As more business, shopping, and banking is done online and from, well, anywhere, customers increasingly expect high-quality digital-first services that remove the need to go into a physical store or bank.

“People were working from home, shopping from home, banking from home, and are more tech and digital savvy than ever,” says Mike Dargan, group chief digital and information officer for UBS. “And if you look at the financial services industry, the ecosystem is constantly evolving, so it becomes more competitive, open, connected, and location-independent every day.”

Banks like UBS are experiencing a cultural transformation that makes technology itself integral to the business offering. Because technology is often the first—or only—medium via which customers encounter a business, the quality of that digital customer experience is key to the value it provides. To make that digital-first experience a differentiator for a business, Dargan explains, requires strategically and substantially investing in tech throughout the enterprise.

Investing in technology means a targeted focus on the people and platforms behind the customer-facing experiences, not just building out the feature of the month. Dargan’s roadmap begins with engineering excellence—attracting and retaining engineers who want to shape the direction of the industry.

In addition to offering an inclusive culture and opportunities to solve important real-world problems, companies seeking the best engineers must provide cutting-edge platforms and tools to create an industry-leading developer experience. To enable this—as well as to reimagine what they can offer to clients—UBS has made years-long investments in updating legacy systems to new technology, focusing on infrastructure allowing the launch of cloud-native applications on a cloud-native platform.

Internal company processes, though invisible to customers, drive the speed and quality of digital innovation. At UBS, process focus has included training on agile methodologies—teaching employees from all business areas how to get from emerging requirements to high-quality outcomes as quickly and iteratively as possible.

Less obvious longer-term investments in the technology future may also pay dividends both in business terms and in customer experience. In the sustainability space, UBS has partnered with the Green Software Foundation to build software standards and best practices for reducing carbon emissions, and has set a goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions across its operations by 2050.

Says Dargan, “the world is faster, more digital, and more data-driven than ever before, so clients really do demand services that are digital-first, anytime, anywhere, and are underpinned by first-class technologies. In fact, I'd say tech is really how our clients experience us every day.”

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with UBS.