While banking leaders understand the need to adopt agile approaches to counter such disruptive competition, their existing processes, systems, and organizational structures stand in the way of adoption. Even some with agile teams still take months to do what nimbler competitors do in days or weeks. Banks and financial institutions that wish to compete with truly agile organizations all face the same question: Can we become agile enough, fast enough? The Missing Link: Unprecedented Cross-Functional Collaboration Executives at large banks and financial But these structures and processes services companies run into familiar typically create distance between problems trying to deploy agile teams marketing, research, legal, and other and scaling agile across the enterprise. participants in agile teams. Instead of While each institution takes an approach collaboration, there are hand-offs: the best suited to its context, the lack of a marketing team hands off a decision common vision (‘Why agile?’) and what to the finance team, and the finance it means to adopt the agile ‘way of team adds information and hands the working’ leads to many failing to deliver decision off to the IT team to develop the business value they anticipated. a solution. This adds time and static to the development and launch of new These institutions run multiple lines of financial products. business, with organizational structures and processes to support each one.