Forging new frontiers-advanced technologies will reshape the banking experience
The pandemic has brought to the fore the importance of the data layer when it comes to banking on the cloud. That was the key takeaway from the Banking Panel of the ‘The Next Wave Of Cloud Innovation’ forum organised by Forbes India & Google Cloud.
“Never before has the focus on the data layer been as intense as it has been since the (COVID-19) pandemic,” said Kiran Kesavarapu, Head of Customer Engineering (Industry Solutions & Architecture) at Google. The renewed focus on data is driven by a combination of new technologies such as serverless computing, a bank's own comfort with data sciences and a newfound realization that data science isn’t being seen in isolation, but, as a layer that underpins everything that needs to be done in for either operations or customer experience, he added.
This comes as the pandemic has accelerated the pace of transformation in banking services, according to Deloitte India’s Shyam Govindan. “Global transformation has been going on for years in banking, but what this pandemic has done has acted as a catalyst for change and it accelerated the pace at which this transformation is happening,” the Partner at the Big Four accounting firm said.
Banking transformation has been manifold. At the product level, latest developments such as buy-now-pay-later are driving innovation on the top line even as a tectonic shift towards digitization is underway at the retail level, Govindan said. That as demand itself shifts towards the Tier Two and Tier Three cities of India where there has been a massive explosion in data consumption, he added. The latter has brought on its own set of challenges for banks.
“As more parts of the unbanked population become first-time users of formal financial services, catering to this new customer base comes with its own set of challenges,” said Dheemant Thacker, Head of Digital Banking at Ujjivan Small Finance Bank. To illustrate the problem statement, Thacker pointed out that small finance banks’ target customers, for example, are largely low-income households with limited access to education.