Assigning roles for a digital banking conversion

long with putting a dedicated team together for its digital banking conversion, a financial institution (FI) needs to determine and assign specific roles for team members. Hopefully, at this early stage, the project manager is in place for the project and attention can be dedicated to filling other key roles.

The project parts to address are numerous and complex in a digital banking conversion. So much so that dividing and conquering is the only feasible way to manage them all. By assigning roles, project ownership is spread around. An FI also ensures that multiple departments within the FI are engaged in the project, and share in the goals. Plus, one group or a few people don’t have to carry the load of a vigorous project.

Six questions to guide decisions on role assignments

Any FI undertaking a digital banking conversion has six important questions to consider when assigning roles for its team. They are:

1. Who will determine if everything the provider sold you meets compliance standards?
2. Who will train staff?
3. What about account holders, especially corporate clients? Who will train them?
4. Who will determine whether there are enough custom service representatives to support the conversion as well as provide them training?
5. What about the third parties you rely on for your digital banking offerings? Will they work with your provider, and who on the team will manage them?
6. Whose responsibility will it be to recruit friends, family, and both retail and business account holders to participate in user testing of your system prior to go-live?

A helpful list of project responsibilities to address

From working on so many digital banking conversions over the years, Q2 has found there are always certain responsibilities that need to be allocated to those on the project team. Team members must be found to meet these responsibilities:

• Communications (Marcom)
• 3rd party vendor management
• Compliance
• Call center operations
• Back-office operations
• Business client management
• IT/security
• Training
• Application testing

This list will help an FI get its personnel into place for the project. An FI, however, may have other unique assignments to fill. Given this likelihood, an FI should spend some time thinking through other important needs. Getting the correct roles and assignments right in the early going will save on having to scramble to fill holes later.

One of the roles discussed, the marketing communications role, is extremely important, perhaps just as important as the project management role. In the next post, we’ll explain why marketing communications is so important to the conversion project and then go over some of the special requirements for the person in this role.