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In a recent article, The Financial Brand discussed the biggest threats to the financial and banking industry. They included a long list of everything from profitability to making good hiring decisions. However, we thought that there were a few problems that could be particularly fruitful when applied to open innovation systems.

Managing compliance. Even though creativity breeds constraints and regulations can sometimes lead to innovation, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. There are often whole teams of people dedicated to compliance, but with new systems and ideas for doing this more efficiently, not only could financial institutions find themselves better in line with regulations, they could save time and money, as well.

Cybersecurity. Knowledge sharing can be particularly powerful when it comes to solving cyber security problems. Success in one department or feedback from another can help strengthen the barriers around a lot of different systems. And cybersecurity is one of the top concerns of all executives these days, but the financial services industry even more so. How are your employees collaborating to help you become more secure?

Pace of Technology. New technologies and new consumer expectations are accelerating all the time. The systems that worked for you last year already are in need of user experience upgrades and integration with other systems. Are you aware of all that’s available in the market? Do you know who else is using what technology and to what success? If employees are collaborating on how to best implement these systems, you can save yourself a lot of work later.

Lots of financial institutions are already using open innovation techniques to start meeting these challenges. Standard Bank, for example, is looking to their employees and customers for ideas as part of an open innovation initiative. They’ve run a number of campaigns from internal knowledge sharing to external community building. They’ve even been able to improve system downtime by implementing an employee’s prototyped idea.

To learn more about Standard Bank’s internal innovation community, download the case study here.

By Rob Hoehn

About the author

Rob Hoehn is the co-founder and CEO of IdeaScale: the largest open innovation software platform in the world. Hoehn launched crowdsourcing software as part of the open government initiative and IdeaScale’s robust portfolio now includes many other industry notables, such as EA Sports, NBC, NASA, Xerox and many others. Prior to IdeaScale, Hoehn was Vice President of Client Services at Survey Analytics.