Bridging Financial Gaps!
The financial industry is undergoing a profound shift, driven by digital advancements that are redefining customer interactions, operational efficiency, and competitiveness. Digital transformation is reshaping this sector, enabling companies to deliver faster, more efficient services while tailoring their offerings to meet customer needs more precisely. Innovations such as automation, AI, and big data are optimizing internal processes and enhancing the customer experience, making services more accessible and personalized. In Latin America, where financial inclusion remains a significant challenge, the adoption of these technologies is particularly important as it offers the potential to bridge gaps in access to essential financial services.
Jean Paul Saltos, as the Head of Transformation, leads initiatives that blend technology and strategic vision to drive meaningful change in the financial industry. With a passion for innovation and a deep understanding of digital processes, he emphasizes the importance of agility and collaboration in executing transformation. His leadership is focused on nurturing open communication, aligning stakeholders around common goals, and ensuring that teams are empowered to take ownership of their contributions. This approach has resulted in impressive outcomes, particularly in the areas of digital sales growth and self-management, where his leadership has driven measurable and sustainable impact.
Looking ahead, Jean Paul envisions a future where financial services are more inclusive and customer-focused, with digital platforms playing a central role in enabling this vision. He is committed to establishing a transformation framework that enhances efficiency and addresses broader societal needs, particularly in underserved regions. His focus on long-term strategic planning and continuous improvement ensures that these transformations are technological upgrades and fundamental developments in how organizations operate and serve their customers. Through structured governance, stakeholder engagement, and a focus on innovation, he is paving the way for a more agile and customer-centric financial sector.
Let’s explore Jean Paul’s transformative leadership journey in the finance sector:
Customer-Centric Strategies in a Digital Market
Since his training, Jean Paul has always been fascinated about technology, its evolution, and how it can significantly impact the quality of life, especially in Latin American countries. Added to this curiosity was his interest in processes and new ways of working related to innovation and agility, an area that often faces challenges such as resistance to change and the need to adopt new mindsets.
He believes that digital transformation represents a great opportunity for companies, as it allows them to have a true focus on the customer, improving their experience, optimizing delivery times, and increasing their competitiveness in an increasingly digital market. However, the challenge for executives is to understand what this effort really entails and to promote it from the strategy, approached as a permanent process of continuous improvement.
Key Responsibilities in Leading Transformations
When leading a transformation, Jean Paul recognizes that responsibilities fall into two main areas. The first relates to the tactical tasks outlined in his role, such as redefining operating models, optimizing key processes, product development lifecycle, managing cultural change, and measuring results to ensure sustainable transformation.
The second area encompasses the continuous management of stakeholders and executives, promoting spaces for discussion to align the transformation objectives with the strategy, prioritizing strategic initiatives, governance, and organizational design schemes that tangibly impact organizational competitiveness and efficiency.
For example, in the last transformation he led, outstanding results were achieved: an increase of more than 50 percentage points in digital sales, 30 points in self-management through digital channels, and 40 points in user migration to these channels. This generated great confidence in the transformation scheme and led to an increase in the annual budget from $5 to more than $50 million.
Strategic Vision and Change Management
In his experience, beyond the technological approach, skills such as maintaining a clear strategic vision, managing change during the cultural and structural transition, and maintaining approved practices and ways of working are of the utmost importance to generate sustainability.
Collaborative leadership has been crucial in engaging stakeholders and ensuring their commitment at every step. Finally, the ability to constantly measure and track results ensures that the transformation generates a tangible and lasting impact on the organization.
Building Open Communication and Trust
Jean Paul believes that the key is to generate open communication and a relationship of mutual trust, where expectations are clear from the beginning and all leaders are involved in decision-making.
This allows for constant alignment with strategic objectives, and even a scheme of OKRs (objectives and key results) that are decanted from the strategy to the teams can be used as a good practice. Promoting transparency and allowing for quick identification of deviations.
Enriching the Transformation Roadmap
According to Jean Paul, many times, the balance between the short and long term slows down the transformation agenda. The short term is extremely valuable since it depends on keeping the transformation machinery working; however, maintaining a short-term vision can directly impact the organization’s ability to adapt.
A good way to balance these two aspects is to include in the transformation team’s agenda spaces for visioning, planning, and analyzing strategies and horizons of products and services in the medium and long term. This generates executable outputs that enrich the transformation roadmap.
Maintaining Constant Team Connection
In his leadership role, Jean Paul maintains a constant connection with the teams, as they generate value for the customer and the organization. This interaction occurs in weekly or biweekly reviews, where the teams present their progress and receive feedback that they can later integrate into their retrospectives.
In these spaces, he focuses on challenging them to explore new ideas or improve what exists. Additionally, a very useful practice is to ensure that the operating model has cycles dedicated 100% to innovation, where teams can experiment and test new technologies.
Staying Updated with Digital Subscriptions
In Jean Paul’s opinion, there are many subscriptions on the market nowadays that allow one to stay up to date with the digital world. He usually follows publications in the MIT Technology Review, Harvard Business Review, and Gartner. He also tries to participate in key conferences such as Fintech Americas and events related to business agility.
When he wants to take specialized courses, he prefers platforms like Coursera or edX. Networks such as LinkedIn seem very useful to him to interact with experts and discuss different points of view.
Balancing Demands of the Financial Industry
Most of Jean Paul’s experience has been in the financial industry, which by its nature is very demanding and often invades personal time. However, some strategies that have worked for him include, at work, creating periodic moments with the team to share in a relaxed environment and discuss personal issues, which strengthens trust and balances the workspace with the social. On a personal level, setting clear goals in hobbies such as learning to dance, playing a new sport, improving health, or developing a new skill is key to maintaining a balance with work.
Implementing Clear Governance for Sustainability
His main advice to aspirants is to ensure the active involvement of executive leadership from the beginning. Having a clear roadmap and raising awareness among leaders that transformation is a continuous effort and not a technological project is key to reducing uncertainties. As for agile-driven roles, it’s vital to understand that these roles, such as those of Product Owner, Scrum Master, and development teams, require a new way of operating.
It is about promoting autonomy within a well-defined framework to maximize efficiency. In addition, it is crucial to redefine traditional team roles, understanding that leaders no longer only monitor but enable their teams to respond agilely to changes. Implementing clear governance over decision-making and managing resources and portfolio effectively is essential for transformation to be sustainable and build trust in the long term.
Structured and Systematized Long-Term Results
Jean Paul is currently taking on an opportunity in the Caribbean to establish a digital transformation scheme from scratch at one of the leading financial institutions in the region. In addition to generating value for the entity, his main objective is to impact the sectors that most require financial inclusion, developing initiatives adjusted to their reality and aspiring to generate a positive effect at the country level.
To achieve these goals, he will not only lean on his experience, but it is essential to surround himself with a transformation team that knows more than he does in their areas of expertise. He is not looking for people who only follow him but who bring their own criteria and experience, providing knowledge superior to his as much as possible. This approach is key to executing a structured, systematized transformation with tangible results in the long term.
