The majority of financial institutions still don’t see digital as central to their business strategy. More often than not, digital is a department or a project. In the meantime, your members, your products, your services, your competitors and even your own business operations are digital at heart. That’s why developing a digital strategy misses the mark. You need to reimagine your business as fundamentally digital. If you can make this strategic shift and implement it, you will conquer the world. If you fail to execute, though, you will be conquered. Too many credit unions still treat digital as an add-on. Treating every new digital channel and challenge as just another project creates a divided company, and generates organizational and technological chaos. When your company’s functional building blocks try to increase internal efficiency independently and fight for scarce resources, your operational challenge intensifies exponentially. The “add-on” approach can deliver tactical results, but your strategic reality is that your business needs a reset. Three strategic imperatives to win in the digital world

1. Use digital to deliver member outcomes, not products and services. Forget about developing products and services based on your needs. Develop new offerings based on personal value ecosystems that your members aggregate according to their needs and desires. Expand the importance of your credit union in your members’ lives by learning to increase value.
2. Business agility is directly linked to digital operational excellence. Yes, digital transformation is about customer experience. But, in equal parts, it’s also an effective way to drive operational agility. Digital operations will help your credit union to accelerate speed-to-market, increase employee productivity, promote leaner processes, and maximize utilization of resources and assets.
3. Don’t bother developing a digital strategy. Digitize your business strategy. Digital fundamentally changes your relationships with your customers. This is not done by creating an app or a new mobile site. To stay ahead of the game, you must restrategize and re-engineer the way your credit union creates value for your members.

David Rogers, keynote speaker at THINK 17 and author of “The Digital Transformation Playbook,” explains it this way: “[Digital transformation is] about rethinking your business for the digital age. You have a business that was started before the era of the internet, and it’s already grown up. It’s got customers, products, ways of doing business and corporate culture. It’s got position in the market and scale. And now you need to change to meet new challenges and opportunities that have come with the internet era. What you need to change and how you get there is what digital transformation is all about.” Follow us for the next few weeks as we help you develop your own digital strategy. And join us July 13 for the latest live webinar in our Digital Transformation webinar series: Craft Your Own Digital Playbook.