For a typical bank today, the ambition is clear: sleek new branches, modern apps, and digital-first customer journeys. But behind the scenes, the reality looks different.

Imagine a customer looking to solve an issue. They start in the app, find limited options, and end up calling the contact center. After waiting on hold, they repeat the exact details they entered digitally. Despite their best efforts, the agent — working across multiple, disconnected systems — lacks the context to resolve quickly. The customer leaves frustrated, the agent leaves drained, and the bank absorbs a higher cost-to-serve.

The Banking Crossroads: Growth vs. Cost Reality

This story is all too common. 80% of banking executives believe their CX is strong, yet only 24% of customers agree. Expectations have shifted dramatically:

• 72% of customers expect immediate service.
• 70% expect staff to have their full context.
• 64% say their mobile app cannot resolve support inquiries quickly, if at all.

These gaps are not cosmetic: they carry a steep financial price. Forrester research shows that a 1-point improvement in CX Index score can lead to $123 million in incremental revenue for a large multichannel bank.

This is why banks today are at a crossroads: keep patching over fragmented systems or orchestrate a model where CX, operations, and technology actually work together.

Customer Experience: From Fragmented to Orchestrated

Many banks still use a channel-led (not customer-led) model. Agents manage high call volumes while juggling multiple screens. Digital tools exist, but adoption is low.

What change can look like:

• Omnichannel orchestration where journeys flow seamlessly across app, branch, and call center.
• AI copilots that help agents resolve faster and more consistently.
• Intuitive, contextual, and proactive self-service journeys that customers actually adopt.

Banks adopting Sutherland’s unified CX model have reported 20% reductions in handle time, higher digital containment, and tangible improvements in CXI, NPS and loyalty.

Operations: From Reactive to Predictive

For many banks, back-office inefficiencies are hidden until they show up in the P&L. Debt recovery issues are a prime example of the consequences of such a model. While delinquency has climbed, collections have stayed manual and late-stage. As a result, loan fulfilment slows, costing both customers and dealers valuable time.

What change can look like:

• Predictive analytics flagging at-risk customers before delinquency.
• Digital self-cure journeys that reduce inbound calls and improve early-stage resolution.
• BPaaS delivery models that flex with demand while lowering run cost.

Banks adopting these approaches have achieved 20–30% improvements in early-stage resolutions and cost-to-collect reductions of 20% or more, freeing capacity for growth.

Technology: From Legacy Burden to Growth Enabler

The core challenge for most banks is not vision but delivery. Vendor sprawl, brittle legacy cores, and manual compliance reviews turn every new product rollout into a slow, risky, and costly exercise.

What change can look like:

• Cloud-native platforms and microservices to accelerate product launches.
• API orchestration to enable embedded banking and faster integrations.
• AI-enabled pipelines embedding compliance checks into every release.

Banks moving in this direction are receiving more than 5x ROI and reducing compliance risks, all while creating a technology core designed for resilience.

Orchestration: The Common Thread

Across CX, operations, and technology, the message is the same: the future is not about adding another channel, another process, or another vendor. It’s about orchestrating what already exists into one connected, intelligent model.

• Orchestrating channels so customers experience the bank as one entity.
• Orchestrating operations so collections and lending drive margin protection, not leakage.
• Orchestrating technology so compliance, scale, and speed are built in from the start.

Banks that do this will not only withstand cost pressure: they’ll unlock scalable growth.

The Growth + Cost Opportunity

The pressure is real: slowing loan growth, increased customer churn, and tighter margins. But so is the opportunity.

Banks that move from fragmented to orchestrated models unlock the potential of their drive to modernize by combining great tech with the right delivery strategies. They are proving that cost efficiency and growth are not opposing forces — they are outcomes of the same design.

In the next decade, the winning banks will be those who turn complexity into simplicity for their customers, employees, and regulators alike.