Considering the speed at which technology is moving, products are moving, and industries are moving, businesses must increase their ability to respond to the market. Consider the amount of information readily available to consumers that informs their choices. If you are not on top of it or able to respond, then you will either lose a sale or lose a customer.

Customers can be surfing on their tablet or phone while they're in the store talking with your sales agent or looking at the chart of savings rates. They can immediately see the bank down the street is offering a higher rate. So, they ask right then and there, "What are you going to do for me, Mr. Bank? I've been a customer now for twenty years and you're telling me I can't do this, but I can go down the street and get the same thing – or better."

One of the key trends is how do you hold on to your best people – not only right now, but also at the end of your transformation. How are you going to keep them interested? How do you hold on to that talent?

In financial services, the rise of mobile and internet banking services require a much different skill set for new hires. Many companies have bankers who still ask their secretary to print out their emails and bring them in their office, or they're running an old mainframe computer technology different from what the external world is working on. The skill set that you're hiring is the skill set that you want for tomorrow as you become more digital. But you still have to retain the old skill set. 

There is newfound scrutiny from the public about the people who run financial institutions and the things they're doing. In the past, a customer came in and put his $200 into an account and didn't think about the fact the bank takes it and lends it to other people to make money from it.

There's more transparency now, and customers are beginning to ask more questions and are becoming more educated. That's forcing financial institutions to be more responsive to customers with either their products or their explanations of how they're doing business. It's something that's very personal to customers: their money. 

There's also a newfound immediacy. In the past, a bank could take three days to wire money from their customers to someone else. Now, consumers wonder why it can't be done right now. 

The governance and risk processes inside a bank or financial institution are changing radically. Regulators will require more transparency than exists now. They will ask what the governance process is and who was in the room making the decisions, and it will require people to become even more nimble in their governance structure than they have before. The banks are actually being fined and the rules and regulations are being changed.

IT infrastructure and the systems supporting financial transactions have come under scrutiny. Banks will have to step up and invest a lot more to do what they need to do in the new environment. A number of banks have had embarrassing systems failures that have affected customers or failed to catch instances of money laundering. Companies have looked at their business and operational prospects but have ignored the back-end infrastructure for a long time. With the issues that have occurred, with customers unable to get to their cash due to IT system failures, the public and the regulators will be increasingly focused on this issue.