The platforms are sophisticated, the teams are capable, and the infrastructure is in place. But across retail banking, insurance, wealth management and financial advice, the same question keeps surfacing in conversations with digital leaders: why isn’t the return matching the investment?
The answer is rarely the platform. It’s almost always the programme around it.
Digital performance in financial services is held back by four problems that are structural rather than technical, focussed on how the work is organised, measured and led.
Financial services organisations collect more data than almost any other sector. From customer journey analytics to conversion tracking, and A/B test results to satisfaction scores.
What’s missing is the connection between those numbers and what the team does next. Data is reviewed, reported upwards, and stored, but in many organisations it rarely triggers a fast, structured response. The insight-to-action cycle is too slow, too manual, and too dependent on individuals rather than process.
In a sector where customer expectations are shaped daily by fintech challengers running lean, data-driven programmes, that lag is expensive. Building insight activation into ways of working can help to close the gap as long as it is a standing operating rhythm and not an ad hoc exercise.
The majority of digital leaders in financial services can tell you where their journeys underperform. Application abandonment rates. Quote journey drop-offs. Onboarding friction. Adviser finder dead ends...What’s harder is finding who owns the problem. In most organisations, digital journeys cross team boundaries – product, marketing, technology, compliance, operations. When something underperforms, ownership can be contested or unclear, and so outcomes don’t improve consistently.
Compliance adds a layer of genuine complexity here. In financial services, the ability to experiment and optimise is constrained by regulatory requirements in ways that don’t apply in other sectors. But this is often used as a reason not to optimise at all, when in reality it’s a reason to build a more rigorous programme – one that knows exactly where it can move fast and where it needs to move carefully.
The most common optimisation model in financial services is a backlog that no one fully owns. Requests come in from across the business, get prioritised by whoever shouts loudest or has the most seniority, and are worked through by a team that’s simultaneously maintaining the estate, dealing with incidents and trying to run a programme.
The result is optimisation that’s busy but not seeing results. Lots of activity, limited evidence of cumulative improvement. No clear line from digital effort to commercial outcome.
Optimisation should be treated as an ongoing programme rather than a managed backlog. This allowed for a hypothesis pipeline, a testing cadence, and a defined way of measuring what counts as success. And it means there’s someone accountable for the programme as a whole, not just the individual tasks within it.
In financial services, digital is increasingly how customers are acquired, served and retained. But the digital strategy – where it exists as a written document – is often disconnected from the commercial strategy. It’s a roadmap of platform improvements rather than a plan for how digital will contribute to growth, retention and cost efficiency.
The consequence is that digital teams are working hard but not always on the right things. Effort is invested in features and content that reflect internal priorities rather than customer behaviour and commercial need. When leadership asks what digital is delivering, the answer is usually measured in activities and outputs rather than outcomes.
Closing that gap requires more than 'better reporting'. It requires a deliberate process for connecting digital priorities to business priorities, and for making that connection visible to the people who need to act on it.
None of these problems are unique to financial services, but the sector context makes them harder to ignore. Regulatory scrutiny is increasing. Fintech competition is intensifying. Customer switching costs are lower than they’ve ever been. And leadership is asking harder questions about what digital investment is actually producing.
The organisations making progress are those who have their strategy, insight, operating model and performance management working together as a system rather than as separate workstreams.
If you’re not sure where your programme stands across those four areas, the Digital Optimisation Health Check is a good starting point. With just seven questions, investing a few minutes in this assessment will give you a personalised report and recommendations that you can begin to implement today.