Building Financial Services insight at large IT/technology providers

Large corporations deal mainly with other large companies when sourcing products and services. Many factors, including risk aversion & ability to deliver at scale, drive this truism. So, for example, the biggest banks generally buy advice from the most prominent professional services firms, and their technology from the most significant IT providers.

But therein often lies a problem. Large organizations generally have a matrix-type structure with a combination of geographic, product, and functional areas. While there will be some industry knowledge spread across the organization and some pockets of expertise, the vast majority of customer-facing teams don't understand their clients' industries in any real depth. As a result, there are many missed opportunities for better client conversations that can lead to sales. 

This is especially true in large technology/IT providers and their Financial Services (FS) clients, including the banking, insurance, & capital markets. IT provider teams are often very product-centric, able to talk most comfortably about technical specifications but not understanding the broader context in which their FS clients operate. This impacts the IT provider's delivery and their sales and cross-selling to large FS organizations.

In previous years, IDC and Forrester have recognized this issue in their research on sales enablement, which led to growing demand from the leading technology/IT corporations to build up Financial Services industry knowledge and insight within their customer-facing teams. 

One of the leading firms worldwide for sales enablement & business outcome-focused training is Exceed-Global Ltd, which operates in the UK and the USA. Exceed has worked with many of the world's largest IT corporations, including Intel, Nokia, and HP Enterprise, among many others. 

In the past few months, Exceed teamed with Ulysses Partners to design, develop and deliver Financial Services knowledge sessions for one of their global technology clients. These sessions covered the Capital Markets, Banking, and Insurance sectors, and included insights into the business models, current challenges, and emerging trends within each industry. 

The sessions gave deep industry insight to the clients' team members and showed them how to apply this knowledge to their customers. Sessions were delivered to client-facing teams in Europe, Asia, and the USA and generated excellent positive feedback from participants worldwide. The course and materials were made available as recorded webinars for ongoing use.

Since running these sessions, what has become even more apparent is that the trends shaping Financial Services are accelerating. Forces that I and others have written about previously, including Open Banking and Embedded Finance, are growing. New players (i.e., new market entrants) appear every week in FS - often via new combinations and partnerships, enabled by the Partner Banking ecosystem and Banking-as-a-Service solutions. 

This rapidly evolving environment creates new challenges for FS and other large corporates - and new opportunities for the large technology & IT providers who traditionally serve them - if they can understand what's happening across the organization.

The problem is that in many large IT/technology providers, this kind of market insight is limited to a small pool of specialists, who are stretched thinly across the enterprise. A better approach is to build an understanding of the FS market and the trends shaping it across the organization via a well-designed set of training interventions.

Constructing a foundation of market insight as outlined above is possible (as demonstrated by our client) and very valuable. It creates the opportunity not only for richer client conversations leading to cross-sales but also for further innovation.