Future-Proofing Financial Market Innovation – Fighting Digital Disruption with Digital Disruption

The term ‘Digital Disruption’ describes the situation where an existing industry is being altered by emerging digital technologies. These new technologies lead to innovations, often creating new markets and value markets that can impact the established leaders in the industry.

Financial organizations of all shapes and sizes are being disrupted by small, agile, innovative and technology-oriented companies which offer convenient and efficient services. Examples of this kind of disruptive financial market innovation can be readily observed in companies like PayPal, Nutmeg, WorldRemit, along with a multitude of crowdfunding organizations, and various digital currencies such as bitcoin. To counter the threat of disruption, financial organizations must innovate in order to stay ahead of the competition.

The financial industry is changing rapidly, incorporating technology into business models to stay current and competitive. This is so prevalent that those companies pushing forward in this direction are now part of the Financial Technology Industry, or FinTech. Banks are opening up to the idea of looking outside of their normal creative processes, by using external sources such as crowdsourcing with customers for their next disruptive technology. They are also instituting programs and physical hubs to involve startups.

Financial Market Innovation of the disruptive kind - created by fin-tech companies
FinTech companies are disrupting every area of the finance industry.

Fighting Fire with Fire

Simply put, innovation management is the management of product and organizational innovation processes within an organization. With regards to dealing with the threat of disruption, innovation management provides a set of tools that promotes cooperation within the organization towards a common understanding of processes and goals.

By focusing on the creativity that is inherent to the innovation management approach, organizations will recognize opportunities for the implementation of new ideas, processes, and products or services. Thus, innovation management helps existing financial industry organizations treat disruption as an opportunity for change and growth.

An organization’s genius needs to be accessed, captured and released. However, that genius is not only found within the company, but also in your customers, prospects, partners, suppliers or any other person who has an interest in the company. Companies must engage these various groups and harness their collective intelligence, by making them part of an effective innovation strategy and exciting Innovation culture.

There are a wide variety of collective intelligence systems available on the market today, but the majority of these vendors offer a generic product which is supposed to meet the needs of all challenges, customers, and markets. However it has been shown, specifically with finance organizations, that a tailor-made, configurable, and scaleable solution can be far more effective at achieving innovation.


Global Financial Market Innovation Best PracticesGlobal Financial Market Innovation Best Practices

Qmarkets is an innovation management solution provider, who has extensive experience with helping leading global financial institutions to manage their innovation processes. Their clients include not only multinational financial corporations such as Unicredit, UBS, and Bank of America, but also smaller localized companies such as Intesa San Paolo Card, and Bank Leumi. Best practices from these projects can be invaluable to finance companies who are ready to achieve innovation, but can’t afford to dedicate 1-2 years to testing and innovation pilots in order to find the approach which works best for them.

Some innovation management systems for finance companies can be incredibly complex, as there is often a need to involve quite a few departments and functions in the workflow. Therefore, the Qmarkets innovation tool allows you to configure the lifecycle of ideas in the system to fit your exact requirements and needs. This flexibility makes Qmarkets’ platform especially suitable for the volatile and tumultuous market which finance organizations face today.


The Issue of Information Security

Financial institutions are historically one of the biggest targets for cyber-crime, and specifically hacking. One of the most notable examples of this was the Bangladesh Bank Heist of 2016, where hackers attempted to process over $951M in fraudulent transactions, succeeding in transferring over $100M to accounts in Sri Lanka and the Philippines.

Financial Market Innovation - The Issue of Information Security As more and more companies become reliant on nascent technologies, the risk to financial organizations grows and grows. Therefore it is crucial for these organizations to select an innovation management solution that does not represent a “weak-link” in their chain of cyber-defense.

Qmarkets realizes that security and data protection are critical to many of their customers, and their credentials have been tested and proven many times by security audits from leading organizations. Not only financial companies, but also government and defense, where security is arguably even more crucial. For this reason, Qmarkets is happy to offer a solution which is deployed on-site to the internal hosting network of its customers.

However for many organizations SaaS (Software as a Service) deployment through the cloud offers more than adequate security. Qmarkets’ data centers are hosted using the cutting edge scalable and secured Amazon AWS service. Our network is fully protected, including 256 bit SSL encryption, firewall, and the implementation of strong security policies.


How to Harness both Internal and External Innovation

Qmarkets Q-360 is a suite of products that provides comprehensive crowdsourcing and innovation management solutions. These products have been developed to offer a solution to any corporate innovation challenge or timeline, and they can be purchased stand-alone or integrated together as part of a multi-purpose enterprise-grade infrastructure. Alongside the main editions of Idea and Innovation Management (Q-start, Q-flex, Q-max). One of these which is especially relevant for large finance companies is Q-kaizen, a platform which promotes the strategic sharing and uptake of company-wide best practices.Financial Market Innovation - How to Harness both Internal and External Innovation

As described earlier in this piece, it is just as crucial for financial market innovation efforts to look outside the company, through external stakeholders, suppliers, and partners. The main way to achieve this is through Q-open, a variation of Qmarkets’ main platform which is aimed specifically at harnessing the power of external stakeholders. However another tool which is becoming increasingly essential within the finance world is Q-scout, a cutting-edge solution which allows scouting teams to track opportunities for mergers, partnerships & acquisitions with this advanced tech scouting tool.

The financial industry is also making a strong push towards digital transformation – looking to close branch offices, reduce manpower requirements, and move business online. The Qmarkets platform facilitates digital transformation as companies upgrade their infrastructure to support the utilization of modern digital methodologies.

A Fully-Configured Innovation Solution for Finance Organizations

A Fully-Configured Financial Market Innovation SolutionAn idea or innovation management platform empowers and invests your employees, so that there is a feeling of being more involved and connected to the overall company strategy. In addition to this, the company reaps the benefits of making better use of the experience and insight of their employees. In times when it is difficult to keep up morale, this is an invaluable achievement.

Qmarkets offers the Innovation Management solutions to help financial organizations not only survive disruption, but to excel by leveraging the valuable collective intelligence of employees, customers, business partners, and others. You can read about how Qmarkets assisted financial services company Intesa San Paolo Card to achieve their innovation objectives in our free case study.

To discover how Qmarkets can help your enterprise to achieve disruptive innovation results, don’t hesitate to contact us today. You can download the full case study of Qmarkets’ project for the Intesa Sanpaolo Card here.

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