Financial Services Ecosystem Readiness Assessment

What is the Zühlke FSI Ecosystem Readiness Assessment?

The Zühlke ecosystem readiness assessment aligns business & IT leaders in your company on how to adapt and thrive collaboratively with XaaS partners, resulting in a tailored report with roadmap and recommendations on your optimal position in the FSI Ecosystem, how to drive revenues, get to value faster, recommended partnerships, and how your technology is holding you back.

The Benefits of an Ecosystem Readiness Assessment

The digital transformation of financial services organizations demands integration into the wider ecosystems through new partners and channels. Ensure you’re not missing out by finding the right role for your organization, then ensuring your technology is positioned to maximize your evolving engagement:

• Drive Revenue – reach new customer segments, provide access to partner products that lead to consistent revenue streams and exploit existing data and capabilities
• Partnerships Effectiveness and Value Exchange – Who are your best strategic partners in the ecosystem, why are they willing to collaborate? How can you form effective partnerships with a wide range of providers?
• Is your technology stack holding you back? What needs to change?
  • Build vs. Buy – determine when to build solutions in house to meet business requirements vs. buy solutions from the market / third parties
  • Technical Debt – Reduce current technical debt from legacy systems, unlock data in silos, and reduce the risk of future technical debt
  • Spiraling Costs - Reducing the total cost of ownership and annual run rate

Topics Covered

Developing an effective ecosystem approach requires consideration of the following:

• Types of ecosystem engagements and what they mean for your organization
• Developing a future architecture to support your vision
• Prioritizing customer-centricity
• Ensuring regulatory compliance
• Working with partners within a partner management framework
• Cultivating agility and adapting to ecosystem evolution

Outcomes and Deliverables

After the series of 4 senior management workshops, you will receive a final report summarizing recommendations on your strategic options and the associated impacts, risks, and mitigating actions. The report will enable you to understand how to address these challenges & opportunities. Position your business to take advantage of future opportunities as they arise through:

• Building leadership consensus and alignment across business and IT stakeholders -e.g. should you be aiming to engage in multiple ecosystems or focus more narrowly?
• Development of a technology strategy and approach that is tailored to your business’ objectives, regulatory environment, and competitive differentiators
• A practical roadmap for AWS XaaS ecosystem engagement, tailored to your organization, with a list of topics that would benefit from deeper dives.
• Provide clarity on the skills and capabilities required to build an effective ecosystem and manage partner relationships.
• Define the AWS tools and services required to support and enable an effective ecosystem (e.g. AWS Control Tower, AWS Budgets, AWS Service Catalogue, EC2, IAM, API Gateway, AWS’ Well-Architected framework

These outputs will be consolidated into a report summarising recommendations on your strategic options and the associated impacts, risks, and mitigating actions.

Assessment Methodology & Structure

The ecosystem readiness assessment will be conducted through a combination of data, based on our own experience, research and industry reports, as well as four virtual workshops attended by your key business and IT leaders:

• Workshop 1 - Understand your company’s vision and goals, competitive differentiation, priority markets, products and business agility.
• Workshop 2 - Analysis of your preferred plans for ecosystem engagement, current architecture landscape, build vs. buy approach, partnering strategy, and pipeline initiatives
• Workshop 3 - Discuss key obstacles preventing you achieving your vision for ecosystem engagement and review the associated impact on your IT landscape
• Workshop 4 - Review recommendations from the analysis, suggested next steps and potential solutions for further evaluation

The inputs required will be communicated in advance of workshops as well as a suggested attendee list per workshop. Each Business and IT leader attending the workshops should be able to commit 2 to 3 hours per workshop and be able to attend all 4 workshops.