Société Générale’s head of innovation for the UK, Anthony Woolley, talks to Joy Macknight about accelerating the French bank’s digital transformation through an open innovation strategy inside and outside the organisation. 

Anthony Woolley

Anthony Woolley

Innovation is a priority for Société Générale (SocGen), as evidenced by its 2020 roadmap, Transform to Grow, launched in November 2017. The French bank announced a €150m innovation fund for investing in internal start-up ideas, as well as taking minority equity stakes in relevant companies.

Two months earlier, it created an innovation function in the UK, as part of the group’s worldwide innovation network. “Innovation knows no organisational boundaries and we have initiatives across all our business units that benefit from leveraging our global innovation platform,” says Anthony Woolley, who moved from his role as chief information officer (CIO) in the UK’s corporate and investment banking division to lead the new function.

As CIO, Mr Woolley engaged with many business lines on innovation and change initiatives, but from a technology perspective. “Technology is an enabler of innovation, but innovation starts with business transformation,” he says. “I am a change-driven individual and jumped at the opportunity to work on our transformation programme from a business perspective.”

Making a connection

In his new role, he speaks with business functions about their change agenda and how their businesses are transforming. “The innovation team delivers direct value to them by connecting them with external ecosystems and companies that they might not know how to access or have the time to engage with,” he says.

Mr Woolley calls this an “open innovation” approach, which involves leveraging the immense talent, capabilities and expertise across the group as well as external ecosystems. “Through this approach, we can generate new business opportunities with our existing clients and markets, as well as reach new markets,” he says.

The team engages in discussions with clients around how their industries are changing. “Everything we do is in the service of our clients,” says Mr Woolley, something he believes many financial institutions overlook when talking about innovation strategies. “Instead of concentrating on internal transformation, we are focused on how our clients’ businesses are changing. This perspective is a much better compass and informs our own transformation journey. We are looking at transformation outside to drive transformation inside.”

External collaboration

Through its open innovation approach, SocGen is highly engaged with London’s world-leading fintech ecosystem. The bank has worked with Accenture’s UK Fintech Innovation Lab for the past three years, and Mr Woolley credits Accenture with recognising early on that successful transformation in the industry will be built through collaboration. 

  • 2017 Société Générale (SocGen), managing director, UK head of innovation
  • 2013 SocGen, UK chief information officer
  • 2010 SocGen, head of client and trading technology, fixed-income, currencies and commodities, EMEA
  • 2009 HSBC, global head of FX pricing and e-commerce technology
Career history: Anthony Woolley

“When the lab started, many start-ups aimed to disrupt the financial services industry,” he says. “And while a small number have grown extremely rapidly, the majority have faced many barriers to entry and much industry complexity.”

Mr Woolley’s experience working with and mentoring fintech start-ups has been “extremely positive”, he says. An important lesson he learned is that a large bank with deep pockets and vast resources can easily crush a start-up. “[Start-ups] have a limited runway and time is their most valuable resource,” says Mr Woolley. “Banks can spend a lot of time taking them from meeting to meeting, but start-ups need to get the right stakeholder and decision-maker in the right part of the organisation as fast as possible. They want a yes or no, not a maybe.” Therefore, his aim is to bring the average of 12 meetings down to just three.

While acknowledging that the traditional way of approaching technology vendors is not appropriate for start-ups, Mr Woolley is not a supporter of speeding fintechs through the procurement process. “When onboarding a start-up, we take a risk-based approach. It is not about just fast-tracking small companies into the organisation without thinking about the risk, because they do present risks,” he explains. “So, we talk to procurement, information security and IT about the risks and ways to overcome them. For example, procurement may be worried about the vendor risk, but the manager that needs the solution can largely underwrite the risk.”

A level of maturation

Over the past two years, not only has SocGen refined its approach to fintechs but the ecosystem has also matured, according to Mr Woolley. When large institutions first began engaging with fintechs the focus was on the early-stage start-ups, to understand new ideas and technology, but today banks are moving upstream.

“While it is important to have those [early] interactions, realistically it is difficult for a large institution to directly engage with a seed start-up,” he says. He adds that it is possible to engage constructively if the institution is incubating the start-up, or it is making an investment to support them because they could be useful or relevant to in two years’ time.

Previously SocGen spent time fostering, mentoring and understanding nascent start-ups, whereas today it is also focusing on fast-growing, post-series A companies. “These are the organisations we want to engage with,” says Mr Woolley. “In terms of the balance of risk, they are in the right place and they are going to have a material impact on the organisation, without us potentially suffocating them.” 

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