Banking and Financial services in a new customer-centric era

26th August 2019
Banking and Financial services in a new customer-centric era

L C Singh, Director and Executive Vice Chairman, Nihilent,  talks about the new customer-centric focus of the  Banking and Financial Services sector and how disruptive technologies  can be leveraged.
In this 'Customer centric' era, how exactly can companies in the BFSI Sector enhance their customer experience?
The BFSI sector is undergoing digital transformation and next age of technology adoption to keep up with the increased expectations of the customers. The key to being truly customer-centric lies in gaining an understanding into the mind of the customer, proactively, designing products and services around these insights, and constantly validating and testing these with real customers. This outward-in approach is radical and is something that traditionally neither process specialists nor analysts nor engineers have been good at or trained to do. This is a profound transition which lends itself to adopting Design Thinking as the new path to customer-centric transformation.
In the new age of customer-driven digital transformation, it becomes apparent that the myriad systems developed to support the processes of the older paradigm are a drag and represent a huge suite of costs. It must be dispensed quickly as the business must swiftly evolve into the new customer centric world of experience where the customer aggressively exerts choice. The capabilities required for doing this and the measurements used to assess success has changed dramatically.
How can the BFSI Sector  leverage disruptive technologies to accelerate growth and to stay ahead of competitors?
Staying competitive in digital age is the biggest challenge the BFSI sector is facing. For example, Blockchain is seen as a disruptive technology which can help banks in reducing cost of payment processing and help them to cut through the complex process of money transfer.
These will help banks and financial institutions to create more value for their customers in terms of new offerings etc. Blockchain technology can also protect against hacking, DDOS attacks which would result in gaining customer confidence in digital banking.
Cognitive analytics is another area which is going to be help BFSI sector to create advanced image and video processing algorithms. These will help them understand emotions and precisely capture even the subtler cues that are hard to be noticed by the naked eye. It would be fascinating to see how satisfied the customer was besides allowing an insightful feedback mechanism in place.
Use of Artificial Intelligence and introduction of Chatbots are some of the other disruptive innovations we are witnessing a faster uptake from the BFSI  sector.
|What are your perspectives on "Change management", and how crucial are they for  businesses?
Change management is aimed at coping with the new breed of consumer demands and who exactly know what they want. To deal with that at the enterprise side, we need a change in the processes, change in the way we create products and redefining the overall business strategy.
We need to go deep down the consumer demands and understand their needs and pain points and build solutions using appropriate technologies to solve consumer problems. And how does one seamlessly manifest all these? As an integrated change management vendor, we take all the parameters under Sense, Immerse, Define, Ideate, Build and Validate through the design thinking approach.
Approaches like design thinking will completely change enterprise computing by fostering customer-centricity and hasten collaborative partnerships not seen before. By propagating design thinking, what we are saying is that IT is not a one-time deployment process, rather a continuous evolutionary process, engaging the customers and other stakeholders continuously for the efficient business outcome.
How is the commercial adoption of Blockchain in India compared to the global market?
While the concepts of distributed ledger have been around for a while, most of the popularity, hype and discussions were more focussed towards Bitcoin, the first and most successful implementation of Blockchain. Which saw a surge of other cryptocurrencies to follow, count of which is in thousands.
India now has a lot of clarity on the government’s stand on cryptocurrencies. There were reports in the media on the government banning the private cryptocurrencies. This paves way for much more meaningful discussions on the potential of this technology and we are already seeing some very encouraging use cases out in market. It has also caught attention of government. The most encouraging thing to see is Niti Aayog getting actively involved in exploring opportunities to deploy blockchain technologies in industries such as pharmaceuticals and similar ones to counter counterfeiting.
They are working in close coordination with state governments who have taken lead for use cases such as land registry, driving licenses to drive greater transparency and traceability. This will create an environment which will drive mass scale adoption.