The Banks in the Age of Digital Transformation: Considerations for Enterprise Architecture

In the world of continuous changes, digital transformation has emerged as an inevitable factor for survival of organizations. Not only it is a technology change, but also is a radical change in all aspects and in other words is a business transformation. Banks like other organizations in digital era are facing new features namely the emergence of disruptive technologies and new business models, presence in ecosystems and importance of customer experience. In order for revising an enterprise architecture with digital transformation approach, it is required to determine the distinguishing characteristics of digital banks and traditional banks. The reason is that such characters affect the enterprise architecture framework approach and also the school of thought of enterprise architecture.  Design/methodology/approach: In the current research, we applied the mixture of quantitative and qualitative research method. firstly, using a systematic literature review, 284 papers with related keywords with digital bank were reviewed in order to extract the distinguishing features of this bank with traditional banks. In order for determining the indicators and their categories using the SLR, alongside a researcher (coder 1) is done by another expert of SLR (coder 2). Considering the KAPA coefficient 804%, six major features of digital banks are as follows: customer-centric experience, service oriented, based on ecosystem, alignment with digital technologies, digital transformation strategy, and platform oriented codded as 18 micro features. For finding the enterprise architecture school of thought and enterprise architecture framework aligned with digital banks, a questionnaire was designed by a group of 27 experts of enterprise architecture and digital transformation.  The results of findings were analyzed using SWARA-WASPAS method. The results show by considering the macro and micro characteristics of digital banks, in order for implementing a digital bank architecture, considering the distinguishing characters of the bank, it is essential to select ecological school of thought and service-oriented framework.