Impactful digital experience comes from focused delivery, not overengineering everything.
In the banking industry, customer expectations around digital experience are not just high—they’re evolving faster than most architectures can keep up with. Users want control, speed, and personalization at their fingertips, and often, the pressure is to match or beat the digital journeys offered by fintech and consumer tech players.
But as I’ve experienced firsthand, meeting those expectations doesn’t always mean tearing down and rebuilding your entire IT landscape. One of the recurring traps I’ve seen across organizations—including our own in earlier phases—is the tendency to over-engineer solutions in the name of digital experience.
Take a simple customer need—say, allowing someone to reset their card PIN through the app. In theory, it’s a lightweight feature. But because of how traditional banking systems are structured, delivering that experience often requires tapping into multiple modules across the core platform, customer authentication stack, risk engines, and notification layers. That “small” feature can quickly turn into a large-scale project involving weeks—or months—of work. It’s in these moments that the experience ambition collides with architectural reality.
One doesn’t need to modernize the entire stack to make an impact. Focused, scalable solutions win over overengineered transformation.
This is where CIOs need to exercise judgment. The goal isn’t just to modernize everything—it’s to identify where value can be unlocked with minimal disruption. Sometimes, that means building experience layers on top of legacy cores. Other times, it means isolating a micro-journey that can be containerized, API-enabled, and delivered independently. We’ve learned to segment experience delivery from system modernization—and that’s made a huge difference.
Another dimension to this is the complexity of the customer journey itself. Most journeys don’t begin and end in one application. A single interaction might span multiple backend systems, third-party integrations, risk and compliance checks, and real-time messaging services. Orchestrating all of that to feel smooth to the end user is a challenge—but it’s also where a lot of the magic happens.
We’re also seeing our technology partners evolve in how they engage. Earlier, vendors would provide tools or platforms and leave it to us to figure out the implementation. Now, they come in with design patterns, industry benchmarks, and playbooks from similar rollouts. One area I’m cautious about is peer benchmarking. Of course, we all want to keep up with the market. But jumping into transformation just because a competitor launched something flashy can backfire.
–Authored by Amol Pai, Chief Technology Officer, Jio BlackRock AMC