As CIO of Collector, an innovative and fast-paced digital Swedish bank, Camilla Dorvall and her colleagues in the IT department focus heavily on digital business development. “We want to introduce the banking services of the future.”

Collector Bank is an entrepreneurial niche bank with a strong desire to revitalize the banking market. Just one of the ways this can be achieved is by offering different types of financial services to both the retail and corporate segments. The bank’s revenue is growing by just over 30 per cent year on year, and the company was listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in June 2015.

“Innovation and being able to respond rapidly to the market’s needs by providing new types of services constitute one of our major drivers. Our IT department is very centralized and integrated into Collector Bank’s operations. We work closely with the communications department, sales and all the individual product areas. We encourage our employees to present their proposals for new digital services, and this means that ideas for business development are just as likely to originate from IT as from other parts of the organization,” says Camilla Dorvall.

 Proprietary innovative solutions
When Camilla took on the role of CIO in 2012, she was tasked with building up an IT function that was integrated into the company and heavily data-driven. “We took a strategic decision to develop our business-critical systems ourselves, so that we were able to focus more on customers, as well as being extra fleet of foot and ultra-flexible,” explains Camilla Dorvall. This change has been achieved very quickly and the IT function has gone from being a small support function to more than 70 committed people, the vast majority of whom work on development.

Top-priority management issue
“We consider digital business development to be a top-priority management issue. I have been lucky enough to always work with a management group who have been interested and understood the value of leading from the front when it comes to the digital arena. Working with partners who are experts in their fields has also been a strategy right from the start,” concludes Camilla Dorvall.

Keys of success
“A vital prerequisite for successful digital business development is enabling the organization to focus on the end customer and on driving innovation”, says Philip Smith, senior consultant at Basefarm who helps companies not just with application operations but also with their digital transformation.  “And Collector Bank’s management team has definitely been successful in that respect. We often meet CIOs who want to free up resources so they can devote more capacity to working on innovation.”

Camilla’s tips for CIOs who want to make the same journey as she did:

• Focus on customer experience.
• Focus on the technical side of the business and ensure flexible and secure IT support.
• Follow an agile work process to stay quick.
• Make use of your customer database and allow Big Data to create new business opportunities based on insights.
• Dare to be bold and try out new things.
• Take the step from being an administrative IT manager to taking on responsibility for the company’s digitalization and processes. Be a stimulating and driving force.