Composable
Financial Services
Dave Stawinski
Vice President, Digital Services
A Composable Recipe for Financial Services
What is Composable?
There’s no “one-size fits all” in composable—careful curation of technologies is the point. There’s reality to face, too. A suspicion that embracing composable means embracing complexity and the idea that, “composable is hard!” In sectors with more stringent regulatory and security needs, like financial services, this may be more prevalent.
After decades of being told to “slow down”, financial services marketers may be understandably shy when it comes to adopting a new Digital Experience Platform. Add to this the idea that there may be several technologies from multiple vendors in this new composable mix. Staying within the comfort zone of “big box” solutions, traditional analytics might seem easier but it’s a step behind.
Why now is the right time to adopt composable? We at XCentium believe it doesn’t have to be daunting. With strong collaboration between partners, composable delivers on its promise for financial services. When we consider regional banks, credit unions, investment banks, asset management firms, insurance firms, etc., we think of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and FINRA.
Rightfully so, we also think of current events such as trust issues and high expectations among customers, intense competition for business, consolidation of brands even as customer segmentation blurs and one-to-one customer experiences become ubiquitous, and more. These pressures are not going to let up, they are universally felt. However, composable is an important approach in response to them.
Simply put, the promise of composable is putting the needs of the business first, then selecting the technologies to enable it to give us real benefits such as:
- Marketer empowerment
- Faster time to market
- Roadmap flexibility
- Cost control
In a monolithic approach, a DXP offered what it offered while asking the customer to decide how to fit its needs into that box. Increasingly, that’s no longer the case. We at XCentium like to think of composable approaches as “recipes.” For different tastes, ingredients are allowed to vary, so how does this really work?
Main Ingredients: Composable for everyone
Every DXP needs Content, Personalization, Marketing Automation, and Search. Depending on the need, it may also need Forms (very important for lead generation-a mainstay of Finserv marketing) and Account Management (often offloaded to online banking or other specialized tools).
In the monolithic approach, we had to select one DXP to fill all or most of these basic needs. If one DXP had awesome content capabilities but wasn't quite right for email automation, we were expected to make do. It's as if the kitchen wasn't willing to listen to us, or to our specific tastes and needs.
With composable, this has changed. Content Management (like Sitecore XM Cloud) can be married to Forms from another partner that's more in line with the need. Sitecore's own Search can be adopted, but there are other options that can be chosen without breaking anything, blowing budgets, or settling for less than what's truly needed.
Sauces and Seasoning: Composable for Finserv
It's true: Financial Services is different. Technology decisions must be circumspect and protective against undue risks.
Digital experiences for customers must account for regulatory compliance features and content like disclosures, footnotes, compliance statements, and content auditing while still delivering pertinent experiences and content like blogging, video, and social media awareness.
This is where a partnership with XCentium comes in. Curating and building a composable DXP that delivers on the benefits must be guided by real needs. We can help simplify, streamline, and clarify the choices to zero in on the best options for tech selection. We're the partner you need to deliver a unified, composable solution that performs.