Technology in Banking and Finance

One of the casualties of a recessionary environment is the luxury of not changing the way businesses price their products and services. In order to keep up their top lines, most organization have started innovating their pricing strategies moving it closer to the transaction based model, factoring in the risk and cost. Knowing the cost at various levels is relevant for price optimization, capacity utilization and operational efficiency. As there is a growing importance to measure the productivity and profitability of service delivery channels like ATM, Internet payment gateways, branches, etc Banks need to implement costing practices at various departments. Today costing is generally a grey area in banks. This is because most banks do not know what exactly the cost of an individual transaction level is. Unlike manufacturing industries where cost at an individual unit can be arrived easily, banks product cost cannot be fully arrived at until it is consumed, and the costs are distributed...

I cannot help but think how things go awfully wrong many a times because you as an individual or organization has not believed on what he/it has done through the long time it takes to take the tree to bear fruits.I have seen so many instances both professionally and personally now, how things have gone off track just when you do not know how close you are to where you wanted to go. One of the primary reasons for things to go amuck i see is interference, taking actions for too many things too many times. My travel to Africa couple of weeks back was a challenge on my patience. I got a seat next to a lady with a fussy kid. The kid cried, slept, cried, slept, cried slept.... and the cycle continued till we reached Dubai. I did not know what went through the kid and why it was crying. The kid did not let it self be put on the seat belt and was rolling all over creating a mess. I was loosing patience and had a deep urge to scare the child so much that it kept quite for the rest of the journe...

I watched the google wave developers demo on friday since i was curious about its potential. It has already created waves on the internet and is currently being talked about as the next big thing coming from google. Google wave is a communication protocol built on the principles and architecture of operational transformation . It is a client and server based solution that google aspires to release as an open source so that organization can implement their own wave servers and clients into which their users could login and communicate. So what is a wave and whats in it for an organization like banks and users like me and you that would make our life simpler and more powerful ? Google wave is a new way of communication that integrates real time messaging, emails and other powerful features into a convergent platform. Waves could be created and sent across multiple users just like email. The waves enable users to concurrently communicate with other users in real time where changes made b...

Over the last three years, any bank i met up with irrespective of the region, size, how tech savvy the bank is, or if the bank had a data warehouse or an enterprise CRM; all had a common concern 'The challenge is clean customer data' . Essentially, since most banks operate on a silo mode, the customer information gets defined in different places to varying levels of data quality, leading to a 'Polluted customer data' from an enterprise point of view. This is a concern for all banks going in for any new enterprise solution since interfacing and data quality is an issue. The question is 'how do you identify and link up the related customers defined at various business silos'? This answer is in the quality of customer data and the available parameters. In some countries regulations have played their part in the solution by implementing KYC (countries like India now lay a lot of emphasis on KYC) norms. With KYC, linking up customers is possible using parameters like...

Its been a week of Nigeria, F1 and IPL2 for me. I am almost ready to leave back to Bangalore and it was a week of witnessing the new emerging players, tremendous competition and good performance exhibition under unfavorable circumstances. Firstly the F1 race at Shanghai, it is the first ever win (first and second place) for the Red bull team and Vettel's performance was excellent given the competition and toughest of the wet weather conditions. Red bull has not been the favorites of the teams but now its definitely something to watch out for, way to go!! IPL season 2 going on at South Africa is nothing short of spectacular, especially since what Lalit modi managed to achieve in a short notice of 3 weeks. Between all the internal politics (interesting blog by the fake IPL player !!), pressures among the teams to stay on the league tables and weather challenges I think IPL has managed to be a great success with a decent media coverage everywhere (even in a not so cricket crazy countr...

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...

To continue on product innovations, to reach newer segments of the banking market i was thinking about telecom. Why there is such an explosive growth(in terms of reach to common man) in telecom industry versus a hindu rate of growth when it comes to traditional banking. I am not talking about the 20% growth in revenues the banks are making by doling out home loans and credit cards to the consuming public at various interest rates. I am talking about parallel's to pre paid cards, small recharge tickets available at the beedi shops, life time free incoming facilities, bundled products like land line + internet + IPTV, etc that is making telecom companies add 3-4 million subscribers month on month. Is it that the need for a common man to have banking facility is minimal when compared to his need to communicate? I think the answer to this is the way we understand customer segmentation. Unlike the uniformity in need to communicate, the need to have banking services varies widely across ...