When determining Forrester’s Technology Strategy Impact Award finalists, we seek to recognize excellence in technology strategy that drives an obsession with customer success and business growth. The companies recognized as finalists are executing a future fit technology strategy that enables them to quickly reconfigure business capabilities to meet future customer and employee demands with adaptivity, creativity, and resilience.

The finalists show a focus on customer and business outcomes and leverage a modern platform, practice, partner, and people strategy.

We congratulate İşbank, this year’s winner, and finalists PKO Polski Bank and Schneider Electric.

İşbank Drives A Future Fit Technology Strategy To Create The Bank Of The Future

İşbank, officially Türkiye İş Bankası, is the largest private bank in Turkey. With its 23,000 employees, the bank serves 23 million customers and generates 350 million transactions per day — some 96% of which pass through digital channels. The motto “the bank of the future” summarizes a broader IT and digital vision based on an inclusive and participatory approach.

The bank’s digital transformation roadmap focuses on platform banking, ecosystem collaboration, superapplications, and new-generation employee engagement models. Innovative solutions pervade its technology roadmap to provide a resilient infrastructure, develop digital immunity, drive operational effectiveness and efficiency, and leverage AI in the context of data-driven banking. From a sustainability perspective, İşbank has joined the Net-Zero Banking Alliance to spearhead Turkey’s eco-friendly economic transition and launched the app Forest for the Future to engage customers in carbon footprint reduction via a gamified platform that combines mobile banking and tree planting.

PKO Bank Polski Leverages A Future Fit Technology Strategy For Value-Added Services

Powszechna Kasa Oszczędności Bank Polski — in short, PKO Bank Polski S.A. — is a multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in Warsaw, Poland. It is among the largest financial institutions in the country with 1,145 branches located in Poland and abroad.

The bank’s 2023–2025 IT and digital strategy leverages the scale of its operational, digital, and technological advancements to make the bank “ready for the challenges, focused on the future.” This underpins its innovation and technology strategy to build a simple, friendly, and accessible bank while bringing the bank forward on its path to the achievement of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. Meanwhile, the bank is building its presence on various metaverse platforms for meetings, conferences, events, and job fairs. The bank fosters innovation thanks to a platform for the development of modern technologies from an ecosystem of startups and fintechs. To facilitate the implementation of the strategy, PKO Bank Polski is changing the culture to an agile and customer-centric approach and has implemented reskilling initiatives such as PKO Cloud University and the Academy of Agility.

Schneider Electric Uses Platforms To Grow Its Future Fit Partner Ecosystem

Schneider Electric is a French multinational company that specializes in digital automation and energy management solutions for efficiency and sustainability. It addresses the residential, buildings, data center, infrastructure, and industry sectors by combining energy technologies, automation, software, and services. Using a broad partner ecosystem, Schneider Electric provides state-of-the-art solutions for sustainability and efficiency that are easy to implement and continuously improved through data and AI.

At the heart of its IoT system architecture is Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Platform. It is the foundational technology backbone on which Schneider Electric solutions are built and delivered. The company created an open ecosystem for collaboration on its EcoStruxure software called Schneider Electric Exchange. Exchange engages more than 70,000 users who can co-innovate and accelerate the digital transformation for sustainability and efficiency. Users can create their own integrated efficiency solutions across domains in energy management and automation, along with utilizing the marketplace on Exchange to publish their offers. The huge focus on platforms, AI, and data amplifies the power of its partner network in building and connecting cutting-edge solutions.

Also note that Schneider Electric was selected as the winner of this year’s Enterprise Architecture Award for EMEA. Read more about that here.

What’s next? İşbank will speak about its technology strategy at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation EMEA Forum, which takes place in London and digitally, October 12–13, 2023. We hope to see you there!