Finansliv, Sweden: Cognizant’s Head of Banking and Financial Services in Europe Says Co-Innovation can Help Banks Develop Innovative Customer Offerings

“For banks which have traditionally worked in siloes, co-innovation partnerships offer an opportunity to develop new business ideas and gain inspiration from a pioneering start-up culture,” says Sriniketh Chakravarthi. “This approach provides access to the latest technologies, capital and expert knowledge around regulatory requirements as well as industry and sector experience. Ultimately, co-innovation accelerates the time-to-market for new products and services.” Excerpts:

“In order to stay relevant amidst increased competition from start-ups and tech companies, Swedish banks know they have to embrace innovation. However, in order to make the best use of the many opportunities created by social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) technologies, banks are shifting their innovation strategies to a co-innovation approach. This means partnering with other companies and innovative start-ups, sponsoring innovation incubators, building relationships with academic and research institutions to create new products and services, and establishing new revenue streams and channels.

Partnerships with established innovation labs and collaboration with third parties are increasingly important for banks that seek to meet the changing expectations of tech-savvy customers, thus positioning themselves at the forefront of a brand new culture in banking and technology.

For banks, these co-innovation projects are already leading to new products and services. Examples abound: biometric account validation, creating crowdsourcing sites to invite customer feedback, and even working with peer-to-peer lending platforms in order to compete with mushrooming banking and payment start-ups and technology companies are challenging traditional banks.

Today, tech companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook have entered the payments space with the ambition to disrupt the industry and offer financial services at competitive prices with greater convenience for clients. It is clear that banks today face multiple challenges to traditional banking that together make a case for adoption of co-innovation as a strategy to future-proof their business. Banks therefore should consider partnering with IT companies and innovative start-ups, to access their technology expertise and software and begin commercial relationships in a phased, planned manner. The age of co-innovation is now.”

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