Financial Services Gone Digital at Cisco Live 2016

Kevin Spacey delivered an amazing keynote closing out Cisco Live 2016: “Today, the last words of my speech belong to Frank Underwood.”

Cisco Live this year was all about how digital is dramatically redefining business models. Digital is creating disruption for incumbents and opportunity for the disruptors. In today’s world, digital is about survival.

Digital simply means we can do things that were never possible before, and this is enabled by technology. When we develop a specific business process, does it account for new capabilities available today such as social, mobile or geo location? Survival means disrupting yourself before someone else does, about being fast, agile and responsive to change.

I believe building the foundation for digital business is table stakes for survival.

The following five key themes stand out as the key building blocks to a digital roadmap:

Customer experience – advice at the time of need, whether servicing a mortgage at physical branch or engaging in a virtual claims process across messaging/chat bots, voice or video.

Workforce experience – collaborate within and beyond the four walls of a building, and with geographically dispersed teams. It’s also about offering an environment and tools to attract and retain the best talent.

Fast IT – create cloud-based architectures to enable rapid innovation, embrace Agile/DevOps practices to impact cost and shorten time-to-market.

Analytics/Insight – this is particularly interesting in the insurance space where carriers are looking to leverage telematics or sensor data / location analytics to provide more accurate underwriting and reduce their risk profile.

Cyber risk/Security – embed security into the network fabric to ensure you can automate security policy and to understand application behavior so security doesn’t delay the time to innovation.

As we wrapped up a very busy week at Cisco Live, I’ve never been more excited about Cisco’s direction and innovation to help financial institutions with their digital journey. Please visit our Financial Services page and follow us on Twitter @CiscoFSI and follow me, @arevz, to stay current with the latest updates.

I’ll leave you with one last question, do you want to be the hunter or the hunted?