Innovation is the key to Stay Relevant
For most of the banks in the world, the challenge is how to stay relevant to their customers, and serve them to their best capabilities whether it is in a developed country or developing country. The only way to do this to continuously innovate and create an environment of continuous innovation, patents, work with partners like service providers, work with Fintech, work with technology companies like google, Microsoft to use their platforms, work with startups around the world, work with other companies which have IP’s that can leverage instead of doing discovery all over again. So we cut down the time to market and bring optimized solutions to our systems and applications within our bank.

Change the Bank – Industry
We come across real time personalized marketing solutions to our customer. For example, when let us say an ICICI bank customer is going in an Ola cab for a meeting, we could send a personalized message in his mobile saying if he wants to go to forum mall which he is passing by now. There he gets a coupon from café coffee day saying a particular coffee flavor he likes we are running a promotion of 50 percent for that item today. This is a partnership model between banks and other 3rd party players where both of them could enhance their revenue streams from the same customer. And technology solutions are making this possible today. When banks are losing market share to other players like Paytm and Airtel, which are poaching in to banking territory, it is imperative for banks to collaborate with other players to increase their customer revenue, and wallet share by sharing customers and cross selling the products with the partners, and giving an enhanced customer experience to its customers.

Today’s youth are using mobile phones and if they want to complain against a service being deficient in a bank, they are putting it in facebook or twitter, instead of making a complaint in the bank. Unless we are continuously watching the feeds in social media on the complaints or observations related to our bank, the public is already making impressions based on these views in social media. It is important for banks to work on getting such feedback from our

young customers who have a completely different mindset, and ensure that the bank treats this young population who use mobile banking and other channels and are constantly requiring superior service from banks.

One of the opportunities in optimizing our banking platform is to come out with optimized application so we have applications which are super efficient and scalable, and this involves a slew of projects which will optimize our applications, our software, our infrastructure, our people required to support development of these applications and these are more technology transformation projects but will give great benefits in terms of dollars/rupees/any currency and set us up to be lean and mean to meet future needs.

It is imperative for banks to collaborate with other players to increase their customer revenue, and wallet share by sharing customers and cross selling the products with the partners

Another opportunity is to come out with a data strategy across the bank with different lobs like deposits, insurance, consumer lending, mortgage, wholesale, wealth etc. Therefore, we have common access points where this lob provides master data to the rest of the organization, which it has the responsibility of mastering data, and the rest of the organization takes feeds from this common access point. This way we have a true 360-degree view of the customer and the right lines of business hold the right master data.

We come across industry leading ideas, which will be a trend setter for the industry. For example, we see available in the market data testing automated tools which will automate the whole process of data testing from requirements gathering to how one will create test use cases to test the code which any developer colleagues have coded and delivered. There are already such tools in the market, which can be leveraged by players instead of discovering what is already there and increase time to market for the organization.

One of the opportunities is to provide labs where bank team members could work on the latest technologies available in the market, along with our partners(service providers, Fintechs, other companies having IP’s) so we are able to experiment with different technologies to try out our use cases in the areas of customer experience, fraud, compliance and keep innovating.

Run the Bank
This is to keep the lights on and usually gets all required budgets to keep operational efficiencies in the bank. This would mean the right infrastructure, right people, right optimization of jobs, applications meeting the SLA of the required by the customers , stability of systems in addressing the queries and reports and be stable from a service perspective.

In times when fraud possibilities are increasing, hackers are targeting banks, internal fraud checks are failing many a times, our focus in banks is to get industry leading solutions which will make life easier to run the vast electronic media (teaching or research) to the bank’s advantage.

Essentially the banks are losing business to multiple players – startups who are better at them in some of the areas, telecom firms, wallets (like Paytm), Join hands with partners and survive the onslaught is the mantra now.