The Digital Transformation of the Swedish Banking Industry : A study on the digitalisation of Swedish banks and how it affects their perspective on customer experience

Sammanfattning: The Swedish banking industry has long been at the forefront when it comes to digital leadership. Currently, this industry is starting to fall behind other industries, and a closer look at the industry reveals that niche banks are having less trouble with adapting new technologies than bigger banks. There are a lot of studies on specific digitalisation areas within banking but nothing comprehensive about the strategies required for digital transformation within the banking industry. As the research area is new, there is little previous research on digital transformation by today’s standards. Therefore, the centralquestion in this thesis is “What do respondents in the Swedish banking industry think that the most important factors of digitalisation for customer experience are and what the consequences of digitalisation might be?” to find out what affects the digital strategies of a sample of Swedish banks. To answer the research question, semi-structured interviews with relevant profiles in the banking industry dealing with digitalisation and strategy at a management level were conducted. The interviews were conducted with five respondents from four different banks. In combination of this research method, the research strategy Case Study was implemented. The results revealed that digitalisation is in high focus amongst all the responding banks, for various reasons. The reasons can be seen as roughly divided into two categories, internal reasons and external reasons. The internal reasons have to do with streamlining current internal processes and creating more available resources for other projects. The external reasons were all towards improving customer experience. To improve customer experience, personalisation of the digital products and services is a key factor. However, personalisation is not without risk, as it may fail to be personalised enough for the banks’ customers if the personalisation is attempted towards a too wide customer segment. Some of the banks are operating 100% digitally, meaning that they do not have any physical bank offices for customers to visit, and thus all their work then becomes in one way or another digital work. The banking and finance industry is continually changing, and legal factors play a significant role. Not only do these legal factors affect how banks work internally, they also affect the competitiveness of the various actors and with it, how much digitalisation can affect. The thesis concludes that digital transformation is heavily influencing the strategies of banks in the Swedish banking industry through customer needs, competition and legal factors.