The Rise of Digitisation

Since the mid-2000s, B2C companies have been developing digital capabilities in order to eliminate friction. Nowadays, for a product to be successful with customers, it needs to be completely frictionless – available on demand, instantaneously and remotely. But the digital revolution is not confined to the customer market, write Lorenzo Migliorato.

The B to B industry is now in a position where it needs to meet customer expectations that have been substantially raised by experiences outside work hours. “In our personal life, we are all living with an acceleration of processes through digitisation,” says François-Régis Martin , chief digital officer at BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions.

Everything is accelerating in terms of digital comfort. From a professional point of view, we no longer tolerate our experiences as clients not being at the same level.

Aligning the professional experience to the consumer one is never easy, but the nature of finance companies makes the effort even more complicated.
“The job of our partners is not to use of digital tools directly,” says Martin. “Working with a lessor’s [tools] helps to sell more, but their first job is to sell the equipment.
Lessor may well approach partners with new digital solutions, but these need to greatly pique vendors’ interest before they are adopted. And even on the lessor’s side the cost of a digital endeavour needs to be weighted against other factors. 
“When we started the digitisation of Leasing Solutions, it was not unusual to sometimes say, “The sale is more important to us,” says Martin.

The Human Factor

The development of a digital tool, then, does not immediately result in adoption at all levels. In other words, digitisation is not just about a company’s technology – it is also about its anthropology.
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GAUGING CAPABILITIES

Any company’s digital roadmap, however, always needs to reckon with the strictly material technological component, and the foundations on which it wants to build its digital infrastructure.
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OUTSIDE TALENT

It would be naïve to think that digitisation is a exclusively internal process. Not only have startups ad fintech been gnawing at established financiers’ customer bases, regulation like the UK’s Open Banking legislation – which implements the EU’s Second Payment Services Directive, PSD2 – is also levelling the playing field for new entrants and so-called disruptors.
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