How Insights from Comparative Agility are Driving Business Agility in the Banking Sector

Overview

The banking industry is undergoing a profound transformation as it faces rising customer expectations, digital disruption, and legacy infrastructure challenges. Banks that fail to evolve risk falling behind as agile, customer-centric fintech competitors gain market share.
The Banking Agility Report, published by Scaled Agile and powered by Comparative Agility's data, examines how banks are leveraging Lean-Agile methodologies to enhance customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate decision-making.

With insights from 548 respondents across seven countries, the report highlights key trends in banking agility, revealing how institutions that prioritize Agile leadership, customer-centric solutions, and continuous learning outperform their peers in revenue growth and profitability.

Top Five Trends for Banks Practicing Agility

The top survey items focus on customer experience and efficiency. Four of SAFe's Seven Core Competencies in banking optimize processes and empower teams.

The teams apply Agile practices

4.34

We train our people in Agile

3.99

The teams apply Agile practices

3.89

We adopt a customer centric approach to defining our solutions

3.84

Our leaders exhibit an openness to an Agile way of working

3.82

The Challenge

The traditional banking model relies on hierarchical decision-making, legacy systems, and siloed operations—factors that hinder responsiveness to market changes and customer needs. Banks struggle with:

Slow solution deployment

Limiting the ability to update digital products and services on demand.

Rigid funding models

Preventing adaptability in an uncertain market.

Siloed business and IT teams

Reducing collaboration and slowing innovation.

Customer expectations

Evolving faster than banks can respond, putting pressure on product development cycles.

Lack of Agile supplier integration

Creating bottlenecks in service delivery.

Without a data-driven approach to Agile transformation, banks risk inefficiencies, slow decision-making, and missed opportunities for growth.

Bottom Five Trends for Banks Practicing Agility

Risk management, legacy systems, and customer experience rank as areas for improvement in the bottom five trends for practicing Agility in banking sector.

Our business teams operate with Agile practices

3.03

We can update deployed solutions on demand

2.83

We are moving away from project-based funding

2.56

We review and adjust funding decisions on a cadence

2.5

Our suppliers participate in our Agile development processes

2.4

The Solution

Comparative Agility provides banks with the world's largest agility assessment platform, offering real-time, data-backed insights into their Agile transformation efforts. Through benchmarking, continuous feedback, and actionable analytics, banks can:

Evaluate Agile adoptation

across teams and leadership

Identify strengths and areas for improvement

using comparative insights

Track progress over time

to ensure sustained business agility

Optimize decision-making

by aligning financial strategy with Agile funding models.

Accelerate customer-centric innovation

through Lean-Agile methodologies.

The Banking Agility Report reveals that banks leveraging Comparative Agility's insights are significantly improving organizational alignment, leadership openness, and team agility, driving faster revenue growth and higher profitability.

Tangible Impact

The findings confirm that banks using Comparative Agility's platform experience measurable improvements in agility and efficiency:

Impact
1

Increased Organizational Alignment

  • Banks with high strategic alignment report 58% faster revenue growth and 72% higher profitability.

  • Teams that plan Agile work together on a cadence achieve greater cross-functional collaboration.

2

Stronger Agile Leadership Buy-In

  • Leaders exhibiting openness to Agile practices rank as a top enabler of successful transformation.

  • Agile leadership fosters transparency, trust, and adaptability across bankingorganizations.

3

Enhanced Customer-Centric Product Development

  • High-performing banks prioritize customer needs and feedback in solution design.

  • Design Thinking and iterative development drive innovation in digital banking.

4

Improved Agility in Business & IT Teams

  • Banks that train employees in Agile outperform competitors in decision-making and execution speed.

  • Continuous learning cultures enable teams to refine processes and innovate faster.

5

Addressing Challenges in Agile Expansion

  • Agile practices beyond IT remain a challenge, but leading banks are integrating business teams into Agile workflows.

  • Agile supplier integration and funding models require further optimization for end-to-end agility.

Faster Revenue
Growth

More Profitable

The research finds that banks adopting Lean-Agile practices in support of transformation enable organizations to grow revenue 58% faster and become 72% more profitable than firms that continue to rely on traditional methods and legacy operational models.

Why Comparative Agility?

Comparative Agility is the world's largest agility assessment platform, providing banking organizations with actionable insights to accelerate their business transformation. The platform gives insurers a competitive advantage through the following key differentiators:

Unmatched Credibility and Trust

Our surveys are developed by recognized domain experts and rigorously validated by our team of data scientists using cutting-edge psychometric techniques. This ensures accuracy, reliability, and actionable insights that organizations can confidently rely on.

World's Largest Industry Benchmarks

With data collected from over 90 countries and 52,000 organizations across diverse industries, Comparative Agility offers the most comprehensive, validated industry benchmarks available—helping companies compare, adapt, and improve with precision.

Accelerate Decision-Making

Designed for transparency and enterprise-wide visibility, Comparative Agility empowers authorized users to optimize decision-making, break down silos, and drive holistic value creation across the organization.

Continuous Improvement at Scale

By leveraging real-time insights, organizations can identify meaningful improvement opportunities, refine Agile practices, and drive sustained progress—ensuring agility becomes a long-term competitive advantage.

Maximized Value for Investment

Organizations that act on Comparative Agility's data-driven insights achieve significant cost efficiencies, increased value creation, and improved market competitiveness - delivering returns that far exceed the initial investment in the platform.

Banks that utilize Comparative Agility's insights gain substantial cost efficiencies, enhance value creation, and strengthen their competitive edge, generating a return on investment that far surpasses the initial expenditure.

Conclusion

As digital transformation reshapes the financial industry, Comparative Agility's data-driven approach empowers banks to embrace Agile at scale. By integrating customer-centric innovation, leadership agility, and continuous learning, banks can drive sustainable growth, improve financial performance, and stay competitive in an evolving market.

Brain
Contact us today to explore how Comparative Agility can help accelerate your organization's transformation.