On December 15th CIONET hosted a special edition of CIONEXT | The Year of the Tiger where the winners of 4 categories and the Most Inspirational European Digital Leader of the Year 2021 discussed their business challenges for the 2022, their budget proposals and hypothesis they want to test in 2022. The conference, moderated by Hendrik Deckers and Nils Fonstad gathered over 500 digital leaders around the world. 

The winners:

We congratulate the winners!

Economic pressure caused by inflation and covid, changing customers behavior, war on talents, sustainability challenges will test most of the businesses next year. 

For mBank and Krzysztof Dąbrowski, the Most Inspirational European Digital Leader of the Year, 2022 will be marked by two key challenges: high inflation in Poland (currently reaching 7,9%) and a huge task to re-platform the retail part of the bank. 

KfW and Melanie Kehr, winner in the Finance category, puts emphasis on sustainability and climate actions.  ‘’We have a role as a promotional bank to support the transformation of the economic sectors and financial market towards a greenhouse gas neutral future’’, she said. With this ambitious task for the next year, KfW wants to identify not only the investments needed in Germany to become gas neutral, but also promotional investments in technology and how to speed up digitalisation. Melanie also pointed to the fact that with so many good ideas around, a need to prioritize is becoming of crucial importance. Melanie hopes that having clear regulatory requirements will speed up the process of migrating to cloud for the banking industry. And this, in consequence, will enable a more effective use of data.   

Marco Moretti, winner in the Public Sector, shared insights of A2A’s 10 Years Business Plan and pointed to digitability, a new concept which combines sustainability and digital. Energy production must be based on renewable sources and A2A is planning to invest EUR 1,2 billion in energy transition and circular economy. 

For BAT and Marina Bellini, winner in the B2C category, 2022 evolves around keeping the momentum of bringing more and more customers to the reduced risk products. Sustainability is another key challenge for BAT and in particular transformation to carbon neutral organization and reducing and eventually limiting use of plastic. “It’s not easy and it’s not cheap”, Marina stresses. 

Nik Puri, Senior Vice President IT and the winner in the B2B category aims at  finalising TNT’s acquisition. The objective is not only to  integrate both companies, but to transform them into something more than just the sum of its parts, making it fully digital. “Next year is when these two companies will be fully integrated, we are enabling the companies to operate on data (...) Data becomes the fuel for future innovation for us’’. Fedex is shifting towards application development, innovation transformation, digital RPA, the SML and security. These are the areas and capabilities where Fedex plans to allocate most of its budget.

We congratulate the winners and wish them all the best with the challenges they’re facing!