If you’re a sports fan, you may know that Major League Baseball’s trade deadline just passed. Each season as the deadline approaches, teams look at their current roster and map their best shot to reach the playoffs with their sights set on the ultimate prize – winning the World Series. Where can they make improvements? Is there a gap in the roster or a position that could use improving? Perhaps the missing piece is a left handed power hitter, another bullpen arm, or a veteran catcher who calls a great game.
The trade deadline is a period of elevated risk and uncertainty; a high-stakes, multi-dimensional game of chess. Baseball’s best general managers are committed to winning and do not rest on their records or wait and see what everyone else is doing; they play offense. When this time of the season comes, wishful thinking is not enough. The best teams have a strategy and are ready to attract the desired skills and talents to position them for success, without taking a significant hit to their current roster and farm system (their bottom line!).
Let’s shift into a thought experiment and see if we can gain some clearer perspective on how this analogy relates to the banking industry. Imagine yourself as a General Manager of your banking team. Your team seems to be off to a good start this season. Your lending portfolio is steady, your call center volumes are in control, and you’re online and mobile banking is stable. With your current roster and history of service, you know you’re in the game. But is your strategy to ‘hang in there, to just ‘make it’? Of course not. You have bigger plans on the horizon. However, you just looked at your budget and the trade timeline. Money and time are getting tight! Does that mean you skip out on participating and hope your current team will keep you relevant this season?
We hope not! That kind of approach will certainly disappoint fans and blow up your team’s message boards. What you need is a strategic map. A plan to tie all of these individual components of your team into one cohesive clubhouse.
This sounds oddly familiar right? Strategic Planning season for community FIs and credit unions is like the MLB trade deadline. What would it mean to play offense at a time of disruption and uncertainty in the financial services industry? With mounting pressure to meet and exceed consumer expectations in the era of internet money, is it enough to sit on the sidelines and hope that this time, complacency will be rewarded? Or are you prepared to play offense, executing your strategy for self-service and building digital community to give your team—and those you serve—a real shot at the future of money with your institution the epicenter of community relevance in the digital era?
Thankfully, we have all the bases covered:
First: You can’t win the game if you don’t first reach base. Hire a head coach that understands the game to set you in the right direction. Look no further, our Next Gen CUSO is your qualified candidate! We have the roster and experience to augment your internal team and teach you the mechanics to pitch a ‘no hitter’. We know how each position on your team (your operation) needs to interact to maximize efficiencies and identify future potentials. You’ll be the team to beat this season!
Second: With the right head coach leading your squad you’re ahead in the count, but big league teams don’t just hire one coach. There are base running coaches, pitching coaches, hitting coaches; a team of ‘subject matter experts’ that work alongside the head coach. We’ll collaborate with your team (the subject matter experts) to define your modern strategy and design your roadmap to fundamentally transform and streamline operations for the digital revolution. As your head coach for the digital era, we’ll advise you (our assistant coaches) on how you can use your roster (your data!) to eliminate friction and continue to amass those data sets to optimize and delight the consumers you serve.
Third: You’re almost there! You have the coaches, now it’s time to make the moves and map out your playbook. Whether it’s mixing up your roster and trading to solve for gaps or discovering how to optimize operations and ROI by increasing data density, our mission is constant: putting your team at the nexus of modern community and commerce by consolidating control of your data, improving data density, helping optimize your operation around that modern strategy, and providing opportunities for greater returns to your business (efficiencies, innovative products and services for the new era, income, relevant connection to community). We’re here to help identify those opportunities and walk with your operation from Strategy Formation & Mapping to Strategy Protection (operational transformation) even (especially) when the stakes are high.
Home: Score! With your playbook in hand and an impressively efficient roster, you’re ready for the long ball. Money will merge with the internet; commerce and economies will become truly digital (surpassing the current clunky, risky, expensive interfaces between electronic dollars and internet transactions), but you’re equipped to seamlessly facilitate digital experiences and extend your products & services from your core to your community, shutting-out your rivals. DaLand’s C.O.D.E. Engine is designed to help your team do exactly that; extending your optimized operation and core data to these worlds of digital commerce and data-driven community.
Is your institution ready to make the moves needed before the trade deadline? Do you have the playbook for a productive and meaningful strategic planning session? We do! DaLand is proud to continue its long track record of making critical and complex change management elegant and efficient in times of high pressure. We’re here to help you understand the tectonic shifts taking place in consumer expectations for digital experience and the specific operational transformations to make it to the ‘FI World Series’ this season.
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