I spend most of my work hours talking to our customers. “Well, of course you do – you’re the Chief Customer Officer,” you may say. But what drives those conversations isn’t the title. It’s the curiosity I bring to every interaction, constantly asking, “What can we do to truly help our customers drive massive returns?”
In partnerships, success is often driven by three pillars: trust, alignment of goals, and innovation and collaboration. If one of those pillars weakens, partnerships can start to wobble.
According to the EY-Parthenon survey, 55% of banks expect partnerships to play very important roles in their strategies by 2025, compared with 32% today. Another 36% said working with fintech firms would be important within three years.
As banks partner to expand their capabilities, lines between industries are blurring. Banks are now more than financial institutions, they are becoming ecosystems that integrate a wide range of services, from payments and lending to e-commerce and analytics.
But it’s not enough to buy a solution from a technology firm. Success comes with a mutual understanding of how collaboration will drive business value for both parties.
Despite the growing importance of partnerships, 40% of banks report partnership failure rates of 20% to 40%, and nearly a third of banks above 40%. According to the report, key challenges include ineffective strategies, scalability issues, and poor organizational alignment. Many struggle with partner identification and managing partner relationships, which can hinder the value of these collaborations.
Strategic partnerships are often celebrated for their potential, but what are the key success factors in successfully executing a partnership in this market?
Leverage partner experience
The greatest success happens when our clients are open to learning from our experience and treating us like partners. It’s important that they clearly articulate what they’re looking to achieve – as I mentioned in my ‘Off the Clock’ episode’ – because without that transparency, it’s more difficult for partnerships to hit the mark.
If banks treat us like vendors, they can miss out on the full value we bring to the table, including our global experience and lessons learned. If they say, “We’re trying to achieve this result,” and seek our input on the best approach, we can leverage our experience to help achieve it.
By the way, if you haven’t watched my Off the Clock episode yet, here’s a shameless plug! It’s a quick two-minute video of me sharing the coolest things I’ve done – including running the Boston Marathon.
Drive business results while modernizing
It’s important to focus on two dimensions: business transformation and core modernization. We recommend prioritizing new capabilities to unlock first – such as introducing a product or adding a new feature to an existing one. For many organizations, modernization is a necessity, and it has the power to deliver much more than moving existing functionality from an old system to a new system. We help address this by collaborating with banks to set clear, actionable goals and teaming with them to deliver on those priorities with our SaaS platform. Once those initial results are achieved, we find that the tangible business outcomes generate momentum for the next.
Maximize impact across the organization
When large, complex organizations look to drive maximum impact, we’ve seen greatest success when a single leader is appointed to drive adoption at an enterprise level. In multiple organizations we’ve seen this enable accelerated adoption and shortened time to value. It brings focus, avoids the risk of scattered priorities and missed opportunities, maximizes impact, and avoids resources being diluted across multiple fragmented initiatives.
At Zafin, we partner with the world’s leading banks as a global provider of SaaS solutions for core banking transformation. Our award-winning platform helps banks innovate their business models and modernize technology, promoting transparency and fairness for banks and their customers. We enable financial institutions to streamline operations, drive revenue growth, and enhance customer experiences.
