Technology in Banking and Finance

When i wrote about the need for banking for a common man in poor Indian villages in February 2009 little did i know that just about the same time elsewhere a start-up was working on this idea. Yesterday this start-up was featured in the Times of India. The company i am talking about is EKO financial services started by Abhishek sinha and Anubhav sinha. This start-up tied up with SBI to offer no frills account to the people representing the bottom of the pyramid. A common man can walk to a store, similar to buying a Sim card on furnishing identity documents can open an account within 10 minutes. And similar to recharging his mobile currency can deposit money into his account by handing over cash to the shop keeper who acts as a customer service point of EKO. Money transfers can be through the phone. I am immensely happy to see this innovation happening at the grass root levels and also very optimistic about the future of this goldmine. All the best to EKO team. The following video shows...

Publications: CFO , Rfpconnect Volume based incremental or tiered pricing is not new to most of the banks. Banks use this technique to incrementally drive revenues from existing customers by giving him volume pricing or discounts. Depending on the capability of the product system, banks may decide to keep the competitive price definition inside or outside the system. The challenge is in building in tremendous flexibility by parametrization of the solution. A white paper co authored by me is published in CFO.COM and RFPCONNECT.COM

What do you and me as individuals do when the going gets tough economically? Double check our telephone bills? See if we used them more than we should have; check if there is a better plan out there with better rates which was not so important before? Weigh whether to use your car or public transport now depending on the need to use. Make sure that you bought groceries and vegetables at the best rates that were never so important since you loved the place you shopped more than the value. Double check all the rebate coupons that you never cared to check on before. There are two keys things that I am talking about, one is controlling the overhead costs or expenditures and the second is plugging the leakages that existed before but you cared less. I believe similar to this, banks in today's environment will have to closely consider performance metrics like costs, profitability of product and revenue leakages. Measurement of costs and product profitability are in practice today, but i...