Financial Services institutions have experienced unforeseen challenges and significant disruption during the Pandemic and beyond, but also unprecedented opportunities to accelerate growth and digitize business operations to enhance employee productivity, customer experience, and innovation. There is an increased sense of urgency to Connect, Secure & Automate, and most importantly, to make Banking, Insurance & Wealth Management easier for customers, partners and stakeholders.

Top of mind industry trends include:

• Hybrid Operating Model -not a "one-size-fits-all", as Banks, Insurance companies & Wealth firms weigh the appropriate mix of remote work & brick-and-mortar workforces.
• Accelerated Digital Transformation -a Fortune 500 CEO survey estimates 75% of companies have decided to accelerate their transformation plans because of this Pandemic.
• Digital-First -For businesses, it's put more focus, energy, and urgency on digital transformation and the need to deliver digital-first services. Even those institutions more risk-averse to change have embraced digitizing business processes and sub-processes, with migration to remote work. According to Gartner, 88% of global enterprises encouraged their office workers to work from home because of the Pandemic.

Top Customer Priorities include:

• Reimagine Applications -Applications used to be an extension of the business. Now they ARE the business.
• Secure Data -66% of CIOs have indicated lessons learned from the pandemic will result in an increase in cyber security investments over the next year.
• Transform Infrastructure -in our connected world, the network has created limitless possibilities but incredible complexity. By 2023, 29 billion devices, or nearly four devices per person, will access the internet.
• Empower Teams -in a Cisco Global Workforce Survey, 58% of office workers anticipate they'll work eight or more days each month from home.

In our recent webinar, we had a conversation with John Rosato, CEO, CS Technology; Andrew Zitney, EVP, CTO State Street; and Jim Ditmore, former COO Danske Bank, CTO Allstate, and CIO Barclays about strategies Banks, Insurers, and Wealth Management institutions are considering & actively executing today. Questions our clients and strategic partners are asking include:

• How will employees consume technology moving forward?
• How can companies adopt a sophisticated and flexible use of technology?
• How can a company accelerate their business model while reducing costs?
• How can we ensure our data centers and most critical IT infrastructure don't fail?

To learn more about these customer priorities, actionable insights and ways to rethink business solutions, fast track enterprise digital transformation strategy and technology infrastructures to strengthen business results, check out the webinar recording here and reach out to Jeff Lavin ([email protected]), CS Tech to talk further.

It is critically important now more than ever before for strong leadership and collaboration between IT and business teams. These teams must work together to align capabilities with growth and cost strategies to drive digital transformation. This is where Cisco comes in: We can address specific use cases like Cybersecurity, Virtual Expertise, Omni-Channel Experience, and Secure Remote Worker to help customers solve problems right away.

To learn more about Digital Transformation and Business Resiliency Strategies for your organizations, visit the Cisco FSI home page, or contact sales today. We're here to help.

And don't forget to read the complete Connected Experiences series to learn more about ways Cisco's Connected Experiences can help execute your Financial institution's strategic goals.