Banking and Insurance

Navigating Regulatory Change with Scenario Planning and Risk Insight

Banks and insurance companies operate in one of the most regulated environments. In 2024, industry analysts observed “no let-up in the regulatory intensity” facing financial institutions​ kpmg.com. Firms are grappling with a constant stream of new compliance mandates – from capital requirements to data privacy – that demand rapid operational changes. Leading advisors recommend reviewing the “regulatory change portfolio” to ensure organizations are ready for complex updates ​kpmg.com

. In practice, this means anticipating how upcoming rules will impact projects and resources. EY experts, for example, urge financial firms to use scenario planning to explore different regulatory outcomes​ ey.com so they can proactively mitigate compliance risks.

Keto AI+ helps financial institutions stay ahead of these changes through robust scenario planning and integrated risk governance. With Keto’s platform, you can model “what-if” scenarios for upcoming regulations or economic shifts and immediately see the impact on your portfolio of initiatives. This gives CIOs and risk officers foresight into how, say, a new banking regulation or cybersecurity mandate would affect timelines, budgets, and resource needs across projects. Equipped with these insights, you can adapt plans before regulations hit – reprioritizing or adding projects to remain compliant with minimal disruption. All regulatory compliance initiatives, risk registers, and audit trails are managed in one platform, providing a single source of truth. This not only streamlines regulatory readiness but also strengthens oversight: Keto’s built-in approval workflows and reporting ensure that any adjustments align with internal controls and board-level risk governance policies. In short, Keto AI+ lets you navigate regulatory change with agility, turning compliance from a reactive scramble into a strategic, well-orchestrated process.

Prioritizing Innovation and Maximizing Value Realization

In today’s financial sector, innovation is a double-edged sword: it’s critical to compete, yet difficult to execute effectively. CIOs and strategy leaders might have dozens of promising ideas – from new digital banking features to AI-driven insurance products – but only limited capacity to pursue them. Too often, pet projects or loud voices get priority over data-driven choices, and value realization suffers when resources are spread too thin. A lack of transparency into project performance further clouds whether initiatives are delivering the expected benefits. In fact, nearly 50% of business leaders say that siloed collaboration and poor coordination are top barriers to successful innovation​ gartner.com. This highlights how important it is to not only choose the right initiatives but also to break down silos so that IT, finance, and business teams work in concert on those priorities.

Keto’s SPM platform brings clarity and discipline to innovation portfolio management. It provides advanced tools for evaluating and prioritizing initiatives based on strategic fit, expected ROI, risk, and resource requirements. Instead of guessing, decision-makers can rely on data-driven scoring to compare the ROI and strategic impact of each proposal. High-value projects that align with corporate goals rise to the top, while lower-value or misaligned efforts can be paused or dropped. This ensures that scarce budget and talent are allocated to initiatives that maximize Return on Innovation. CFOs particularly appreciate that Keto AI+ tracks benefits and expenditures across the portfolio, helping ensure that promised value is realized – every project’s costs and outcomes are transparent in real time​.

By focusing resources on the most impactful innovations, financial organizations avoid over-commitment and eliminate wasteful projects. Keto also fosters collaboration by providing a unified workspace where product teams, IT, and finance can jointly review project status, budgets, and performance metrics. When everyone from the CIO to the PMO and finance analysts is looking at the same live data, it’s easier to course-correct an initiative or support an ambitious idea across departments. The result is a balanced innovation pipeline that delivers tangible business value: new digital offerings get to market faster, and every investment is clearly tied to outcomes that matter (customer growth, efficiency gains, revenue, etc.). In an industry where careful investment is paramount, Keto helps you do the right projects at the right time – and get the results you expect.

Aligning Strategy and Portfolios Across Finance and IT

Strategic alignment is a perennial challenge in large banks and insurance firms. Top executives set ambitious goals – expanding into new markets, improving customer experience, meeting ESG targets – but translating those objectives into executable projects is often problematic. Plans get fragmented across Excel sheets, legacy project tools, and departmental systems. This siloed approach makes it hard for leadership to maintain line-of-sight: Are all these ongoing projects actually supporting our strategy? Is the IT portfolio aligned with the priorities of the business and finance? Without a unified view, critical initiatives can drift off course or compete with one another, and executives may only discover misalignment after time and money have been spent. Studies show that a vast majority of organizations struggle to execute their strategies successfully​, largely due to this disconnect between planning and execution.

Keto AI+ closes the strategy-execution gap by serving as a common platform for both business and IT portfolios. It lets you link every program, project, or product development effort to high-level strategic objectives or OKRs. For example, if your strategy includes “Improve operational resilience” or “Launch 5 new digital services,” you can tag and group all related projects under these goals. At any moment, a CIO or Head of Strategy can pull up a live dashboard and see exactly how each initiative is contributing to the company’s targets – whether it’s revenue growth, compliance improvement, customer satisfaction, or other KPIs. This strategic alignment ensures that every approved project has a clear purpose and business case behind it, and pet projects that don’t map to a strategic goal can be filtered out early.

Moreover, Keto bridges the traditional gap between IT and finance teams. It unifies project portfolio data with financial data (budgets, forecasts, actuals), enabling true IT-finance collaboration. A CFO can easily view how the investment in a core banking system upgrade is tracking in terms of both spend and expected benefit, while the CIO can see financial constraints and value metrics alongside technical progress. This shared visibility fosters better decision-making: trade-offs between projects can be discussed with all stakeholders having the same information. Keto’s real-time reports and one-click analytics also support governance needs – for instance, quarterly portfolio reviews or board updates – by providing trustworthy information on status, risks, and costs without a massive manual effort. In essence, Keto AI+ acts as the single source of truth that keeps the entire organization in sync. Strategy leaders, finance, and IT can finally work from one playbook, adjusting course together as needed so that execution continuously aligns with evolving strategy.

Accelerating Digital Transformation with Agile Strategy Execution

Digital transformation in financial services is often likened to changing the engines on an airplane mid-flight. Banks must modernize core systems, automate processes, and implement new digital customer solutions – all without disrupting daily operations. These transformations are inherently complex, involving interdependent programs (core banking upgrades, mobile app development, AI risk modeling, cloud migrations, etc.) and often requiring a mix of Agile and traditional project methods. It’s no surprise that around 70% of digital transformation projects fail to meet their goals​ fintechfutures.com. Even when they don’t outright fail, nearly 70% run slower than expected according to CFO surveys​ gartner.com, due to unforeseen roadblocks and poor coordination. To succeed, financial institutions need a way to execute their strategy in a more agile, responsive manner – one that accommodates change and feedback in real time.

Keto AI+ enables agile strategy execution by bringing all digital initiatives under a coherent portfolio approach with built-in flexibility. Instead of managing transformation projects in silos, Keto provides an umbrella view where executives can oversee and adjust a whole landscape of initiatives in one place. This makes it easier to balance short-term wins with long-term investments: for instance, a bank’s leadership can run a portfolio of quick digital onboarding improvements alongside a multi-year core system overhaul, and set different expectations for each. Keto’s platform supports hybrid project methodologies, meaning an Agile PMO can run sprint-based software development efforts next to a Waterfall infrastructure project – and still roll them up into unified dashboards and reporting. As your fintech teams and vendors adopt Agile ways of working, Keto allows you to manage in a hybrid mode to get the best of both worlds, coordinating Scaled Agile trains and traditional projects side by side.

Crucially, Keto AI+ integrates with existing enterprise systems (such as core banking, CRM, or ERP) through no-code connectors, so data flows seamlessly without forcing teams onto a completely new stack. This reduces manual work and ensures that everyone from IT engineers to business analysts is working with the latest information. Keto’s no-code configurability means the platform adapts to your processes (not the other way around), which significantly reduces the IT burden and speeds up implementation. You can configure workflows for change requests, risk approvals, or value tracking in minutes rather than months of custom development. By orchestrating all aspects of transformation in one system – strategy, ideas, projects, resources, and risks – Keto gives financial organizations the agility and control to drive change faster. Executives can quickly reprioritize or pivot initiatives when market conditions shift or new technologies emerge, without losing sight of the overall strategic roadmap. The outcome is a faster, more successful digital transformation: projects stay on track (or get killed early if needed), teams adapt quickly to surprises, and the organization continually moves toward its digital future rather than stalling.

Proven Value with Leading Financial Institutions

Keto Software has a proven track record in the financial sector, delivering results for banks, insurers, and public finance organizations across Europe and the USA. Leading institutions such as OP Financial Group and Willis Towers Watson have chosen the Keto AI+ platform to modernize their portfolio management practices. For example, OP Financial Group – one of Finland’s largest financial services companies – turned to Keto to streamline its innovation and development processes. Before Keto, OP’s innovation operations were slowed by legacy tools (spreadsheets, manual workflows) that struggled to keep up with the fast-changing business environment. After implementing Keto, OP was able to adopt new functionalities in an agile way and involve employees more directly in the process (thanks in part to Keto’s user-friendly interface and mobile access). According to OP’s team, previous ways of working were simply “too slow to react” to current demands, and they chose Keto for its ease of use and fast implementation​ ketosoftware.com. Now, OP has a single platform covering project management – vastly improving transparency and responsiveness. In short, OP Financial Group replaced fragmented, slow processes with an integrated system that keeps everyone aligned and projects moving forward at pace.

Financial organizations that leverage Keto AI+ see similar benefits: clearer visibility into portfolios, faster time-to-market for new initiatives, and stronger alignment between strategy and execution. By implementing a flexible SPM solution like Keto, CIOs and PMO leaders can continuously rebalance their project mix as conditions change, while CFOs and executives get instant insight into where value is being created. Keto’s success with demanding customers like OP Financial Group demonstrates its ability to handle complex regulatory requirements, large project volumes, and the need for real-time data in decision-making. Whether it’s enabling agile transformation programs at a major bank or improving strategic alignment in a government finance agency, Keto Software empowers financial leaders to turn strategy into results. With Keto AI+ as the engine for your strategic portfolio management, you can drive innovation, ensure compliance, and achieve your goals with confidence – all through a single, intelligent platform built for the unique challenges of the finance industry.