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Enterprise technology: crucial to banks' survival

By Saurabh Kumar, MD of In2IT Technologies South Africa


Johannesburg, 24 Mar 2015
Saurabh Kumar, MD of In2IT Technologies SA.
Saurabh Kumar, MD of In2IT Technologies SA.

The next era of banking will involve heightened complexity, uncertainty and competition, as banks face threats from new players - including companies in areas like software, social media and telecoms. To combat these challenges and remain relevant, and to make the most from the latest technology, banks will be required to step up the pace of core systems rationalisation and modernisation, says Saurabh Kumar, MD of In2IT Technologies SA.

Many commentators argue that the fundamentals of banking have hardly changed over the past few decades. The same basic product sets exist today, and the principles of lending and borrowing, risk and return, still form the bedrock of the way banks approach their customers.

Evolution

To quickly sketch the evolution of banking in recent years: the mid- to late-1990s saw the first signs of paperless processing and bank-wide systems started plugging into each other. While banking remained largely branch-based, the concept of document management came to the fore. This was followed in the early 2000s with better data integration and the rise of "master data management".

Inter-bank payment systems started to better connect banks at a national and international level, and the major card schemes like Visa and MasterCard accelerated their footprints across the globe. At the same time, more and more banking services were exposed directly to customers via secure online channels.

The period from 2005-2008 saw the mobile channel starting to take hold, albeit on simple protocols like unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), SMS, SIM toolkits, and mobile wireless access protocol (WAP) browsers.

From there, digital channels have continued to evolve - with increasingly sophisticated online banking and online shopping services available, and the mobile channel shifting towards intuitive and easy-to-use banking applications (apps).

However, when one pauses to think about it, these underlying systems and processes are largely the same as those of decades ago - the only real advancements have been in the front-end, the banking interface channel.

Next frontiers

Jump ahead to the immediate future, and it seems likely that the next battleground in banking will be centred around breakthrough technologies like virtual currencies, location-based services, mobile wallets holding multiple stores of value, social lending, wearable technology and even augmented reality.

To remain relevant amid these waves of disruption and transformation, banks will need to develop greater agility and flexibility in their enterprise architecture. Undoubtedly, this requires a technology partner which understands the evolving banking landscape and the forthcoming threats, and can help to realign infrastructure accordingly.

The first phase in this journey involves application portfolio optimisation - where some processes and systems are optimised, and others are phased out. Secondly, it is critical to establish a secure and flexible services-oriented architecture (SOA) middleware layer that can connect existing legacy systems with the rest of the bank's IT estate.

This SOA foundation allows new technologies and services to be fluidly added as customer demands evolve; and the bank is able to capitalise on the latest innovations found in both consumer and enterprise technology.

Importantly, having the right foundation with one's IT estate enables sophisticated analytics, business intelligence (BI) and big data applications that scan the sentiments and behaviours of millions of customers - compressing the myriad insights into useful outputs for executive decision-makers within the bank.

By better understanding customer behaviours, banks are able to create more personalised, contextual and predictive banking services. This, in fact, is the way they will remain relevant in the new era that is characterised by the threat of new market entrants and non-traditional competitors.

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In2IT Technologies

In2IT is a global technology services firm focused on providing IT consultancy, application development and maintenance, technology infrastructure services, programme and project management as well as future edge services to its clientele. In2IT Technologies constantly drive towards anticipating the rapidly changing technology landscape and the impact on clients.

In2IT Technologies is a technology practitioner that works along with its customers to help streamline processes, ensure optimal usage of deployed solutions and deliver a high performance customer-centric service. In2IT Technologies is driven by a passion to build innovative businesses for its clients. In2IT Technologies' experience shows that if it serves its clients well, its own growth will follow. With more than 80 global customers, In2IT Technologies strives to be the first choice for world's best talents. Through its Internal In2IT Academy, the company is committed to continuous learning and giving its practitioners freedom to innovate.

In2IT is present across nine cities in South Africa, with more than 60% of staff complement as local nationals. The company has an Africa Innovation Centre in Sunninghill, South Africa focused on social media, mobility, analytics and cloud (SMAC) and remote infrastructure management (RIM). In2IT is a CMMI Level 3, ISO 9001:2008, ISO 27000 and ISO 20000-1 certified company

Editorial contacts

Lesley Rencontre
Evolution PR
(011) 462 0679
lesley@evolutionpr.co.za
Saurabh Kumar
In2IT Technologies
(073) 080 8081
saurabh@in2ittech.co.za