing business models; it’s often perfectly possible to resort to existing templates. To put a digital strategy in place, you need to take a really good look at digitisation in general, and then as it relates to your corporate operations and objectives. It’s time to unlock the benefits of digitisation for your business, make the most of the opportunities, and manage it in such a way as to boost your profits.
Our Executive Education course on becoming a Digital Business Advisor provides you with all the tools you need to tackle this challenge. You’ll find all the details on our website.
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