Essence of digital transformation—Manifestations at large financial institutions from North America

Abstract There is focus among most leading academic institutions globally to understand digital transformation. While most operate on some common premise related with the construct of digital transformation there is no established definition yet. Existing descriptions cover a wide range of things from smart living, future of work, automation, industry convergence, and technology among others. These are sometimes fairly all encompassing, inconsistent and incomparable as a point of reference. Interestingly, major consulting firms, technology promoters, independent influencers, analysts promote transformation solutions, each with their own models, interpretation and descriptions. In the paper, we develop an understanding on what is the nature of demand for digital transformation. This is based on evidences of narratives from large financial institutions. We scoped our study on four large banks in North America to see — is there an essence of transformation when institutions adopt digital technology? The paper deals on key themes — drivers, benefits, perception of digital transformation, readiness of banks and deployment instances. Understanding how large financial institutions are adopting digital technologies is important for contemporary technology providers, institutions, researchers and analysts. The study conducted is qualitative along with associated quantitative techniques and visual analytics. This is achieved by theme-based narrative analysis of the public disclosures from four large North American Banks across five years (FY’13–FY’17). The research analyzes the relevant narratives from annual reports to code them into logical themes thereby providing a view of the key focus and associations. Analyzing the practices and manifestations of the institutions this research classifies standard and more advanced differentiating practices. This leads to an emergent structure for a Digital Transformation Maturity Model (DTMM). The authors believe these will serve as indicative maturity guidance for digital technology adoption by financial institutions, in similar context and will also be beneficial to technology providers.