Banks Demand Technologies To Deliver Unique Customer Experience

The BFSI industry in the advent of digitization is constantly progressing towards reshaping the future of banking in India. Technologies are playing an important role in creating the infrastructure to provide digital products and services as customer experience has become the main focus for banks. 

At present, 50 billion dollars have been invested in financial services with respect to the technologies they are using in addressing their customer's needs.

"How far can you go with technology alone? Each of these technologies like IoT, AI, Machine Learning etc will keep evolving and going the distance. The task ahead is to combine these tools as one to provide a better customer experience," said Aruna Rao, CTO, Kotak Mahindra Bank as she opened the floor for a panel discussion at the BW BFSI CXO Summit 2018. 

Organizations and institutions are yet understanding the advantages of technological tools as the country expects the digital wave. The entire business cycle is still skeptical about the product and services that are being leveraged through technologies especially when cyber threats continue to increase. 

Abhijit Shah, CTO, DCB Bank said, "We look at systems in isolation but the ecosystem is about cloud computing, data analysis, and IoT being added on to devices. The trusted identity is not restricted to an organization and therefore data can be transferred to anyone. Hence the customers are still skeptical of trusting products and services offered by banks on the digital platform. We need to first look at the complexities involved with cybersecurity and work towards preventing cyber threats."

Vinay Kumar Sankarapu, Founder Arya.ai during the discussion said, "As a protection, the plan is to start building different systems. It's about evolving constantly than being secure. We must understand that evolution will continue with the help of technology but security is an endpoint solution." 

As the discussions continue, it is believed that evolution in technology will drive banks to digitize their entire operations. But, with a large volume of bots, strategies need to create an environment where both can co-exist rather than compete with each other. 

"With all the technologies we can look at automating everything. The strategies, however, in organizations, must be more dependent on where do they see themselves 3-4 years down the line and the ways of deploying automated tools to derive the customer's needs. Since there is no clarity on that subject, rumors about humans vs bots have already been spread in the market. Automation is picking up really fast in the short run and we at PwC are drawing our strategies around it," said Sumit Srivastav, Executive Director - Head Automation, PwC India. 

Jyothirlatha B, CTO, DHFL discussed about DHFL's progress with the help of technologies like data analytics and machine learning during the panel discussion. 

"At DHFL, the focus for now in technology is more with respect to data analytics. We have since 2017, been working on cloud and analytics as well and it has been very convenient to understand factors like depreciation value and customer insights. We have been seeing quite a progress in housing and finance ever since."

"We have a platform of our own which we also leverage to fintechs. The Dhani platform delivers a first of its kind customer experience, especially in getting instant loans in India. The application allows us to validate customer's credentials depending on the customer's need along with the speed at which they purchase loan plans and repay their dues. The technology has moved us quite ahead in customer experience," said Rajnees Chawla, Group Head - Marketing & Communications, Indiabulls Housing Finance while discussing the advantages of technology in the housing and finance industry segment. 

Although, some organizations instead of directly using it, partner up with capable startups in order to understand the technology better. Banks have adopted the digital ways of doing businesses by partnering up with fintechs. 

"The way to go ahead for banks depends on how well they partner with fintech companies to leverage customer experience. We then plan our business models depending on the learnings we gain from these platforms because we are in corporate banking and the priority is to understand convenient ways for our clients to work with us. Hence, we have to evaluate what technology can we offer to our clients and new age banking depends mainly on what kind of channels can you offer to your clients." said K R C Murthy, VP - Safety & Soundness - Grooup CIO, Deutsche Bank.

Ramgopal Subramani, COO, Perifos also commented on the advantages of working with fintech companies during the discussion. He stated that the products brought by fintechs need to be examined by representatives of bigger organizations in order to scale them ahead.

"The thing about fintechs is that they are young and agile. We use their ideas and technology but we have to yet examine them deeply before we scale it up. With the help of fintechs we have progressed in doing compression and bio-metrics better. But more importantly, they bring a lot of product ideas on the table."

"We have partnered with fintechs especially when it comes to credit lending platforms. We have seen a huge demand for credit lending platforms and our social engineering has also been quite strong. However, with new regulations coming in especially with respect to data, it is important that we also focus on understanding the governance behind the use of any kind of data." Said Bhuvanendran Kamak, CIO, CIBIL.

Speaking on the ecosystem of technology and the roles of vendors and customers, Kent Nash, Senior VP, Asia Pacific, Solace Corporation stressed on the importance of building a strong communication in between all the entities in the market. It is essential to communicate in order to have the freedom to choose your vendors and improve as a client. 

"People spoke about applications and integrated points which are very complex. We love it when it is complex because that is where we come in to simplify the entire process. At CISCO, we are responsible for getting the right application at the right time for our customers and that is possible because security for us is a key concern and our approach is very coordinated. It is not just about securing the corners but about how the perimeters defer and move on the application level. Our designs work are based on how we adapt to new technologies and understand the security around them," said, Ritesh Doshi, Director Sales - Enterprise Business, CISCO India. 

The discussions on the topic 'Technology is Reshaping the Future of Banking' was moderated by Rajeev Arora, CEO, Fino Finance at the 2nd BW Businessworld BFSI CXO Summit on the 31st of May, 2018, Grand Hyatt, Mumbai.