14 minute read
TECHNOLOGY
from #228 March 2020
EMERGING TECH AND ITS POTENTIAL
Savio Tovar Dias, Senior Director at Avaya International, shares his projections on emerging technologies and how it will impact the financial services sector
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What emerging technology are you most excited about at the moment? For banks to meet and exceed today’s customer expectations, they need to deliver consistently excellent service across all channels, provide a hyper-personalised experience, support mobility with security, and empower employees for better collaboration and customer support.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a fundamental enabler of these objectives. However, presently, most AI projects in the sector are focused solely on entry-level chatbots that automate basic customer service interactions. We believe the potential for AI to positively impact customer experience extends far beyond this. This is why we are focused on delivering solutions that augment the intelligence of machines. By giving machines knowledge from all channels, we empower AI to create the right outcomes based on the right information. This in turn enables banks to drive intelligent self-service and significantly reduce errors during customer interactions—all leading to improved brand reputation and trust.
Mashreq Bank stands as prime example of a regional bank that has successfully implemented AI to its customers’ benefit. Working together with Avaya, they have deployed the region’s first digital engagement banking bot which acts as a visual and conversational virtual assistant. This enables their customers to access banking services and complete service requests almost entirely through an AI-powered ‘agent’. The ‘chatbot agent’ can verify customers, complete transactions, and sign up for new services on the customer’s behalf— from anywhere and through any device.
What are your projections on technology and its impact on the financial services sector this year? In our latest Avaya Global CX Happiness Index report, we uncovered that for the banking sector, staff knowledgeability, using digital technologies to enhance efficiency, and providing a consistent level of service every time, are among the top five factors driving customer happiness.
Agent Scripting, a flexible, browser-based call flow scripting platform that provides the ability to define in- and out-bound call flows. Addressing inconsistencies in agent skill sets with a clear rules-based script that adapts in realtime as conversations progress, Agent Scripting provides on-screen, step-by-step guidance to better navigate customer interactions. And through integration with CRM and other back-end systems, the capability can also make invaluable customer data instantly available to agents, enabling more effective service and contributing to a faster time to resolution. AI Routing, which enables enterprises to leverage AI to more effectively pair customers with the most suitable agents. With a user-friendly dashboard, the solution provides real-time insights and actionable management controls so that even the most demanding customers can have their issues resolved by being paired with the best-trained agents. Avaya IX Teamspace, which deepens integration with the back office by providing open, rich media chat and messaging capabilities between customers, agents and backoffice staff, for easier, faster, real-time communication and collaboration. By making back-office subject matter experts easily accessible to customers and front-line agents and providing them real-time context of the customer journey, IX Teamspace can drastically increase resolution speed for customer queries and issues for improved business results.
What would you say is the biggest challenge for banks right now? The banking sector, across the globe, is at the forefront of digital transformation—in fact, according to Ovum's recent ICT Enterprise Insights report, the banking sector recorded a digital maturity progression index score of 42 per cent, a close second to the telecom sector at 43.9 per cent.
This commitment to innovation has had a measurable positive impact on customer satisfaction. According to research conducted by Avaya—SuperServe: Five Strategies For Superior Customer Service—20 per cent of consumers found that banks most exceeded their customer service expectations, a number that is more than double that of consumers who said the same of other service-centric industries such as airlines, hotels, restaurants and retail.
— Savio Tovar Dias, Senior Director, Avaya International
As fintech technologies, that were once revolutionary, now begin to reach maturity, banks have the challenge of identifying the next set of cutting-edge solutions that are now so vital in gaining the differentiating digital edge. At the same time, the sector is bound by strong compliance and governance regulations, so any innovation must conform to these restrictions. So the key challenge CXOs and IT decision makers in banks face is defining a long-term vision and ensuring the speed of execution to stay at the forefront of the market.
Tell us more about Avaya Spaces and how important it is for the Middle East market? The way teams interact with data, technology and their colleagues is rapidly evolving into a richer environment of converged digital channels and modes of communication. Gartner forecasts that by 2023, fewer than one-third of digital workers will choose the office as their preferred place to work. Organisations need to empower teams to work in more effective and productive ways with their preferred channels and touchpoints, wherever they may be and using whatever devices and platforms they choose. Avaya is giving organisations the ability to meet these needs with Spaces. This easy-to-use app integrates web meetings and team collaboration, allowing users to create cloud workspaces where they can message, meet, share content and manage tasks. Because Spaces is cloud-based, it is conveniently accessible from any device, via a browser or mobile device. This makes seamless collaboration and communication possible from anywhere, and at any time.
Moreover, Avaya Spaces will soon be available in over 60 countries, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and can support up to 500 video meeting participants. The app features connectivity with existing Avaya IX Collaboration Unit CU360 huddle and SIP-based video room systems and integrations with Google, Slack, Microsoft Office 365, Outlook, and Teams.
What can the market look forward from Avaya in 2020? In the coming year, we will focus on augmenting the intelligence of machines by giving them knowledge from all channels. By enabling AI to create the right outcomes based on the right information, we are enabling organisations to drive intelligent self-service and significantly reduce errors during customer interactions. An example of our innovation in this area is the conversational interactive voice response (IVR) with embedded biometrics that can identify customers and provide the option of continuing through visual IVR.
Avaya IX Spaces (Source: Avaya)
We are also empowering humans to choose the right customer experience and employee experience journeys by giving customers the ability to choose the channel of their choice with the guarantee of consistently exceptional service. We recognise that by 2020, customer journey analytics will be the main customer analytics investment, with 85 per cent of organisations investing to optimise cross-channel experiences.
In line with this, through the application of analytics, we are personalising interactions across the entire customer journey. For example, by identifying subtle and valuable patterns in human interactions, we facilitate better pairings between customers and agents, to drive better outcomes from resulting conversations. These analytics also feed into our powerful workforce enablement tools, delivering the ability to transform each employee into a super-agent and brand champion.
BANKING AND TECHNOLOGY: ARE THEY ON THE SAME PAGE?
Speaking to Banker Middle East, Vivek Raghavan, CEO, United MakGroup Technologies, detangles the cords to marry the needs of a bank’s business and the technologies required to achieve mandated objectives
STRENGTH IN SCALE, NOT NUMBERS? I n our experience with both large and small local and international banks in this region, we have seen that most of them have a great willingness to adapt to new technologies and digital innovations. They are often headed by teams of extremely tech savvy personnel which further helps fuel the quickness to adoption and have the prowess and maturity to foresee potential bottlenecks in the roll outs.
As consolidations and mergers bring some of the larger players together, we can see that this has helped drive fintech innovation to improve efficiencies and collaborations. Regional banks have the advantage of not being burdened by legacy solutions, have lower dependencies on branch networks, higher connectivity all of which help fortify their positions. They have now used this to their advantage and are now looking to be present in major financial capitals of the world. This expansion will lay the foundation and requirement for improved technology adoption that spans borders and matches their international counterparts. Then there is the whole other potential to invest in digitalisation, cloud solutions, customer experience, robotic process automation/intelligent process automation and process intelligence. We do strongly feel that majority of banks and financial institutions will see that their main resource is within the Big Data they all have available to them. This sets a solid foundation which allows them to invest in future technologies.
SETTING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT Banks have increasingly become tech companies trying to save time by cutting down process steps in every client transaction. Banks therefore, have to become more efficient and measure their efficiency in how many more transactions they can do per second (loans, deposits, wealth management, trade finance pass throughs). Robotic process automation is the natural choice to secure the utmost efficiency while artificial intelligence is a must to support mass personalisation based on client profiles.
Majority of clients have dipped their hands into it and are now at the stage of deciding how exactly this fits into the grand scheme of things. When considering automating processes, we recommend clear process intelligence needs to be applied to understand actual workflows. These solutions lead to the challenging question regarding the road map for future cloud deployments. The question of which, what, and how is the of most discussions and often hinders current adoption of a solution based on the grounds of future viability of the same solution on the cloud.
This also automatically raises concerns surrounding security and compliance angles which have taken much more significance today (in comparison to the past). The business and technology sides, now more than ever, need to agree before any technology solution is implemented. Cybersecurity is a major concern and hence any solution that the business wants to adopt needs to pass through very stringent security and data compliance requirements set by the respective bank’s technology departments.
Banks are bound more tightly now to be in line with global policies and regulations in order to fight off potential financial and economic crimes. This has resulted in them being extra cautious about deployments and scope of work for any project. Since banks collect a lot of customer data and, when a technology solution is implemented in the bank, the vendor gets access to this data and governance around how this is being handled and what safeguards are available, are all major criteria in deciding the solutions. The key for any customer when faced with technology challenges is to partner with someone who will take full ownership of a project. When deploying a solution, for example, the bank needs someone who will understand their particular challenge and situation and look for a solution holistically. In an ideal world, a client would be able to hire their own experts in each of the technology solutions they have deployed. However, in today’s economic climate and with rapid changes in technology, this is neither possible nor viable.
Furthermore, in mission critical environments at banks where data, integrations, compliance and security are extremely vital areas of concern, you need to have a partner that has a substantial amount of experience in that very same space. Systems integrators working within this area need to have a clear understanding of the security architecture followed by both global and local organisations and be ready to meet and support these requirements. Some examples of this include the ability to recognise and combat vulnerability scanning as a security threat, and counter data storage security and compliance requirements.
— Vivek Raghavan
GROWING PAINS The biggest, or rather the most complex, obstacle we have seen financial institutions face here is with aligning their business requirements with technology solutions available. They need to focus and entrust this alignment to experts in the market who have the dedicated resources, long term stability, technological knowhow and customer-oriented approach.
We have occasionally observed a tendency in the market for organisations looking for transactional deals—be it client side or vendor side. Technology must be seen as a tool to help banks in achieving their strategic goals and they must focus on aligning the solutions out there to their own requirements and not merely mimic what others are doing or take on solutions simply because they are the most gainful in the short run.
2020 PLANS While many systems integrators are buckling under the pressure of the current economic situation, we are using this as an opportunity to strengthen our position in this market. We are confident about our presence in this region and are looking to further expand our current footprint with new full-fledged sales and support offices in neighbouring markets. We are using this current time of volatility in the market to look inside our own organisation to further enhance efficiencies, upskill ourselves, add to our portfolio and create new opportunities for growth.
FIRST LINE OF DEFENCE
We have a quick chat with Shoaib Yousuf, Principal at Boston Consulting Group, on cybersecurity trends for 2020
Shoaib Yousuf
What cyberthreats should we look out for this year? Cybercriminals continue to rob banks ‘because that is where the money is’, and they are becoming more sophisticated. A rising number of digital touchpoints creates an expanding choice of windows through which cyber attackers can enter. Today, attackers will often use ransomware or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as a noisy diversion, while quietly making fraudulent fund transfers.
Nation-states are also getting increasingly bold. The role of banking systems is vital to the economic climate of countries, which makes them sensitive targets. In fact, we see more and more examples of destructive cyberattacks carried out not for monetary, but for political objectives. As digitisation booms, the problem is becoming ever more serious.
Where do you see areas of improvement for banks in cybersecurity? As cyberthreats intensify, financial institutions are becoming more proactive in protecting themselves and their customers. We have observed an increasing number of banks focusing on implementing technologies to counter cyberthreats, which is a good start.
However, our research shows that most breaches happen due human erors and process shortcomings, and technology alone could not have prevented the breach.
For instance, cloud breaches is an area that is in dire need of better security processes. Several of the biggest banking breaches of the last year can be traced back to failures of cloud security process—not being vigilant about which employees get access rights or lacking a process to monitor data flows.
How to best approach cybersecurity issues? In Europe and the US, the largest banks have recognised cybersecurity as a strategic issue for the C-Suite and Board of Directors. Some of these banks have defined cybersecurity to be an ‘existential risk’ and have granted their chief information security officer (CISOs) vast budgets to tackle the challenge. Budget is important, but even more important is culture and leadership. Hackers look for the weak spots, so good security practises must be integrated across every business unit and back-office process.
Executive leadership and drive is often the difference between having a cyberdefence plan that looks good on paper and having an integrated cyber programme that properly works when tested.
IFCD
THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
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