It was our honor to represent Accenture at the 2019 Leasing Life Convention in Barcelona and facilitate the panel on data.

Reflecting on this year’s event, we have seen these emerging trends:

1. Players are going beyond their current role as financiers of the economy and actively moving into sustainability at scale.
   As an example, BNPP Leasing has partnered with 2StepIT to provide the recycling of technology assets in 20 countries. On this topic I found the players particularly ambitious and ready to reinvent their model, leveraging platform and application programming interfaces (APIs), in particular.
2. The journey to digital is moving forward, with these characteristics:
3. • Speed is becoming a competitive advantage in digital transformation. Fast execution is key, but fast decision making (including contracting) is also an important lever to provide agility to the industry.
   • Business model transformation was actively discussed, with a focus on how to proceed to a cultural transformation, how to balance product expertise with customer-centricity and how to reorganize the sales force around profitability, partnerships and JVs, to gain speed in digital projects and talent attraction. On the latter, points of views diverged, with some players quite confident in their ability to attract talent while others identified a potential drying-up of tech-savvy resources.
   • Opening of the ecosystem was considered a strong enabler, with vendor partnerships a strong asset to leverage.
   • Tackling complexity was, on the other hand, considered a hurdle—especially in data, products and country coverage. Standardization and scale issues were recurring themes, with increasing interest in core banking transformation but few other disruptive moves, such as outsourcing.

According to our report, Caterpillars, Butterflies and Unicorns, the banks with the sharpest digital focus are generally better at extracting more revenue from their assets. Where they really excel, though, is on cost efficiency and in moving closer to their competitors through cost improvement while maintaining their revenue advantage. The 60/25/15 rule—60 percent focus on cost reduction to make space for investment, 25 percent on growing the existing business and 15 percent on growing new business—seems a good one to follow.

We would like to continue the conversation and learn more about how your team is making the pivot to digital. Please contact me to connect and discuss these concepts further.