Where I’ll be
this month
I’ll be attending the Community Bankers Association of Ohio convention, and I’ll be working with the ICBA team to get ready to move to our new D.C. office on Sept. 2.
Innovation is one of those line items that can be hard to wrap our heads around. There’s no formula or silver bullet to determine how much to spend, so we annually face that Goldilocks conundrum of determining what’s too little, what’s too much and what’s just right.
Yet, when faced with that uncertainty, I’ve found that dialogue can be the answer. Conversations with our leadership teams, full staffs and customers will spark ideas that can help us focus on our true needs and evaluate where our priorities lie.
Those discussions start with determining how we define return on investment (ROI). With innovation, ROI is about looking through the lens of overall impact, not just how it will affect us financially in the year ahead.
Ultimately, budgeting for innovation requires us to reverse-engineer our thinking and consider the price of not acting. We can’t just look at the fees for the technology or the integration; we also need to evaluate the cost of maintaining the status quo. That will help make the innovation investment more concrete and provide guidance for our decision-making.
We need to take a particular pain point, evaluate what it currently costs us in terms of staff time, customer attrition or other relevant variables, consider what may shift in the future and evaluate both the short- and long-term impact. That analysis helps us gain concrete awareness to make informed decisions.
And sometimes not acting is the right choice. Not every solution is going to work for everybody, but thoughtful conversations result in a conscious, strategic decision versus one informed by a reaction to a product price tag.
This dialogue is critical to creating an innovation-centric culture, which is more about the process than the product. Brainstorming with our teams leads to valuable decision-making, and the ROI comes out of the time we spend in discussion and proactive approach to problem‑solving.
Innovation is a journey, not a destination. It’s about enabling a mindset and culture that’s open to considering something different and continuing to shift with the needs of our customers and communities.
As the financial services industry continues to evolve, we will increasingly be faced with the challenge of balancing investment in innovation against budgetary constraints. Thoughtful discussions with our teams will shed light on the best approach for our individual banks. It’s in these discussions that we will chart a course that’s right for our organizations, one investment at a time.
