Digitalization of Financial Services in the Age of Cloud

Chapter 4. Climatic Patterns in Financial Services

“A change in the weather is sufficient to re-create the world and ourselves.”

—Marcel Proust, French novelist

As you explore your value chains, building maps as you go, some factors will come into play that are entirely out of your control. Just like the weather, or perhaps more accurately like the climate, these forces and patterns represent additional parameters and constraints that affect how you can evolve and optimize your systems according to the goals of your digitalization strategy. In mapping, these influences on your strategy are called climatic patterns.

The Wardley Mapping community is collating an ever-growing catalog of climatic patterns for consideration when building your strategies. Each climatic pattern fits into a defined category. In this chapter, we’ll follow the same approach to identify the climatic patterns that are more specific to financial services:

Category	Patterns
Market opportunity	“Financial Services, Everywhere”
Competition	“No Business Is an Island,” “Emphasis on Speed, Scale, and Agility”
Components	“Lower Technology Barriers to Entry”
Environmental	“Sustainability Matters”

Climatic Pattern 1: Financial Services, Everywhere

“Financial Services, Everywhere” may sound like a cliche, borrowing from slogans from the past (“Java Anywhere” anyone?).¹ However, it reflects precisely what financial services organizations face today. “Financial Services, Everywhere” is more than catchy ...