Company

BNP Paribas Fortis is an international bank based in Belgium and a subsidiary of BNP Paribas, formed after the sale of Fortis Bank. As the largest bank in Belgium, BNP Paribas Fortis provides a comprehensive range of financial services to private and corporate clients, operating with a workforce of 184,000 employees globally.

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Strategic Question

What trends do we need to monitor to understand how our strategic roadmap is affected?

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Objectives

• What are our trends that impact the strategy?
  
• When will they hit us?
  
• What’s the expected impact of these trends on our business?
  
• What are the business cases linked to these trends, and how are our competitors approaching these?

Challenge

BNP Paribas Fortis wants to understand how to continuously monitor trends impacting its strategy, ultimately supporting strategic deep dives and knowing what to focus on in terms of innovation. The key challenges it would like to see addressed are as follows:

• How do we navigate a changing world?
• How do we monitor different types of trends in the short, mid and long-term?
• How can we flag alerts and translate alerts into triggers for change?
• How do we incorporate these indicators for the future in our new agile way of working to fuel innovation and agility funnel?
• How do we build a quantitative and automated approach that will support us to scope, analyse, monitor and communicate alerts and help us assess if we are evolving towards the right strategic destinations?

Solution

We started by defining the impacting trends within the scope of the BNPBF strategy.

The result is a data-driven online trend board with 148 trends fuelled by big data from around the globe and analysed using data science and AI.

These 148 trends can be linked to eleven trend themes:

1. Data
2. Mobility
3. Technology and science
4. Work
5. Society and health
6. Regulation
7. Customer change
8. Sustainability
9. Finance
10. Living
11. Algorithms and computing
    

Impact

This trend board is used as a corporate AI-driven decision support system for short, mid and long-term trend watching and monitoring. On top of that, it serves as a basis for conducting new deep dives on impactful topics.