Technology innovation in financial services industry

Over the last few decades, we have seen an enormous evolution in the financial services industry driven by technology innovations. Indeed, we cannot imagine the current financial system without electronic fund transfers, ATMs, and Internet banking among many other innovative implementations. In fact, the financial services industry is the largest market to IT suppliers which makes the financial providers the preferred partners in many technological innovations such as mobile technologies, security devices and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Although the importance of technology innovation is clear in transforming the financial services industry, we do not often find organizations getting sustainable competitive advantage though technology innovation. In fact, in most cases, financial providers have just been focused on being as good as the competition in terms of technology innovation, neglecting any sophisticated technology strategy that could enable them to primarily capture the value created by internal innovative ideas. The goal of this research is to evaluate the stage of technology innovation in the financial services industry, its strategic relevance to the organizations, and its governance models. Based on the information gathered through reviewing relevant literature and interviewing people involved with technology and financial services, our work will propose some technology strategies that could improve the effectiveness of innovation to different types of financial providers.