Who's Who of Financial Services Asia 2011/12

the

Who’s Who

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of financial services ASIA

CHIEF PERSPECTIVES CEO insights from Citibank, AXA, Allianz and YES Bank FUTURE ROADMAPS Super regionals, Super budgets, Slimmer margins ON THE MOVE Mobilising Payments

EXCLUSIVE CXO INTERVIEWS Sandra Stonham, DBS Bank Pravir Vohra, ICICI Bank Lim Khiang Tong, OCBC Bank Sumit Puri, Prudential Life Susan Hwee, UOB Vikrum Sud, Citi Michael Leung, China Construction Bank + more

2011/2012 Annual Directory

Plus: Asia’s top product, service and solution providers

The Who’s Who of fINANCIAL seRVICes GeNeRAL MANAGeR, edIToRIAL Angela Horvat

GeNeRAL MANAGeR, sALes John Todd

edIToRIAL dIReCToR Patrice Gibbons

Contents

jouRNALIsT Melanie Timbrell

CoNTRIBuToRs Michael Araneta Li-May Chew Emilie Ditton Christophe Uzureau

suB edIToR Kimberley Gaskin

ReGIoNAL dIReCToR Glen Myles

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Effecting progressive change in Asia

It’s time to think differently about mobile payment systems

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Fostering deep customer engagement

Driving customer engagement, retention and acquisition

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VICToR KuK, Ceo, souTh eAsT AsIA ANd GReATeR ChINA, AXA

ANIL WAdhWANI, Ceo, CITIBANK sINGAPoRe

oN The MoVe: MoBILIsING PAyMeNT sysTeMs

eXeCuTIVe RouNdTABLe

ACCouNT MANAGeRs Emma Charter Toby Wilcock Lily Liu

CoNfeReNCe PRoduCeRs Magdalen Wong Tom McDonald

eVeNTs MANAGeR Wendy Simpson

eVeNTs & MedIA CooRdINAToR Courtney Longrigg

ACCouNTs Liz Haywood

dATABAse AdMINIsTRAToR Margarita Tilio

GeNeRAL eNQuIRIes info@fst.asia

PuBLIsheR FST Media 16 Collyer Quay #10-00 Singapore 049318 Phone: +65 6818 9837 Fax: +65 6818 9708

dR LuTz fuLLGRAf, ReGIoNAL Ceo, AsIA PACIfIC/MeNA dIVIsIoN, ALLIANz GLoBAL CoRPoRATe ANd sPeCIALTy Mitigating global corporate risk

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suResh seThI, GRouP PResIdeNT, TRANsACTIoN BANKING, yes BANK

eXeCuTIVe RouNdTABLe

Enabling efficiency through business transformation

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The Who’s Who of fINANCIAL seRVICes

Asia’s most influential decision-makers reveal first-hand insights into the trends and evolving disruptions facing the financial services sector

The recipe for successful innovation

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suPeR ReGIoNALs, suPeR BudGeTs, sLIMMeR MARGINs

The desire for greater customer centricity and the push to consolidate IT and operations will be the key drivers of technical innovation

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sWoT ANALysIs

This exclusive report reveals 10 predictions that insurers need to focus on to revolutionise their business strategies

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eXeCuTIVe RouNdTABLe

The power of customer centric business models

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eXeCuTIVe RouNdTABLe

Evoking loyalty through multi-channel innovation

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dIReCToRy LIsTINGs

A concise catalogue of Australia’s leading product, service and solution providers w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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www.fst.asia

Where the Market Meets

Financial Services Technology Media where the market meets

Foreword It is with great pleasure that we bring you the inaugural edition of The Who’s Who of Financial Services Asia. This landmark publication duly recognises the notable innovators within the financial services sector, while applauding the true believers of business-enabling technology.

For the first time, Asia’s finest come together in an unparalleled portrait of those shaping the future of technology investment and strategy. In the ensuing pages you will read detailed insight into the trends, opportunities and emerging threats set to impact your industry and the views of those shaping its direction.

When asked what they see as the next frontier of financial services, Asia’s top financial executives cite social media, mobile channels and payments platforms as key initiatives.

All are concerned with how to underpin smarter selling, servicing and delivering engagement strategies tailored to today’s increasingly demanding and technology savvy customer.

It stands to reason that customer centricity and analytics are high on the agenda. The increasing focus on providing a seamless cross-channel experience, through integrated multi-channel touch points, is set to increase development in areas including channel innovation and alternative distribution methods. These varied elements are seen as imperative for business survival.

The industry analysts who track IT investment predict an emergence of super-regional strategies, tightening margins and increasing technology budgets going forward. They expect super-regional banks to define new ways of rolling out core projects such as banking, outsourcing and cloud computing while technology budgets will grow, courtesy of continued efforts to modernise core banking systems.

All this will be played out against a backdrop of new regulatory guidelines driven by consumers’ insatiable appetite for technology consumption.

This publication would not be complete without the all-inclusive standout directory of Asia’s leading product, service and solution providers. This definitive guide is designed to equip you with a concise review of prospective partners across a broad spectrum of categories and assist in streamlining your decision making processes.

On behalf of the team at FST Media, it gives me great pride to present you with Asia’s consummate guide to financial services success. I hope you gain as much inspiration reading the enclosed as we did in compiling it.

Patrice Gibbons Editorial Director FST Media

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Effecting progressive change in Asia Victor kuk

certain factors that have recently come into play have the makings of a perfect storm that will drive change across the insurance industry in Asia.

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The Asia-Pacific region is undergoing a momentous shift, with people experiencing change at an unprecedented pace. As old lifestyle and consumption habits die and new ones emerge, the insurance industry, like many others, is faced with the challenge of adapting quickly to meet and surpass customers’ expectations.

Certain factors that have recently come into play have the makings of a perfect storm that will drive change across the insurance industry in Asia. Success will come to dynamic organisations that possess cultures which reinforce smart risk-taking and the willingness to effect progressive change.

One of the biggest drivers of change in Asia is the technology revolution. By 2014 half of all internet users will live in Asia. By 2015, three in five phones sold in the region will be smartphones, according to analyst firm IDC. These figures demonstrate that Asians are becoming increasingly reliant on technology, translating into a greater willingness, and expectation, to buy basic types of insurance using non-traditional devices and platforms.

Through technology our customers are expecting not only quicker service, but greater control over managing their policy directly online. Our role is not only about enabling our end-customers, but our agents too, with the right tools to support their needs. Our online platforms ease the burden for our agents by allowing them to obtain quotations and issue policies on the spot, to report claims online as well as make enquiries on claims status.

For our end-customers we’ve introduced a SmartClaims mobile application in Singapore and Hong Kong that is already available on the iPhone and has recently been extended to the Android platform. While an accident can be traumatic, our app helps alleviate some stress by allowing customers to record important information at the accident scene and send it instantly to the selected workshop, where the claims process can start.

Another big driver for change is Asia’s economic boom. The increasing personal wealth of the emerging markets, especially China, India and Indonesia, will also drive increased awareness of the need to protect

assets. With more accumulated personal wealth, people will rely more on banks to manage their savings and financing needs.

This in turn, leads to the rapid growth of Bancassurance, a significant channel for insurers as they can gain access to large customer databases.

AXA has been consistently investing in the Bancassurance channel with new major partnerships with ICBC Bank in China and the extension of our life insurance partnership with Bank Mandiri in Indonesia to include general insurance products as well.

The increasing number of natural catastrophes the region has experienced is a wake-up call for all. With the spate of floods and earthquakes people are more conscious about the need to protect themselves and their personal assets against the forces of nature.

When the recent floods occurred in Thailand, AXA responded by setting up a provisional AXA SWAT claims team to reach incident loss locations within 24 hours of being allowed to enter the area. Consequently we were the first insurer to set up a claims centre with the use of cars during the recent incident in the Nakhonratchasima Province.

Innovation is what enables us to ride the tides of change, not only maintaining the company, but setting it apart from the pack.

We recognise the need to foster a culture of out-of-the-box thinking, which in 2008 saw the launch of the AXA Innovation Awards, a world-wide internal competition to encourage and recognise efforts of those on the frontline who are innovating on the job. This initiative led to AXA being the first insurer in Singapore to offer a claims service guarantee for our motor policyholders.

Over the next five years, AXA’s objective is to become the preferred insurer across Asia – preferred by distributors, employees and customers alike. To the community at large we also want to be known as a responsible corporate citizen in Asia. We will not be able to achieve this if we are not fully committed to innovation.

Victor Kuk is Chief Executive Officer, South East Asia and Greater China, AXA

Performance + Reliability + Security = Better ROI For Financial Services

The Intel® Xeon® Processor E7 Family will enable nancial services institutions to deliver new levels of service, performance, security and data reliability for their Mission Critical transactional and analytics systems.

To learn about how Intel delivers better ROI and performance for nancial services, please visit http://www.intel.co.uk/fsi “Sterci helps nancial institutions to reduce their TCO while enabling high performance for nancial messaging, both SWIFT and non-SWIFT. Sterci’s messaging platform Stelink, running now on Intel Xeon-based servers and Linux is a highly scalable and mission-critical solution offering multi-network connectivity” Sébastien Vallon, Regional Manager, Sterci Asia “The Intel Xeon/Solaris x86 platform provides our customers with unparalleled levels of scalability, while offering the best price/performance ratio on the market. The latest version of the Kondor+ suite, powered by Xeon/Solaris, established new records in complex structured products pricing and large trade processing volumes.”

Paul Dragan, Business Development Manager, Risk, Thomson Reuters “StockBanQ analyzes and monitors hundreds and thousands of stock portfolio. As it is powered by the Intel Xeon platform, StockBanQ is able to scale effortlessly, providing investors worldwide with timely investment cues and optimizing their portfolios at the same time over various channels like the Web, e-mail, twitter and mobile devices” Kumaran Pillai, CEO, Protégésoft “FinArch helps nancial institutions manage risk and meet compliance needs with solutions that automate and simplify nance, risk and compliance management. Based on Intel Xeon/Microsoft, FinArch is a best-of-breed scalable, reliable and mission-critical solution that allows the world’s leading nancial services rms to mitigate risk and meet regulatory and other critical reporting requirements.”

Jeff Tan, VP Asia-Pacific, FinArch

To request for more information, please contact intel-fsi@pmgasia.com.sg Intel, the Intel logo, and Xeon, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Copyright © 2011 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved

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Fostering deep customer engagement Anil wAdhwAni

instead of treating the customer as a passive recipient of information and services, the smart banking concept puts these elements within the control of the customer through the use of enabling tools.

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The advent of technology in recent years has inexorably altered consumer behaviour and expectations. Speed and convenience have become more than just buzzwords and any good innovation must serve one primary purpose: enabling and empowering the customer.

The way banks operate will likewise have to keep pace with technology and the changes in consumer habits technology has generated.

The traditional notion of banking being confined to the opening hours of a branch, for instance, can no longer hold. Rather, it will have to be about giving the customer control over the ‘how’ and ’when’.

The onus is now on financial institutions to evolve in their interaction with customers, harnessing technology to achieve a level of engagement that is meaningful. Citibank, I believe, is at the forefront of this.

The proliferation of mobile phones, particularly smartphones with data capabilities, is powering such a change. Singapore, for example, has one of the highest penetration levels of smartphone users in the world.

Recognising the potential of the mobile phone as a channel for banking, Citibank launched Citi Mobile in Singapore, predicated on empowering customers to obtain account information and perform banking transactions on the go. Internet banking, as a forerunner to this, continues to be an indispensable channel, but mobile banking takes the convenience factor to a whole new level. Introduced with an array of functionalities including funds transfer and bill payment, the Citi Mobile proposition has since been further enhanced to include location-based services and even allow for the redemption of credit card rewards among other refinements. All of these are built upon providing the customer with convenience and the ability to bank any time, anywhere – in order words – putting control in the customer’s hands.

But lest you think that this is technologypush innovation at work, think again.

Customers want and have come to expect convenience and immediacy in their interactions with banks. The Citi Fin-Q (financial quotient) 2010 survey revealed that some 54 per cent of Singapore residents want to be able to do more of their day-

to-day banking using mobile phones. An overwhelming majority of respondents (77 per cent) also believed that digital banking services have made managing their finances much easier.

Certainly the face-to-face human element in a bank’s interaction with its customers cannot be replaced. Bricks and mortar banking will remain the cornerstone of how banks provide services and advisory. But as customer needs evolve, so too, must the conventional branch setting as we know it. Citibank’s Smart Banking branch at Singapore’s Orchard SMRT train station, is a case in point. The flagship transit branch creates a differentiated customer experience that attracts, engages and connects with the customer, leveraging several pillars including technology, branch design, digital content management and the innovative use of media.

Instead of treating the customer as a passive recipient of information and services, the smart banking concept puts these elements within the control of the customer through the use of enabling tools. The interactive touchscreen panels that line the exterior and interior of the branch allow customers to browse for information on products and services at their leisure. If the customer desires a deeper level of engagement, there are ‘face-to-face’ phone banking and video-conferencing facilities for interaction with banking specialists, as well as in-branch personal bankers and service bankers. Other technological features within the branch include a workbench with Apple terminals for account opening and other services; and iPads carried by staff. In addition, to cater to the need for speed and immediacy, the branch provides a range of instant services including instant account opening and the issuance of credit cards within an hour.

In today’s age, technology and innovation have become all-pervasive, permeating every aspect of modern life. This is a reality that the financial services industry should embrace and harness to deepen its engagement with customers and meet their needs better.

Citibank is committed to doing so.

Anil Wadhwani is Chief Executive Officer, Citibank Singapore

DON’T JUST BUILD FOR CLOUD. BUILD FOR YOUR CLOUD.

Move beyond.

In today’s business environment, business agility depends on IT agility.

At VMware, we’re helping IT departments untangle complexity and enable a more agile enterprise. Through our industry-leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions, we can help you move beyond—to your cloud, where accelerated IT delivers accelerated results for your business. www.vmware.com/movebeyond

© 2011 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Mitigating global corporate risk Dr lutz fullgraf

Never before has there been a greater need for integrated risk management that is globally co-ordinated and managed, but locally delivered.

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Increasing globalisation and consolidation of industries are fundamentally changing the risk management landscape, and with these changes come new challenges for international risk management.

Around the world, in politics and in trade, boundaries are shifting. The 21st century brings with it an ever-increasing change of pace. From merger and acquisitions activity to outsourcing and the growing internationalisation of the value chain, new risks are emerging – all of which require a dynamic and flexible response. Global businesses therefore require global solutions, so risk management has never been more challenging or more important.

Other key drivers include increased regulation, which creates the additional need for transparency and corporate governance. Companies that operate across international jurisdictions are also faced with multi-national legal and fiscal environments and are subject to increasing exposures and the potential for international litigation.

There is growing pressure for managements to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of risk management, especially on a globally co-ordinated basis.

Companies are suddenly confronted with questions about who owns the risk, who has to secure insurance cover, where to buy cover, what regulations apply and what are the terms and conditions. Multi-national risk exposures are naturally complex.

Never before has there been a greater need for integrated risk management that is globally co-ordinated and managed, but locally delivered.

Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty (AGCS) has an established reputation as a leading provider of bespoke international insurance programs (IIP) for multi-national clients. Each IIP consists of a centrally co-ordinated combination of local policies and a master policy which provides cover on a Difference in Conditions, thereby harmonising cover for the benefit of corporate clients across all locations.

IIP clients range from smaller companies with only a few locations abroad to

the largest global corporations with the most complex exposures spanning dozens of countries.

To all such clients, an Allianz IIP offers risk adequate local policies issued considering local specifics and client exposures in order to achieve compliance with local regulatory and fiscal rules. Limitations in the local policies are addressed by the Allianz master cover to accommodate coverage gaps at the local level.

An IIP also provides transparency and contract certainty, efficiency through a centrally co-ordinated claims handling process, an aligned approach to risk management and loss control and centrally recorded information on exposures, policies and claims. Various locations, each with their own specific requirements, can be accommodated within a combination of local policies embedded in a global ‘umbrella’ of coverage.

Few, if any, insurance companies are able to match our ability to offer clients such a harmonised approach to risk management on an international basis, through our network across 150 countries. We operate on a single risk carrier focusing on international clients and benefiting from a single global balance sheet and a ‘Very Strong’ security rating.

We are also positioned to harness the combined resources of the Allianz Group, and offer an extensive product range across a full spectrum of corporate risk.

The response to a claim is the key test of any insurer, and this is never more so than with an IIP. Allianz fields an experienced and qualified global claims team, which is integrated into each client team from inception, offering customised claims handling procedures and extensive worldwide resources for local claims.

Adopting a simple and transparent approach based on communication, we aim to provide exemplary service, centrally co-ordinated yet locally deployed.

Dr Lutz Fullgraf is Regional Chief Executive Officer, Asia Pacific/MENA Division, Allianz Global Corporate and Specialty

who ’s who of fs i

2011 2011 2011

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The recipe for successful innovation suresh sethi

the financial services industry is evolving at the cumulative speed of all other industries innovations.

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Co-creation is the perfect recipe for creating innovation. Organisations partnering to bring about change have to put forward their best resources to innovate, leveraging mutual core competencies and their underlying common attributes to create mutual advantages. This is best done with alliances in an industry different to yours. Other industries can reflect common opportunities and problems and provide solutions for the problem you are facing.

Financial services and telecoms are two industries that illustrate this point very well. In the financial services industry, the overarching focus is to enable all-round inclusive growth through financial participation – boiling down to creation of financially and economically viable business models to facilitate opening and enablement of new accounts. The telecom industry provides the direction on this front in establishing an over-the-counter, widelydistributed enabling network for provision of SIM connections.

A telecom operator tying up with a bank can help execute healthy Know Your Customer (KYC) documentation for the bank and the bank can facilitate seamless payment processing for the telecom partner.

Finance is the fulcrum for the evolution of all other industries. An innovation in any industry is complimented by a commensurate innovation in the financial services industry, be it in payments, collections or processing. Partners focusing their efforts a step before banking is required, and a step after the banking is done, will help create common advantages.

The good news is that to support the speed of innovation of all other industries, the financial services industry is evolving at the cumulative speed of all other industries.

At YES BANK we believe in true partnership and innovation by leveraging the fundamental attributes of our partners to our mutual advantage. These partnerships include: • Working on a partnership with a telecom player which has a presence in the corridors of the country where remittance flows terminate but where we do not have our own branch presence. Through this partnership we intend to harness the network of this telecom partner and

leverage the same to help us service remittance termination points • Aligning with a services company, which has a presence in areas accessible to the migrant labor population through internetenabled PC infrastructure at Points of Sales (POS). This alignment provides the ability to create remittance origination points without a branch presence in these areas • Working with an insurance company to co-create a cards-based program to service their customers to be able to receive and make medical-related insurance payments and have access to a healthier lifestyle through the cards-based program offered by the bank • Working with a Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) client to reverse the logistics of cash management by riding on their infrastructure to move cash into partner networks created by us on their route so that cash management does not become a giant issue to be managed at the end of the day.

The key attribute of innovation is to find common underlying attributes and synergies and the right partnership for cross-leveraging.

Finding the latent problems, which people have acclimatised to, is an important step towards innovation. Customers expect finance to come to where they are. Changing lifestyles have led to easier and more serviceable models around internet banking, mobile banking and pay-by-touch services.

The next front is social media. Customers need their loans/payment/commerce/ratings on these platforms and we will all require innovations for the money-rich, time-poor segment, which do not have the time to come to bank branches.

An unfortunate outcome of financial innovation is that it is copied quickly; the innovator takes the trophy for being a first mover, but the competition catches up very fast, learning from the mistakes of the first mover.

At YES BANK we look for opportunities where people have said a ‘no’ for whatever reason and put all our resources towards saying ‘yes’ in the same situation.

Suresh Sethi is Group President, Transaction Banking, YES BANK

a n a lys is // B a n k i n g

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B a n k ing // a n a lys is

The desire for greater customer centricity and the push to consolidate iT and operations will be the key drivers of technical innovation, say Michael Araneta and Emilie Ditton in this exclusive report.

Future Roadmaps Super regionals Super budgets Slimmer margins

It’s something old and something new for the Asia Pacific banking industry in 2011-12.

Macro-level trends will represent marked shifts from those seen during the global financial crisis and its immediate aftermath.

Across the region in general, the focus post-crisis has also altered. For example, we see mid-size institutions fighting back against all the more dominant large institutions, lending targets that are moderating from the aggressive numbers set in 2010, and an industry suddenly concerned about where it generates fee income.

Despite these areas of changing focus postcrisis, in 2011-12 we will see a continuance of trends that became apparent in the postcrisis year of 2010: we will see the continued emergence of super-regionals; ever-tightening margins; and growing technology budgets.

Our tracking activity across markets in the Asia Pacific point to several notable trends in the year ahead and have highlighted the corresponding areas of strategic IT initiatives that are the focus for banks within the Asia Pacific region. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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a n a lys is // B a n k i n g

Megatrends

1. Super-regionals continue to emerge In several reports last year we discussed the emergence of what we called super-regional institutions: institutions that stepped up their acquisitive activities in several markets in the region and in a short period of time created their own regional franchise. A key example of a major super regional strategy from an Australian bank in the Asia Pacific market is ANZ Banking Group (ANZ).

ANZ is expanding its regional footprint by moving into markets such as China, Japan and Indonesia. There are 10 or so superregionals that made their mark in 2010; these banks will continue to build traction in their markets of choice in 2011-12.

Super-regional stories will also emerge in Indonesia and China. Banks in other countries, specifically Thailand, South Korea, and the Philippines, will have to address why their super-regional strategies have been slow in the making.

2. The roadmap to one ASEAN A new angle to the super-regional story is the industry’s increasingly serious consideration of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), which will, if everything happens as planned, come to fruition by 2015.

Among other things, the AEC is expected to liberalise financial services in the

Asia/Pacific Banking Market – Total Spending in 2011 (per cent contribution)

17.7% 28.9% 15.7%

37.7%

HW

Internal IT Spend

Source: IDC

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IT Services

SW

There will be a push to allow more centralisation of iT and operations, enabling organisations to reap the benefits of technological innovations like cloud computing.

10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, allowing more and newer players to compete with domestic incumbents.

The region’s banks will have to seriously consider the prospects of a 700 millionstrong market and anticipate the unique trade finance and corporate banking opportunities therein. Alongside the creation of the AEC is the continued expansion of trade and economic cooperation with ASEAN partners like China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India — effectively made up of the major economies of the Asia Pacific.

Furthermore, banks will continue to urge the region’s central banks to establish a regional banking framework to support this economic integration and to standardise financial regulation. There will be a push to allow more centralisation of IT and operations, enabling organisations to reap the benefits of technological innovations like cloud computing.

3. The race for cheap deposits continues Banks are continuing to focus on acquiring the salary deposit account as the most important customer engagement driving ongoing customer loyalty and increasing revenue per customer. Three trends serve to make funding even tighter for banks in 2011-12 – an increasing interest rate environment that has already led to higher costs in the wholesale market; more aggressive competition domestically for customer deposits; and more stringent

regulation governing reserve ratios and liquidity coverage. Banks with significant CASA bases (ratio of deposits in the form of Current Account and Savings Account to the total deposits) continue to hold significant competitive advantage. The battle for retail deposits, frenetically fought in 2010, will persist in the coming year.

4. Loan growth targets back to normal While a few markets like Singapore and Indonesia will see their banks accelerate lending even further, we expect banks in general to moderate their loan growth targets in 2011-12. This scaling back does not portend lackluster lending activity in the next 12 months but rather underscores how exceptional past years have been, in terms of credit provisioning, huge stimulus programs, and hyper growth in bank lending. In some cases, this scaling back is also crucial to prevent overheating.

In China, the government will likely further push up reserve ratios and more strictly enforce that loan growth targets are not breached. These measures will accompany a continued increase in interest rates that are meant to prevent overheating of the economy. Meanwhile, Indian banks are scaling down previous loan growth targets as they are not seeing robust demand for loans outside of the infrastructure sector – a sector boosted by huge government infrastructure programs.

5. Disruption in fee income A rethink of banks’ fee income strategies is needed, in light of how current sources of fee revenue are being eliminated, capped or put under question. This is not specific to the Asia Pacific region; caps in debit card merchant fees (thanks to the DoddFrank Act) and the continued effort by Elizabeth Warren’s Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection against the ‘tricks and traps’ of the US banking industry, all point to how this is indeed an industry-wide undertaking. In Australia, new measures to cut exit fees on mortgages (although this was more to foster competition) and deposit account transaction fees (also seen in New Zealand) are already being implemented. In the Philippines, banks

B a n k ing // a n a lys is

will be able to take advantage of the new one-day central clearing system but will stand to lose a key source of fee income in returned cheques and draws on insufficient funds.

We believe that banks will offset fee revenue they will not be able to see out of their retail business by expanding fee generation from commercial and corporate banking, investigating opportunities not only in trade finance and transaction banking but also in advisory and consulting services. Other institutions will be looking at entirely new business models. Debt recovery services and cloud computing provisioning are two of the most frequently cited alternatives.

6. Mid-size institutions fight back The highest loan growth targets that we are seeing at the onset of 2011-12 come from ambitious mid-size banks in several markets across the region. To some extent, they continue a trend we saw in 2010 of mid-size players competing aggressively in the deposits business, most of the time to the detriment of margins. This aggressive drive is also seen in IT plans – if one were to look at the growth in bank IT spending for 2011-12, most of the highest growth rates would come from tier two players. These institutions will be spending on technology capabilities that will allow them to handle greater transaction throughput, bring on board many new customers, and support the expansion of their product offerings.

Their aggressive spending plans belie a conviction that their best chance to make it to the big leagues is during this period of economic revival.

7. All eyes on China Although Non-Performing Loan (NPL) ratios of most economies in the Asia Pacific region have been heading lower in recent months, China’s outstanding NPLs are expected to spike as loans reach maturity.

The true state of NPLs in the mainland, obscured by high total loan bases and inconsistent definitions of what actually constitutes an NPL, will be made more apparent in the coming year. Although China’s economy will continue to expand

due to increasing domestic demand, warnings have been raised specifically on the property sector. Alarmingly, hedge fund managers who have successfully profited from the US subprime market and European debt crises have positioned themselves to gain from this growing bubble. Substantial risks in the property sector have also been raised in Australia – where the big four Australian banks are uncomfortably exposed to the real estate market with more than 60 per cent of their total Australian loans made up of mortgages – and many other markets that saw great growth in a short period of time.

Banks and technology vendors alike will have to make sense of the macro-level drivers of the 2011-12 scenario, ultimately deciding which strategies and investment priorities of the past years need to be intensified and which need to be discarded in light of a drastically different marketplace.

The megatrends for 2011-12 will directly impact the nature and type of IT investments banks choose to make, and how these investments are prioritised. Across the Asia Pacific region the technology budgets of banks are growing, and with this banks are placing renewed confidence in the opportunity of successful IT implementations and upgrades. IT investments in the Asia Pacific region are primarily focused around delivering improvements in responsiveness to customers and driving effective customer data management, and capabilities and innovations in the channels. These priorities are driven by the desire to manage costs down while maintaining and driving their own competitive advantage to fare better against other banks in their market. IDC’s activities across the Asia Pacific region in tracking IT investment priorities among the banking industry point to the following:

Top 10 iT initiatives

1. Customer data management: The highest IT priority looking across the Asia Pacific region is the desire to deliver greater customer centricity. The path to this is managing a single view of the customer throughout the organisation. Customer data

iT investments in the Asia Pacific region are primarily focused around delivering improvements in responsiveness to customers and driving effective customer data management, and capabilities and innovations in the channels.

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management brings together disciplines of business intelligence, customer analytics, customer relationship management, customer data integration and master data management with the end goal of attaining an integrated, enterprise-wide view of each customer. A critical part of successful customer data management is ensuring the quality and reliability of customer information throughout the information lifecycle. Effective management of the data infrastructure itself will be crucial, necessitating attention to the areas of data warehousing, storage, and security.

Chief risk officers also need to fully appreciate the advent of technologies – such as cloud computing and virtualisation, social networking tools, and the launching of banking applications on mobile platforms.

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2. Channels: The second part of delivering greater customer centricity is to improve the customer experience in the channels.

Banks across the Asia Pacific region and in Australia, for example, are making investments and driving innovation in the channel. Investments in online and mobile channels are of particular priority, enabling customers to engage with banks in the way that they find most convenient. Amid various initiatives to bring online more channels (in both quantity and type), the strategy taken by banks should be focused on delivering a seamless cross-channel experience for customers, rather than being biased towards one channel in particular. This strategy extends to the remaking of the importance of the branch as a channel to the customer.

A key example of the reignited focus on

the branch as a channel is the advertising campaign of ANZ branches as approachable, customer-friendly environments.

3. Risk management and compliance: Risk management compliance will continue to be a key area of focus in 2011-12.

Risk management executives place concerted priorities on two main areas, the first of which is to focus on programs that made risk management the top strategic initiative in 2010 and equip themselves in filling up outstanding gaps within their risk management capabilities. Among these are credit risk models, regulatory compliance and security. The second task is to keep abreast of new developments, which include new regulatory regimes such as Basel III. Chief risk officers also need to fully appreciate the advent of technologies – such as cloud computing and virtualisation, social networking tools, and the launching of banking applications on mobile platforms – that can transform the banking business and manage the corresponding newly-minted risk implications pertaining to technology innovations.

4. Innovation in IT delivery: Cloud computing offers the possibility of reducing capital investment and enabling the capability of managing costs up and down as requirements change. Across the Asia Pacific region cloud computing implementations

B a n k ing // a n a lys is

in banking are primarily focused in applications such as email, UC and CRM, however regardless of whether banks take on cloud computing, or utility processing, or ‘new outsourcing’, the IT delivery model should align with the pay-as-you-go, use-asyou-please, and results-based principles that have gained ground in the region.

5. Core banking: The focus on core banking is particularly high in Australia where Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and National Australia Bank (NAB) are undertaking major core banking upgrades, and where smaller institutions are looking to improve their own core systems as well. Looking more generally across the Asia Pacific region, the number of core banking deals will increase slightly in 2011-12, reversing the years-long trend of declines. Taking cues from recent core banking strategies out of Australia, a more modular and component-based approach to core banking renewal has gained favor, allowing banks to address business processor data-related gaps within and around the core system, before tackling the core engine itself. Consequently, core banking renewal has become akin to business process reengineering projects.

6. IT governance: Effective IT governance helps ensure that the institutions’ technology directions are on track to support business goals, sustain strategies and objectives, and oversee IT resource management. CXOs also understand that the lack of governance would have a contributory role toward the failure of IT projects, an especially relevant consideration given the high profile outages in major banks of late.

7. IT security and fraud management: IT security and fraud management is a major and increasing area of focus for banks across the Asia Pacific region.

The greatest driver for banks in IT security will be fraud management. In tandem with the upsurge in economic activity, the region has been witnessing increased incidences of identity theft and internal fraud. The new models of IT delivery such as cloud computing, utility processing,

offshoring and super-regional hubbing will also necessitate new strategies to address data privacy and data integrity issues.

8. Trade and cash management: Across the Asia Pacific region corporate behavioral patterns and expectations of their banking relationships have changed dramatically in recent years, shaped by shifting intraregional trade flows. Asian corporates have begun to assess their financial needs in a more holistic manner, with a view to optimising their banking provider footprint, and gaining visibility over risk exposures on a global basis. The imminent creation of the ASEAN Economic Community will shape requirements as well. Unfortunately, solution providers (bank and non-bank) might have remained product-centric rather than transform themselves to be customer-centric.

9. Banking 2.0 and payment innovation: Web 2.0 has in a short period of time become a credible initiative for banks.

The more dynamic institutions have set up innovation centers to roll out their bank’s Bank 2.0 strategies. Innovation has extended to payments, broadly classified into two categories: innovative enhancements and disruptive innovation. These innovations will hopefully help banks access much-needed new sources of fee income.

10. Customer-centric business process reengineering: Part of delivering to the requirements of the customer and thereby delivering customer centricity will be manifested in how banks strive to design business processes that meet the changing requirements of the customer. Processes and sub-processes are being analysed for turnaround time, time to completion, and first-time right, all to ensure good customer experience. There is also growing insistence from customers that their requirements be reflected in products and services on offer – and right away.

*

Michael Araneta is an Associate Research and Consulting Director at IDC Financial Insights Asia Pacific and Emilie Ditton is a Senior Market Analyst at IDC Australia.

Market Forecast: Emerging Trends in Banking Customer centricity is clearly a main theme for 2011-12. Institutions will compete to be truly customercentric – or at least perceived to be so. The creation of new roles within the organisation specifically to foster customer centricity will also be encouraged, as they can speed up the bank’s effort to create points of differentiation Regulation: Anticipate a slew of regulatory guidelines on the management of IT resources as the industry takes to new models of IT consumption. Risk management continues to be a top initiative despite better times New technology: The executive suite should be aware of many new social and technology phenomena that can potentially transform the banking experience. Ultimately banks should be able to participate in the current cycle of innovation Service failures and operational outages are likely to increase in frequency in 2011-12 as the banking industry pursues many ambitious and innovative projects, and all at the same time Super-regional banks: They will define new ways of rolling out projects as core banking, outsourcing, cloud computing and Banking 2.0 Emerging models: The pay-as-yougo, use-as-you-please, and resultsbased principles of IT spending have truly gained ground. Banks will be ‘all ears’ for the opportunities these propositions offer.

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C o - s ponso R E d a R T i ClE

A Simple Solution to the Data Financial institutions today face a continuous battle to remain competitive as their marketplaces shift and change in ways that were unheard of just a few years ago. Analysing customer data in close to real-time has become a necessity so that new and targeted products can be offered in response to customers who demand solutions relevant to their lifestyle, and who don’t have the brand loyalty constraints that their parents might have had.

As if this wasn’t a sufficient challenge, regulatory requirements are much more stringent following the financial crisis and concurrent compliance has replaced yesterday’s more relaxed approach. Banks and insurance companies, exchanges and brokers are realising that without the capability to analyse huge amounts of data very rapidly they risk falling behind their competitors or facing legal issues because of non-compliance.

Traditional data management platforms have tried to respond to these increasing demands, but with limited success.

Bringing terabytes of information under management, keeping it up-to-date and making it instantly available for analytics are complex challenges.

Typically the IT department wastes valuable time in database and software administration, rather than working with their business peers to create value. Many organisations use the same database management systems that they use for their online transaction processing.

Unfortunately, general-purpose database systems lack the specialisation to excel at analytic processing as they require constant

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configuration and tuning. Aftermarket engineering work undertaken to specialise a general-purpose product is doomed to timeconsuming and costly failure.

It is evident that a new way of thinking is required if organisations are to successfully analyse ‘big data’ and free up resources so that information can be utilised rapidly to drive business decisions.

A highly successful and increasingly accepted solution involves moving away from traditional servers and databases and into the realm of specialised appliances that are dedicated to crunching enormous volumes of data, and are particularly suited to business analytics.

IBM Netezza’s data warehouse appliances are such devices and have been deployed in numerous financial services companies such as NYSE Euronext, CompuCredit, FICO and Nationwide, all of whom share a common requirement: the need to perform decision-critical analytics in lightning speed on huge amounts of data while driving costs down.

A dedicated data appliance will perform an order of magnitude faster than traditional databases like Oracle and Microsoft. When analytic queries take seconds instead of hours, a company has the opportunity to completely rethink its business processes and launch new products.

In addition, rather than needing an army of DBAs and specialists to manage the database, Netezza’s appliance offers outof-the-box performance, without requiring any tuning, indexing, or aggregating. When a single appliance scales to more than a

C o - s ponso R E d a R T i ClE

Complexity Crisis petabyte of user data it becomes not only a repository for information, but a vehicle for complex embedded analytics to be conducted at-scale on all the enterprise data possibly thousands of times faster than previously.

Advanced analytics have long held the promise of transforming business decisions by moving BI from reporting on historical information to predicting future outcomes and ultimately helping employees and partners pick the best alternative from a series of otherwise confusing choices at every decision point.

However, despite the obvious benefits, most organisations find it challenging to deploy advanced analytics across their enterprise and to ask complex questions of their growing data volumes because their traditional databases have simply not been able to cope with the technology demands.

Now that complex analytics can be embedded into high-performance data warehouse appliances, business transformation is feasible when questions directed across a range of information domains can be simply answered in seconds. Netezza users are performing embedded analytics in five key areas: Customer Intelligence; Compliance; Risk; Surveillance; and Deep Analytics.

Customer Intelligence analytics have been particularly successful for financial services organisations offering unique products to targeted customer demographics.

These would typically include modules for campaign management, target marketing, customer profitability, cross sell and up sell, and web response.

With the incredible performance benefits and improved time to market we are now realising, we can easily keep pace as data volumes spike. Netezza has simplified our entire data warehouse environment.

— NYSE Euronext, Chief Data Officer, Steve Hirsch

The other solution domains include analytics for regulatory reporting, SEC Compliance, transaction analysis, fraud detection, antimoney laundering, portfolio management and many others.

Internet transactions, referential information and raw data gathering technologies have added to the pervasive growth of data within all financial services organisations.

There is continual change, no steady state, no end point, yet the need to respond to these changing dynamics in support of business lines and regulators is more urgent than ever. Data warehouse appliances with embedded analytics offer a simple solution to this data complexity crisis.

At NYSE Euronext, Chief Data Officer Steve Hirsch agrees. He says, “What I particularly like is the power and simplicity of the Netezza appliance. With the incredible performance benefits and improved time to market we are now realising, we can easily keep pace as data volumes spike. Netezza has simplified our entire data warehouse environment”. www.netezza.com/simpleisbetter/fi-serv/ w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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i nsu r a nc e // a n a lys is

This exclusive report reveals 10 predictions that insurers need to focus on to revolutionise their business strategies.

By Li-May Chew

The recession of 2008-09 was a turbulent storm for the financial services industry. Fortunately, the insurance segment – bar a few casualties – was able to ride it out without sustaining notable damage. However, while the skies may have cleared and insurers are once again sailing through calmer waters, they are operating in a changing and highly competitive environment fraught with unpredictability and challenges. These stem from increasingly educated but demanding customers, graying populations, higher frequencies of pandemics and natural calamities, regulatory reforms and increasingly stringent regulatory norms. Meanwhile, although top lines are typically expanding – and rapidly in some instances – so too are policyholder claims, rising expenses and competitive pressures, particularly within the auto line of business.

Top 10 predictions

To understand what exactly sets leaders apart from the followers, IDC Financial Insights has compiled the top 10 predictions for 2011-12 to help insurers that want to thrive in this era of change stay sharp, strong, resilient, and relevant. The aim of our top 10 predictions is to bring together opinions on critical developments we foresee Asia Pacific-based insurers focused on for the new year.

Note that although technology is often the underlying tool to achieve these predictions, our list may not always correlate with insurers’ IT expenditures. Rather, the predictions reflect key approaches innovative insurers operating ahead of the curve are already integrating into their planning agendas for the year ahead. These predictions fall into four overarching themes that we are witnessing within the post-crisis landscape. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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Projected Change in Technology Spending, 2011 (Versus 2010) % 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 No change

1–10%

10–20%

20–40%

Above 40%

Change in year-on-year spending Source: IDC

1. Focus will remain on consolidating incongruent customer data and on identifying opportunities through analytical applications Data remains a valuable commodity, but insurers are increasingly being inundated with a plethora of information. This is spurring them to think more strategically about consolidating access to customer and transaction information though data warehouse or data mart projects and in utilising sophisticated business analytics to transform these into invaluable insights.

We see the integration of incongruent customer data and identification of opportunities through analytical applications featuring highly on the radar of insurance executives in 2011-12.

Efforts around channel innovation and alternative distribution outreach, such as bancassurance, internet, mobile and direct marketing, are extremely relevant in the context of reducing distribution costs.

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2. Insurers will continue on their unwavering drive toward real customer centricity Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is becoming a fundamental corporate-level strategy for progressive insurers as they seek to leverage customer-facing applications to enhance relationships with profitable customer segments into what is termed as true relationship management. We anticipate marketing investments in 2011-12 gravitating toward new media and digital marketing such as online display advertisements, digital events, email marketing and newsletters and social networking.

3. An integrated multi-channel delivery model will become a mainstay as policyholders increasingly demand interaction via several customer touch points The advent of electronic channels and the emergence of a technology-savvy consumer generation are radically changing the distribution strategies of insurers. Efforts around channel innovation and alternative distribution outreach, such as bancassurance, internet, mobile and direct marketing, are extremely relevant in the context of reducing distribution costs and enabling insurers to provide affordable insurance to the masses.

4. Cost management and change transformation initiatives will further dominate the agenda The need for change transformation and business optimisation initiatives is sweeping across the region to counter IT portfolios and client delivery models that are overly complex and cost inefficient. We expect business process improvements to continue centering around process reengineering to manage intermediaries, enhancing productivity such as via exception-based underwriting, improving customer satisfaction by increasing efficiencies while minimising transactional errors and responding with maximum agility to regulatory amendments or changing business environments.

C

C

M

M

Y

Y

CM

CM

MY

MY

CY

CY

CMY

CMY

K

K

5. Imperatives to develop strategic roadmaps for the replacement or enhancement of core systems will continue Legacy core systems are showing signs of age after years of patching and fixing, meaning that insurers in Asia Pacific need to continuously maintain, patch and fix their legacy systems. These need to complement existing IT architecture, have open, multifaceted, expansive application systems, and interface with existing systems without business interruptions.

6. Insurers will exhibit growing interest in alternative modes of consuming technology as they strive to utilise the most cost effective IT infrastructure Progressive insurers might have relatively tighter purse strings vis-à-vis the banks and

M

C

M

Y M

Y

Y Y M

CM

MY Y

MY

Y M YY

CY

Y Y Y

CMY

Y Y

Y

K

a n a lys is // i nsu r a n c e

once adoption concerns are ironed out, alternative technology delivery modes are likely to have potential to become the most transformative developments in the world of iT.

capital market firms but are not exempted from needing to remain cost conscientious.

We are thus witnessing keener interest in the adoption of alternative technology delivery modes that are based on flexible, pay-per-use models such as cloud computing, with key Japanese insurers having already jumped into the cloud bandwagon. Once adoption concerns are ironed out, alternative technology delivery modes are likely to have potential to be among the most transformative developments in the world of IT. 7. Alternative lines like health and micro-insurance will be poised to become the next hotspots as carriers diversify revenue streams The year ahead will continue to see insurers broaden their horizons to ancillary lines of businesses such as health, micro and travel insurance, and build up internal expertise around these areas as they attempt to capture alternative customer segments and diversify revenue streams. To ensure that these new offerings – for instance microinsurance – grow to become profitable market segments, carriers are investing in technology and infrastructure to increase automation and ensure that internal processes are extremely lean and cost efficient.

Asia Pacific Insurance ICT Market by segment 2011 (US$M)

21% 33%

28% 18%

Source: IDC

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Services

Software

Hardware

Internal IT spend

8. Regulatory efforts to streamline the industry and increase transparency will pick up steam Given the increasingly complex and competitive global environment going forward, insurance supervisors across Asia Pacific are putting forward a series of preemptive reforms to tighten management of insurers.

The corresponding need for insurers to strengthen their ability to comply with the higher prudential standards and demonstrate better risk stewardship have them focusing investments on risk evaluation and mitigation to better align internal risk appetite with strategy and make more intelligent risk decisions.

9. Financial digital devices and services will continue to play a critical role in connecting agents and brokers to their client base Agents, while remaining the primary mode of insurance dissemination across Asia Pacific, are definitely not the most cost efficient distribution channel. To reap ROIs from agent engagement and sustain an effective agency distribution channel calls for insurers to provide financial digital devices and services on the internet or through mobile devices to help them work more efficiently and effectively. For instance, e-solution offerings serve to reduce proposal turnaround time, handle claims inquiries or perform financial need analysis for new customers.

10. New and emerging technologies like telematics insurance will be making waves by providing carriers more opportunities for customised pricing Insurers are increasingly honing their delivery systems by tapping into new-generation technologies. One such development that is expected to have profound ramifications for automobile insurance is the more extensive installation of telematics devices by car manufacturers in passenger vehicles in countries like Japan and South Korea. Such telematics technologies benefit the motor insurers by collecting granular information that they can then utilise to custom riskbased premiums for motorists.

*

Li-May Chew is an Associate Research Director for IDC Financial Insights Asia Pacific.

c o - s ponso r e d a r T i c le

Transforming Mission Critical Computing in Financial Services For financial services organisations, their IT requirements are evolving and becoming even more demanding in the face of new industry regulations and continued market volatility after the financial crisis of the last three years.

The challenge is meeting these demands to deliver new levels of service, performance, security and data reliability for their missioncritical transactional and analytics systems – with IT budgets that are stagnant or even shrinking.

In addition, data is growing exponentially and user/customer expectations of uptime and responsiveness are increasing. An online transactional processing (OLTP) system going down for an hour can translate to lost revenue. Not delivering analytics information quickly and effectively to line-ofbusiness managers can lead to lost market opportunities. These mission critical systems need to be available and responsive 24/7.

As financial institutions look for ways to meet the demands of today’s mission critical computing, Intel® Xeon® processor based systems present a unique opportunity to leave expensive, proprietary RISC systems behind and transition to a more scalable and efficient solution. These Intel Xeon processor based systems have the capabilities that mission critical systems need – performance, RAS, and scalability – all with a breakthrough economic model.

• A more open solution capable of running OSs from multiple suppliers • Improved business agility with a unified environment A TCO study by Principled Technologies found that 10 servers based on Intel Xeon processor 7500 series could do the work of 22 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers, using SPECjbb2005* performance benchmark results. The Intel®-based servers cost 75 per cent less per server and consumed 54 per cent less energy per server. The study estimated total costs for both solutions, including those for acquisition (hardware, software, training, planning, and migration) and support (software support, power, cooling, and data centre and server administration). Results showed a 76 per cent lower TCO over three years for the Intel-based solution, with a total savings of USD 4.4 million. (See Table 1.)

If you would like to have a TCO study done for your own legacy infrastructure, please contact intel-fsi@pmgasia.com.sg.

To learn more about Intel Xeon processors, please visit http://www.intel.com/xeon

Intel, the Intel logo, and Xeon, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Copyright © 2011 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved

The recently launched Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family delivers an even better TCO with a significant leap in performance

Table 1. A TCO study by Principled Technologies for Dell showed a 76 percent TCO savings over three years using Intel® Xeon® Processor 7500 Series-based servers as opposed to Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440* servers Sun SPARC Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 Enterprise Series-based servers T5440* Servers

Moving from proprietary RISC-based systems to industry-standard Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers can accelerate their return on investment (ROI) and can provide benefits such as: • Better ROI through cost reductions from running industry-standard servers • Consolidation of physical space requirements

and reliability for mission-critical and dataintensive applications. It sets a new standard for high-end mission critical computing applications, including business intelligence, real-time data analytics and virtualisation… and is transforming mission critical computing in financial services.

Cost per Server Including 3-year support costs

USD 40,890

USD 163,265

USD 122,375 (per server)

75%

Energy Consumption per Server Based on typical workloadsa

804 Watts

1,766 Watts

962 Watts (per server)

54%

Number of Servers Required Based on SPECjbb2005* results

10

22

12 fewer servers

54%

Total Acquisition Costs Including hardware, software, training, planning, migration, and 3-year support costs

USD 784,617

USD 4,377,258

USD 3,592,641

82%

3-Year Operating Costs Including software support, power, cooling, and data center and server administration costs

USD 586,740

USD 1,399,200

USD 812,460

58%

USD 1,371,357

USD 5,776,458

USD 4,405,101

76%

3-Year Total Cost of Ownership a

Savings with the Intel®-based Solution

Represents consumption during typical usage, which was determined by averaging consumption when idle with consumption under a full (100 percent) workload.

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m o b i le pay m e n t s // a n a lys is

on the move: Mobilising Payment systems it’s time to think differently about mobile payment systems, says Christophe Uzureau, Research Director at Gartner.

The integration of the mobile phone into the retail payment value chain has been one of the most heavily hyped developments and is due to impact the payment market during the next three years. However, by introducing a new format and technology into this payment stream, banks and payment companies are also introducing additional points of failure.

Banks and other established non-bank payment providers, new entrants, telecommunication service providers and myriad hardware and software vendors are all vying for a share of the so-called mobile payment market. But before looking at the opportunity, we need to make sure we know exactly what we are talking about and make the distinction between different types of mobile payment systems. There are two main types of mobile payment systems: • Over-the-Air (OTA) mobile payment systems: OTA mobile payment transactions are initiated by a mobile handset and authorised via a wireless network operated by a mobile operator or a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). Debits can be to bank cards or accounts, mobile phone bills or prepaid accounts.

• Integrated Contactless Mobile Payment (ICMP) systems: ICMP systems are relying on handsets equipped with a contactless chip and that contain an embedded antenna that enables the handsets to communicate, using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), with contactless Point-of-Sale (POS) readers. This communication w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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Delivering value to customers and participating banks requires a new approach to the design and deployment of mobile financial services.

Using the analogy of an arch, the mobile technology is the keystone – the architectural piece at the crown of an arch that marks its apex – locking the other pieces into position.

However, the omission or removal of any of the stones would cause the arch to collapse, as would a mobile financial services strategy that failed to deliver on ROI if any other components are not considered.

When designing a mobile financial services strategy, banks need to take into account all of the necessary building blocks: • Current demand and supply conditions: Mobile financial services are not being introduced in a vacuum. Banks must look into the economic situation, socioeconomic factors, industry structure, and how the demand for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and financial services is evolving

Understand how the current regulatory regime can influence product development and the banks’ control over them.

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technology is commonly referred to by the telecom and semiconductor industry as Near Field Communication (NFC).

Taking into account these two types of mobile payment systems, we then need to identify how mobile payment systems and related services would either augment the existing payment value chain and/or replace selected parts of a retail payment value chain.

Mobile payment systems can’t succeed in isolation of a broader approach encompassing all mobile financial services – the use of mobile devices to deliver banking, payment and investment products and services.

This presents some unique challenges: • The complexity of the value chain necessary and the need for revenue sharing • Technology centricity – the selection of the supporting technology including mobile devices, operating systems, Short Message Service (SMS), unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), Java or thin clients, is only one of the parameters • Local requirements such as existing banking and customer payment habits, cross-industry structure and regulatory environment, which make any technology centric solutions open to failure

• Regulation: Understand how the current regulatory regime can influence product development and the banks’ control over them. This includes non-financial regulations, notably those related to consumer privacy • Governance: The existing governance model for banks’ operations could act as an accelerator or actually damage the ROI for mobile financial services • Product and service gap analysis: Mobile financial services should be a response to current gaps and inefficiencies in the existing channel mix and portfolio of products and services managed by the bank • Mobile financial services segmentation: Taking into account demand factors and the gaps identified in your analysis, what are the mobile financial services that should be delivered for each combination of banking service and customer categories?

• Mobile technology capabilities: Mobile technology is evolving rapidly, and banks

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must develop an understanding of the potential for new applications and the related risks. This includes the availability, capabilities and penetration of handsets as well as new mobile technologies, operating systems and applications • Skills in demand: Security/risk management and compliance requirements will demand new skills, notably due to the uncertainty of the security risks posed by mobile devices and networks • Ecosystem management: It goes without saying that banks will have to build new partnerships and manage a new ecosystem of providers to enable mobile financial services.

However, what really matters is how banks choose to segment those providers and develop new roles and analytics to manage conflicting interests. Most important is that they clarify the customer engagement model from the outset

• Financials: Taking into account that a large proportion of mobile financial services have failed to deliver on their initial ROI, the financials deserve more attention. For example, some companies launching new mobile payment systems have failed to acknowledge some of the components of the cost base (for example R-transactions – rejections, refunds and returns) when assessing the potential revenue • Distribution: The delivery of a solution as part of an ecosystem of providers demands a coordinated marketing approach, while the customer registration process will need to involve strong multi-channel integration supported by staff training across the bank network.

Banks will have to build new partnerships and manage a new ecosystem of providers to enable mobile financial services.

The objective is to design – per market – a mobile financial services matrix – as shown in Figure 4. The creation of this matrix is one of the fundamental steps often missing

Figure 4: Mobile financial services matrix must come first Consumers

Unbanked/ Underbanked

Sales and Marketing

• Mobile campaigns • Reminders • Application status

Account Services

• Alert services • Presentment • Language support • Rewards management

Security

• Multifactor auth.

• Multifactor auth.

• Notification • Notification • Confirmation • Confirmation • Activate/cancel card

Merchants

SMBs

Commercial Customers

Internal Services

• Mobile campaigns

• Mobile campaigns • Reminders • Application status

• Mobile campaigns • Reminders • Application status

• Local branch campaign • In-branch registration • Financial advice

• Alert services • Presentment

• Alert services • Presentment

• In-branch support

• Notification • Confirmation

• Multifactor auth.

• Notification • Confirmation • Multitier auth.

• Multifactor auth.

• Notification • Confirmation • Multitier auth.

• Payroll services

• Payroll services

• Alert services • Alert services • Presentment • Presentment • Language support

Transactional • Mobile pre-paid Services top-up • Fund transfers • P2P

• Microloan repayment • International remittances • Utility bills

• E-commerce gateway • Wireless POS • NFS

Business Intelligence

• Contextual data

• Credit card • Credit card • Credit card • Analytics/stock • Contextual data • Industry/market data • Industry/market data market data • Industry/market data • Credit data

• Contextual data

• In-branch support • Trading services

Source: Gartner w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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Figure 5: What really matters for consumers

from the design of a business case for mobile financial services. To achieve real personalisation and differentiation via mobile financial services, banks will need to create that matrix.

This is fundamental to ensuring demand factors are fully taken into account.

Consumers (do not appear to) want: 2.6

Biometric payment system

3.2

best laid plans and taxi drivers: from acquiring to issuing

2.5 2.7

Contactless card

Mobile payment system to SMBs

1.7

Mobile payment system

1.7

Mobile payment system P2P

1.7

2.9

2.7

2.8 1.5

Social network P2P payment

2.6 1

2

3

4

5

All adults 18–24 1 = Strongly disagree 5 = Strongly agree

Consumers (in fact) want: 3.9 3.8

Fraud management Financial relationship rewards

3.8 3.4

Internet payment tracking and fund release

3.6 3.7

Spending analytics

2.7 3.5 1

2

3

All adults 18–24 1 = Strongly disagree 5 = Strongly agree Source: Gartner

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4

5

A Gartner analyst’s recent experience with a new payment card acquiring service being offered by taxi drivers from Italy’s Milan airport did not enhance his user experience, but instead raised major concerns about the security and integrity of his payment data.

He was paying for his journey using a payment card, rather than with cash, and instead of a normal payment terminal, the taxi driver was using his mobile phone as a POS terminal.

On inquiry, the driver explained that it was cheaper to use his mobile phone to accept card payments than to use a bank-issued POS terminal, due to the frequency of card payments the taxi driver had to handle.

Sounds like a great idea.

However, the use of the phone to capture the payment card data had a negative effect on the analyst’s perception of the safety of his data, not the least of which was the need for him to supply his mobile phone number to the taxi driver after the taxi driver entered the card number on his mobile device.

Then, the analyst’s mobile device – which was registered in another country – had to acknowledge the download of an application from the acquirer in order to confirm the transaction. The receipt was by an SMS text message. The customer’s concerns included: • Was the phone the driver’s personal phone?

In that case, what security was in place to ensure that the credit card data was stored securely? What would happen to the data if the phone was stolen, or when the phone is replaced at the end of the contract?

• Could the driver abuse the data on the phone – maybe by transmitting the data to a third party other than the bank?

• How long would the data be stored on the phone?

• Was the application downloaded onto the payer’s mobile device securely?

The novelty of the task, the awareness of the potential for fraud and even the worry that the card would be blocked by the issuer led to an instant reaction of: “It must be easier and safer to use cash.” If the taxi driver didn’t insist this system was OK – and the analyst wasn’t interested in the final outcome of the payment process – for many consumers, payment by cash would have prevailed.

Customer education is critical

This example shows how important the merchant is as a part of the customer education process. The unexpected and unexplained introduction of mobile phones into the payment value chain may undermine the rollout of more mobile based financial applications. Even if your bank has no plans to roll out such an acquiring technology, start to educate your customers on what to expect, and how to react, if confronted by such solutions.

For instance, inform consumers about their liability and protection in case of fraud from such a transaction.

There is growing impetus for the adoption of mobile phones as POS devices, for example, the Square solution from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Square consists of a small magnetic reader that attaches to the headphone socket of an iPhone or similar smartphone. It allows the owner, in conjunction with an account set up with Square, to accept card payments from most individuals by swiping the card through the magnetic stripe reader, and capturing the customer’s signature on the screen. In this case, while the technology may initially appear persuasive, banks and card issuers must think long and hard about the customer’s perception involved in such transactions, as they may end up undermining many of the controls and balances they have previously put in place to secure card payments.

Check your fundamentals before launching new payment instruments

Consumers’ payment habits are highly rigid.

Before launching new payment instruments, banks must strengthen consumer trust by investing in account and payment information

m o b i le pay m e n t s // a n a lys is

services. In a recent survey of US consumers, less than nine per cent agreed that they would like to use their mobile phones to pay for goods or services.

Consumer payment habits vary by geography, but despite the marketing capability of payment providers (notably card associations), consumers’ interest in emerging payment instruments remains low.

In contrast, as part of the same consumer survey, 58 per cent of respondents agreed that they don’t need any new payment instruments. Cash, payment cards and PayPal are responding to all their requirements.

Other findings included: • Consumers trust debit card issuers, credit card issuers and PayPal, while six in 10 US

consumers surveyed do not trust mobile operators for their payment needs • Consumers are not naturally interested in emerging payment systems. They are more interested in fraud management, relationship rewards, and tools to track and better control their spending activities.

They need those services as part of any emerging payment solutions • Convergence of payment instruments is limited by consumers’ interest in and ability to manage a portfolio of payment instruments.

a matter of trust

Consumers are not naturally interested in emerging payment systems. They are more interested in fraud management, relationship rewards, and tools to track and better control their spending activities.

Consumers trust debit and credit card providers to support their payment needs.

This trust equity is important at a time

over-the-air mobile phone payment systems in Developing markets Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa currently lead the world in mobile payment adoption. Combined, these regions will account for 81 per cent of the global transaction volume and 69 per cent of the value in 2014. In developed payment markets like Singapore and Hong Kong, the role of Over-the-Air (OTA) mobile phone payments is to respond to gaps in existing consumers’ payment instrument portfolios by complementing existing payment instruments (for example, ticketing, parking or remote top-up of mobile phone prepaid balances).

However, consumers’ payment habits are very difficult to change; as a result, turning mobile phones into devices that can originate payments will demand strong incentives, account services and demonstrations that they are secure.

Providers like PayPal, which are relatively trusted by consumers, have the ability to

influence consumers. However, for many new payment brands the challenges are likely to be too great, and most will fail to gain any traction.

In contrast to developed markets, the mobile phone has a more important role in the payment value chains of emerging and unbanked markets, in accelerating financial inclusion (notably by reaching the rural population), and also in fostering entrepreneurship.

For example, financial regulators in India are driving plans for financial inclusion, which involve the development of mobile payment systems.

In the Philippines, Globe GCASH and Smart Communications’ Smart Money had some success with their Short Message Service (SMS) mobile payment applications.

Both providers are currently collaborating with Western Union to develop mobile phone Money Transfer Services (MTSs).

In markets such as Malaysia some mobile operators, such as Celcom, are rapidly growing the number of services they provide to their clients that is, customers and merchants – and at more competitive pricing than local banks.

These competitive pressures, coupled with the financial inclusion programs, will drive mobile payment systems in developing markets. The bottom line is that mobile payment systems in emerging markets will only be successful if an ecosystem approach takes into account local partnerships, and if a pricing model provides incentives to the local partners and that the mobile payment system is fully integrated with existing payment habits and channels.

Additionally, the role of mobile operators is more solid because their brand has a stronger reach among the unbanked and the underbanked. Thus, new collaborative models will emerge in developing markets.

Forecast: Mobile Device Sales 2010–2014 (Thousands of Units) Mobile Device Sales – Forecast Smartphones Total Mobile Devices

2010 YR 73,448.74

2011 YR 117,368.45

2012 YR 176,256.94

2013 YR 240,018.12

757,512.80

904,173.70

993,521.28

1,096,607.60

2014 YR

312,033.59 1,186,952.05

Source: Gartner, March 2011

In 2010, smartphones represented only 9.7 per cent of all mobile phones sold in Asia Pacific. By 2014, that is expected to reach 26.3 per cent.

w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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Consumer trust takes time to build, and demands an investment into key account services, a demonstration of strong fraud management capabilities and the use of payment information for the benefit of the consumer.

when an increasing number of surveys point out that banks are not trusted, notably due to their perceived role in triggering the 2008 financial crisis. But this overall level of mistrust hasn’t damaged consumer trust in banks as payment providers. Consumers rely on banks’ payment instruments on a daily basis, creating a recurrent opportunity for banks to demonstrate value.

In comparison, trust in mobile operators is low. A Gartner survey of US and UK consumers showed that only 10 per cent of consumers trust them. It could be argued that, since mobile operators don’t have a long track record of bringing payment solutions to consumers, this is not a valid indication of the potential of mobile operators as payment providers to consumers.

However, this doesn’t change the current consumers’ perception that those providers are not trustworthy enough to support their payment needs. Demonstrating value will take more time, and as a result, the initial business case for emerging payment

solutions such as a mobile payment system launched by a mobile operator, is probably much weaker than those providers currently conceive.

Recommendations

When launching a new payment instrument, banks should: • Ensure consumers are fully aware of how you would deal with fraud • Deliver tools and analytics so your customers feel in control over the spending activity supported by the new instrument • Introduce spending analytics and tracking services first to their younger customers. Those customers remain undecided on their payment preferences and are therefore an easier target for non-bank payment providers entering the market with new payment solutions • Ensure new instruments are fully integrated as part of the portfolio of payment instruments they provide for their customers • Reward consumers for the extent of their relationship with the organisation and that the use of the new payment instrument is a parameter of financial relationship rewards.

Consumer trust takes time to build, and demands an investment into key account services, a demonstration of strong fraud management capabilities and the use of payment information for the benefit of the consumer.

This especially applies to mobile payment systems. Banks are not in control of the whole mobile payment value chain, but they are in control of account services and related analytics.

The development of such services should be a priority, combined with the development of mobile financial services matrices. By doing so, banks will strengthen consumer trust in their payment services while supporting personalisation. Consumer trust is very difficult for non-bank payment providers to capture.

*

Christophe Uzureau is Research Director, Financial Services, at Gartner.

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a Dv e R to R i a l

Speed-to-Value -�Jim Highsmith-�

Flickr  deploys  software  changes  multiple  times  per  day  –  and  advertises  this  on  their  website.  A  medical  software  company  deploys  versions  of  their  application  software  over  75  times  per  year.  Salesforce.com  has  gained  competitive  advantage  with  their  highly  automated  continuous  integration,  testing  and  deployment  of Â

" speeding  value  to  their  customers.

Speed-to-value  embodies  two  key  concepts – speed  and  value.  “Value�  means  that  we  are  constantly  evaluating – at  a  portfolio,  project,  capability  (epic),  feature  and  story  level – the  value  we  are  delivering  to  customers.  That  means  everything  from  calculating  the  ROI  of  projects  to  determining  the  relative  (or  monetary)  value  of  features.  Then  on  a  release,  milestone,  and  iteration  level  we  are  constantly  prioritising  and  adjusting  scope  based  on  value  and  cost.

The  agile  mantra  has  always  been  to  deliver  value  early  and  often,  but  we  have  not  always  pushed  that  to  the  limits  of  actual  deployment  and  customer  solutions.  The  reasons  are  more  organisational  than  technical  (although Â

"

The  organisational  issue  is  both  product  lifecycle  and  business  customer  oriented.  Although  delivery  teams  have  become  agile,  marketing,  product  management,  or  internal  business  departments  have  sometimes  been  reluctant  to  change  their  traditional  modes  of  operation.  I  know  of  product  organisations  that  have  completely  changed  their  perspective – from  demanding  commitment  to  features  a  year  in  advance,  to  accepting  the  # a – " Similarly,  at  the  back  end  of  the  lifecycle,  development  and  operations  are  working  closely  on  smooth  transitions  from  development  complete  to  deployment  complete.  Value  is  only  realised  when  features  are  deployed,  not  when  they  are  ready  for  deployment.  Speed-to-value  should  be  measured  across  the  entire  lifecycle,  from  placement  on  a  portfolio  backlog  to  actual  deployment.

"

use  frequent  deployments  to  their  advantage  –  and  then  changing  business  processes  to  accommodate  them. Â

"

"

" others  it  may  not.  Finding  the  right  schedule  of  deployments  for  different  groups  means  business  departments  will  need  to  become  more  agile  themselves. a " a

"

#

Jim Highsmith is an executive consultant with ThoughtWorks, having spent

30-� plus years as an IT manager, product manager, project manager, consultant, and software developer. Jim was a co-�author of the Agile Manifesto, founding member of the Agile Alliance and is the author of three books. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

33

ro u n dta b l e // r e t e n t I o n & aC Q u IS I t I on

Driving Customer Engagement, Retention & Acquisition John MCGee, thunderhead: The whole premise of our company is to be able to increase customer loyalty, satisfaction and retention; but it is a more complicated proposition today. Consider the sheer number of devices that a company must contend with. There are six billion citizens living in the world today and four billion devices. According to conservative projections there will be 10 billion devices within the next three years. The average person carries around three devices, although there are power users who carry up to 15 devices.

This changes how we work as marketers today and in the future as more and more devices are deployed.

Three years ago most of us, myself included, did not understand the impact of Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter in terms of viable business channels, and as 34

who ’s wh o of fs i

tools for engagement with the customer and driving loyalty and their retention.

Improving the customer experience is not only just a push for the conversation; it’s about engagement and interactivity. Customers expect a high level of engagement through their channel of choice – the customer service centre, the website, the local branch office, or a sales representative. But are you in a position to manage that customer journey in a way that’s contextually relevant to the customer?

We have noted how social media, which the consumer is engaging with is changing expectations of commercial providers. Consumers expect their banking service to be as easy as Facebook or Twitter.

Social media is now dictating your business in terms of levels of competition. We are required to be able to

r e t e n t I on & aC Q u IS I t I o n // ro u n dta b le

Top row (left to right): Vinson Han, Head of Digital Marketing, AIA; Kuo Siong Lim, Head of IT & e-Business, Maybank; Li Lian Ng, Head of Marketing Services, OCBC Bank; Jeff Nicholas, Head of Channel Innovations, Standard Chartered; John McGee, Global Chief Operating Officer, Thunderhead; Richard Wyber, Vice President Strategic Marketing, Singapore, AIA. Bottom row (left to right): Nick Smith, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Thunderhead; Tim Posney, Regional Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific, ING Investment Management; Chee Kiong Lim, Senior Vice President, Head of Regional Business Development & Marketing, CIMB Securities; Aman Narain, Global Head of Internet & Mobile Banking, Standard Chartered; Patrick Kelly, Head of Segments, Strategy & Campaign, HSBC; Paul Hughes, Chief Marketing Officer, AIA; Bill Chua, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Global Head of Delivery Channels and Operations, UOB. The executives featured in this roundtable editorial held the above positions at the time of publication.

leverage everything within our organisations, as well as information external to the company and social media, to determine the next best action in a very personalised manner.

Traditionally, marketers have used a one-to-many relationship. That has now changed to one-to-one relationships, where every single customer is viewed as a unique customer. Consequently messages need to be highly adapted.

Understanding the customer is the first challenge; the next is developing the systems to enable you to understand the customer more easily.

Customer-centric organisations build processes from the outside-in, as opposed to the inside-out. In most client relationship management (CRM) initiatives in the late 1990s to mid 2000s there was a real disconnect between the value that the marketers were going to provide versus what actually happened because CRM was all about improving internal processes to help with the customer; it was not

designed to understand the customer experience and what the customer wanted.

As we all know, it costs five to six times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing customer and a one to two per cent increase in the retention rate is going to improve that margin from five to nine per cent. With statistics like these, we should all be interested in acquisition but more interested in retention. The consumer has more power than the advisors. So service centres become a much more important place for marketers to be able to get the really rich information they need.

Yet often marketers have not looked at the service centre as a way to orchestrate the customer experience.

When someone comes in to complain or to retrieve information, how does that relate back to the value proposition you’re trying to provide and help you move forward?

Studies have shown that the best time to cross sell or up sell to a customer is when they have had a good w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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ro u n dta b l e // r e t e n t I o n & aC Q u IS I t I on

customer experience in the service centre. Prior to the advent of social media, if someone had a bad experience, seven to 10 people knew about it. Now millions upon millions may find out. As marketers, how can we control that conversation and how do we have a strong, positive response to it?

nICk SMIth, thunderhead: According to Gartner, within 18 months the primary way to access the internet will no longer be through a laptop or a mobile device, but through a smartphone. That creates a set of challenges for every organisation. How do you see customer channels evolving over the next three to five years? lI lIan nG, oCbC bank: It’s no longer just about

“The end point for any successful customer engagement is where an organisation starts looking at how all these channels intergrate into one seamless engagement with the customer, social media included.”

Li Lian ng, ocbc bank

one channel; it’s about how all the different channels work together. That is a challenge for many banks because the people who are manning the branches, and those who are responsible for the channels, don’t see it that way. They’re still in the old world where they see themselves as the complex centre agent and they don’t really bother about what the other channels are doing.

But the customer doesn’t see things that way. They are interacting with the brand, and they expect that same service across channels. The end point for any successful customer engagement is where an organisation starts looking at how all these channels integrate into one seamless engagement with the customer, social media included. People want to be heard through social media. They want to be responded to. And if you don’t do that, they will use social media to respond and react.

bIll Chua, uob: I think you need to look at social norms such as culture because in this part of the world going into the branch is still an important experience for many customers. While I agree that new channels can be very important, there will still be a segment that will go to the branch. The challenge for most organisations is how you get the different channels to work together. How do you develop shared Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?

kuo SIonG lIM, Maybank: Customers would like to have a choice. Some like the convenience of using a laptop, some like smartphones, but when they have a special question, they tend to go to the contact centre. You can standardise most of the transactions and consequently minimise your costs but to really get the right opportunities you have to be able to handle customers’ specific and unique needs well.

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who ’s who of fs i

nICk SMIth, thunderhead: How do investment managers and insurers see their world evolving over the next three to five years?

Paul huGheS, aIa: The insurance or daily industry is not like the bank market where frequent interaction is necessary and expected. A result of that is we haven’t necessarily developed the engagement that we should have. We tend to be quite responsive to issues; if a customer has an issue, we have a process to deal with it. I think the opportunity for the insurance industry is to look at how we can engage before there’s an issue, and how we can communicate proactively.

tIM PoSney, InG InveStMent ManaGeMent: The issue of expectations is very relevant. We see very different expectations of asset managers depending on the country we are operating in. The model that works in India is different to what is expected in more developed markets, like Hong Kong and Singapore.

The management of the channel is very different, as is customer experience management. The other challenge for investment management is that in most countries we’re one level removed from the direct customer, so our customer interaction is via a distributor – which is not ideal in terms of managing the customer experience. We then need to manage the distributor in terms of the information flow we’re getting to the customers. We typically interact with customers when there’s a problem, so we have lost the ability to manage that relationship. Channels that enable us to augment the distributor, not replace them, are quite important.

nICk SMIth, thunderhead: The importance of people, process, and putting the customer at the centre of the business are all key trends. But there are many barriers to making those things happen. What are some of the challenges you see in your organisations?

aMan naraIn, Standard Chartered: We started out as a product-centric company and that served us and the industry very well. But the world changed very quickly; we realised that and our focus has been to become more customer, rather than product centric in our orientation. This took place before the global financial crisis and social media but is even more relevant now. Many metrics need to be put in place, but it’s really about organisational design – that’s the piece that is the hardest to get right. We don’t claim to have mastered that but we’re evolving rapidly towards it. Pieces that used to seem very logically aligned – in terms of channels or products – don’t necessarily always work that way with changing customer needs

r e t e n t I on & aC Q u IS I t I o n // ro u n dta b le

requiring us to orient ourselves around them. Culture is also very important. Hiring the right people with the right mindset is really important for us – it’s not only about putting in great technology but it’s about hiring people who actually understand what that means and how to apply it to serve customers better.

vInSon han, aIa: The way in which customers experience a business has changed significantly over the years. Going forward, they will continue to interact via e-platforms. Social media is a new animal they will pay real attention to and it will continue to evolve.

No one uses traditional phones anymore – we use smartphones or Blackberrys and use apps to conduct daily banking and insurance transactions. nICk SMIth, thunderhead: Patrick Kelly, how does HSBC view the different channels of opportunity for your customers?

PatrICk kelly, hSbC: There’s an e-revolution underway being driven by smartphones. We’re finding transactions a challenge, though, in terms of which channels they go through. A question I am grappling with is, in terms of customer centricity and multichannels and the complexity of getting those channels right, how do we structure our organisation with respect to the customer experience; and do we have Chief Customer Experience Officers to manage that?

nICk SMIth, thunderhead: Does anyone have a board level executive with a customer focus or a customer experience title?

bIll Chua, uob: I don’t think we have that at the board level for most organisations. The customer wants to feel that when they walk into a branch somebody will recognise them – the challenge is how we achieve this. A second issue is when you talk about channels – e-channels versus human contact or phone contact, for example – are the processes comparable? We really need to look at fulfillment, understand what a customer needs, and see if we can execute on a straight-through basis where needed.

PatrICk kelly, hSbC: But it’s a struggle for most banks when you say you need more.

lI lIan nG, oCbC bank: As Patrick noted, the issue is how much value an organisation places on experience. As bankers and business people, a priority is meeting shareholders’ expectations more than the public’s expectations. But you can’t put the intangible

expectation into a KPI. It’s not about having big and expensive titles like Chief Experience Officer – it has to be instilled into the people who are delivering it.

nICk SMIth, thunderhead: The battle between shareholder returns and customer satisfaction is very relevant. What sort of debate do you have within your organisations about those two relationships?

Chee kIonG lIM, CIMb SeCurItIeS: We understand that we are here for the customer, but unfortunately the measureable component that goes into our KPIs is really the bottom line.

In the stockbroking business the interaction with the customer tends to be much more intimate. My dealers and traders understand their clients’ investments and they know very clearly what they want – they have to.

But two things to note: the first is that clients do all their research online. The second is that stockbrokers are generally old fashioned – they see clients as their own, not as the firm’s. The firm, however, sees things differently. The policies and contracts are with the firm. We spend a lot of time interacting with our sales agents as well as our clients, because we need to understand exactly what they want and we need to be able to respond first.

rIChard Wyber, aIa: We’re very conscious of the pace of change in terms of technology and consumers’ mindsets and habits. We’re really struggling with that – but it comes down to what you measure, and we are measured on profitability. I think most companies are measured the same way.

We have many great ideas about how to engage our customers, but it comes down to developing an internal investment model that justifies it. We have to explain how we are going to get a better return through crosssell and new business. That is very difficult. We know we need to be more responsive to our customers and we need to engage them, but at the end of the day it comes down to the Return on Investment (ROI).

“We use smartphones or Blackberrys and use apps to conduct daily banking and insurance transactions.”

Vinson han, aia

lI lIan nG, oCbC bank: OCBC has been on a serviceorientation journey for a long time – at least five or six years. If you ask internally you would probably get the feedback that it’s still not working the way it’s supposed to work. There is tension in terms of what’s right for the customer versus what’s right for the bottom line but it’s a healthy tension. We are servants of various shareholders, not just our customers.

nICk SMIth, thunderhead: An Australian bank CEO trying to change his bank’s organisational w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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psychology and culture took the board to Boeing in Seattle. He said, “You think you’ve got a complex business, Boeing takes four and a half thousand parts from 16 countries and builds a plane in 11 days. That’s complex. Now go fix the bank.” Is it as simple as changing your mindset?

Jeff nICholaS, Standard Chartered: We establish satisfaction and the value is actually surveyed by external marketing. We like to find out the service experience from a branch point of view, and from different channels. The varied feedback really works for us. I think the idea of higher value versus low value is the wrong terminology. It’s not about the dollar value of the conversation; it’s really about a high bandwidth or low bandwidth transaction; a discrete versus a rich communication. The communication you can have in a branch is a rich communication. Whether or not that translates into dollars isn’t the point. It’s that it’s a rich medium – you can see the customer’s reaction, and feel what they need.

aMan naraIn, Standard Chartered: We’ve implemented net promoter scores to see promoters and detractors. As soon as a customer logs off, they can tell us what they thought of that service.

It’s not invasive because we know customers are obsessed with ads invading their core experience.

“Social media is a channel that is being driven by everbody. It’s the next big thing, but can you make money from it?” nick smith, thunderhead

nICk SMIth, thunderhead: Innovation is about how you track and measure customer experience.

Are there any other examples around the table of something that’s been done recently to really innovate in the customer experience area?

Paul huGheS, aIa: The key thing for me is differentiating a product and a proposition. That’s where we need to continue to do much more, because we’re still creating organisational structures with sales groups etc. How do we develop that new proposition for the customer that truly differentiates? That addresses a number of things we’ve been talking about, such as ROI.

aMan naraIn, Standard Chartered: From an e-channel perspective, we are hiring different people.

Our team members come from the banking industry but also from a large number of eCommerce players like Yahoo or Amazon or both as in the case of Jeff here who worked for a large Bank as well as Shopzilla, an e-tailer in the US, before joining us. His approach to building technology is very different and we welcome these fresh new approaches.

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tIM PoSney, InG InveStMent ManaGeMent: In our market, the Baby Boomers are driving funds flow. We’re interested in them because they’ve got money to invest. But the Gen Ys have quite a different expectation of what it means to have customer service and what it means to be involved. Consequently the innovation we’re driving at the moment is targeted towards serving the Baby Boomers better. At some point in the not-so-distant future that overhang is going to do whatever it’s naturally going to do and we’ll have a new generation to deal with.

John MCGee, thunderhead: A key theme in this discussion has been the intuition that customer experience does make sense but it’s the metrics and that tug between the profitability and accountability that you have to manage as an organisation. At the same time with the fragmentation and with the complexity of the market, there are opportunities that have never been presented before.

nICk SMIth, thunderhead: Aman, you talked about Gen X/Gen Y in terms of where we actually receive revenue, where it could come from in the future and how we scale our businesses to serve a dynamic web. Actually, there’s no more money coming in, we’ve just got to have different channels.

Social media is a channel that is being driven by everybody. It’s the next big thing, but can you make money from it? lI lIan nG, oCbC bank: When we approached our marketing strategy it was very clear to us that these generations spend the majority of their lives online, and social media was the order of the day. If you tried the traditional marketing approach with these customers it just wouldn’t work. But social media doesn’t exist in isolation.

Social media is a personal medium where you connect with your friends, people you know, and people you want to get to know. When you build a strategy that’s specifically for social media you miss the point because social media happens in conjunction with what’s really happening in a person’s life. In terms of banking you have to make sure it’s not just about product, but about proposition. It is about building that ability for the customer’s imagination to be captured and inspired.

aMan naraIn, Standard Chartered: There are many unknowns in social media. It’s very nascent. It’s not mature, and the consumer and the corporations are not mature in it. However there are some

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opportunities. We’ve seen three types of approaches to social media. There are banks that are completely apathetic and banks that are going all in; we don’t think that either approach is viable.

Our approach is to focus on specific conversations and initiatives and learning from them as we broaden our efforts in social media. A public relations specialist reminded me that after work in London we used to go to the pub and there would be bankers from all over the city interacting – that was social media. It has just been put on the web. Social media is about those conversations, and the challenge for us, as an industry, is that we’re used to one-way communication. We’re not used to two-way communication.

PatrICk kelly, hSbC: The real opportunities lie in the amount of attitudinal and behavioural data that is contained within social media. Somebody just had a baby, so what does that mean to a bank or an insurance company? We can see their thoughts towards certain things, and analyse what that means to a bank in terms of how they market their services to the consumer.

There’s a massive amount of information there.

media and how do we integrate social media into the company’s overall marketing strategy?”

Chee kIonG lIM, CIMb SeCurItIeS: The problem is culture – within financial institutions once something is classified as a complaint there’s a process that has to be followed and everyone has to adhere to those policies and procedures. Customers expect a response within the hour. If it takes 24 or 48 hours they are immediately on social media sites. Customers will not interact with us within banking hours anymore – they are ‘on’ 24/7 and expect us to be ‘on’ as well.

Paul huGheS, aIa: In terms of how you make money from social media, my immediate response is, by not ignoring it. Underinsurance is a big issue in Singapore and our research indicates there are misperceptions and fallacies. Often people are just not hearing the right conversation. Social media can be another way of having that conversation.

nICk SMIth, thunderhead: Li Lian, how is social media used at OCBC?

Chee kIonG lIM, CIMb SeCurItIeS: A challenge

lI lIan nG, oCbC bank: We take it very seriously.

is that social media sites create opportunities for complaint as well. We have a presence on Facebook but it becomes a medium for complaining and we have to respond to that – if we don’t the complaint might go viral. The speed can be phenomenal. The challenge is for us to be invited in to be part of the community; if we’re not then one-way communication occurs.

We really stepped into the hornets’ nest about two years ago when we did a brand campaign around the customer experience in a Sunday Banking branch.

Sunday Banking was displayed as a place where we celebrate moments in your life. One customer began blogging about OCBC after that campaign, writing about a bad experience she had when she came into the branch. She posted it on her blog and her readership of 40 a day rose to 4,000.

PatrICk kelly, hSbC: National Australia Bank has a direct bank called UBank. The CEO of UBank would go online to chat and when customers would complain, he’d respond to them within 24 hours with his view of their complaint and how to sort it out. I read some of the blogs after he’d responded and it shows that although his service wasn’t brilliant, just the fact that he got in there and tried to understand and respond built loyalty. So the complaint became a win.

vInSon han, aIa: Social media is definitely the ‘in’ thing right now and there is a slight herd mentality at the moment. Many businesses are going into social media just to get the box ticked or because competitors are already on Facebook. The type of questions mostly asked were, “How can I get more ‘likes’ on my Facebook fan page; and how can we increase our number of Twitter followers?” These are operational types of questions rather than the strategic type such as, “what is our primary objective of venturing into social

John MCGee, thunderhead: Many conversations

“Customers will not interact with us within banking hours any more – they are ‘on’ 24/7 and expect us to be ‘on’ as well.” chee kiong Lim, cimb securities

today are focused around customer experience with every transaction. Keep in mind that many times the transaction is the end result and the customer experiences a series of steps that are not necessarily revenue related. Social media output may not yet represent revenue transaction for the bank, but it can provide personally relevant messages that you understand the customer; that can help build loyalty and, over time, future profitability.

Fragmentation and complexity create challenges and opportunities and we’re in a unique position to be able to take advantage of both. Thunderhead has an award-winning software that integrates CRM information, information from databases, web content as well as third parties to help orchestrate an integrated messaging based interaction that’s relevant and specifically in line with the segment.

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Enabling Efficiency Through Business Transformation

Front row (left to right): LeAnne Wong, Head of Business Planning & Analytics, Consumer Banking, DBS Bank; Stanley Chan, Director Corporate & Investment Banking Technology, Bank of America Merrill Lynch; Christopher Russell, Global Program Manager, International Account Opening, HSBC Technology & Services, HSBC; Haily Chow, Head of Business Planning, Hang Seng Bank; Jim Nelson, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer, ex-Japan, Nomura. Back row (left to right): Dan Ternes, Regional Technical Director, Metastorm; Rakesh Vengayil, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer Asia Pacific, BNP Paribas Investment Partners; Paul Watts, Regional Vice President, Metastorm; Chris Dixon, Head of Organisational Effectiveness, RBS; Gerard Sitaramayya, Chief Financial Officer, ACE Insurance; Jon Bradbury, Senior Vice President Group Finance, AIA; Paul Mais, Head of One HSBC – Servicing & Entitlements, HSBC; Neal Lohmann, Director of Business Transformation Solutions, Metastorm.

The executives featured in this roundtable editorial held the above positions at the time of publication.

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neal lohmann, metastorm: There are many changes ahead for the financial services industry. There is going to be considerable consolidation and significant cost reduction going forward. Many customers are focused on business agility, which involves reduction of systems, desiloing organisations and centralising, often in a merger or acquisition situation.

Technological advances are also changing the environment. Business transformation starts with strategy, then looks at business assets – including capabilities, technology, people, process, locations – and essentially aligns the two. Enterprise architecture and business architecture can then be used to configure those assets to meet the strategy.

The process doesn’t have to be major – it could be quite small – but the framework is the same regardless of the size of the enterprise: you break your strategic planning down into basic components and determine a direction, a set of goals and a program to meet that strategy.

One of the drivers of our framework is the capability model – which breaks your organisation down into its

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key functions: billing, sales, marketing, audits and IT. The capability model allows you to link information together throughout the organisation, demonstrating, for example, how many systems and vendors you have that support billing. Having that simple concept of what billing is means you can align a lot of different information so when a transformation is ahead you have a detailed roadmap of all the components of the organisation with similar capabilities.

That roadmap of capability then enables build management decisions. You can consider questions like, “If I have 15 systems aligned to billing, how much is it costing? How much would it cost me if I brought it down to four?”

I worked with a client that had 119 different billing systems for 405 products. Each one of those products had a variation on billing; they studied billing every year for six years and couldn’t get it above a Return on Investment (ROI) of five per cent. The cost of recreating the separate features and functions for every product and location in a single system exceeded the financial return. So we needed separate features and functions depending on the product involved.

Then the strategy changed: customers wanted one statement even if they had five products, so from a customer service perspective it was important to have one statement with all their products on it – that actually became the driver, not the ROI. The minute you introduce the transformational idea of making the customer satisfied and put forward a strategy for a single bill to go out to a customer, that changes the ROI calculation. Can we get more revenue by going to customers and cross-selling? Can our differentiator be one clean statement?

One of the transformation ideas that arose from this billing concept related to managing the customer from the first credit card to retirement. So now you’ve taken that simple billing concept and attached it to an enterprise strategy that looks at capturing a customer and holding through the whole lifecycle, which opens up opportunities to cross-sell. That’s the holy grail of financial institutions. Many banks have a global strategy for certain processes, a regional strategy for some processes and a local strategy for other processes – a three-tiered operating model. Capability modelling and business transformation help you map that operating model in detail so you can then make decisions based on what is currently in operation and where you would like to be going forward.

Paul mais, hsbC: At HSBC we have spent the last three years going through that process of transformation. We have always generally been a

strong local bank and we have been trying to bring it together into more globally consistent systems, processes and customer experience.

Our most recent project has been around implementing a global process. This required bringing together people in workshops from countries as diverse as Mexico, Brazil, France, Hong Kong and the UK to determine how different everyone was in terms of their general banking processes. At the end of 10 days we had established a set of reengineered, but globally consistent processes that would work for all countries.

Obviously regulation requires some flexibility in both the process and the technology; but the hard part has been the technology and the joining up of the organisation through the technology.

I have been working on replacing the entire internet banking platform around the world and transforming it into a single platform built with the customer in mind, but that staff and customers can both use.

Getting from where we are today – a proliferation of different systems – to a globally consistent set of reusable components has been extremely difficult because of the scale of the issues involved and the intertwining of systems which are often hard-coded with each other. Unpicking all of those connections, putting in a new front-end, a new customer database, a new back-end and a core banking fee system has been much more difficult that we had expected. We definitely underestimated that complexity.

neal lohmann, metastorm: It is easy to underestimate that kind of project. Approximately 70 per cent of projects fail. And by failure I don’t mean it doesn’t get done, it means they said it was going to take a year, it has taken 18 months to two years. They said it was going to achieve an ROI of 15 per cent, but it only achieved a three per cent ROI.

“I have been working on replacing the entire internet banking platform around the world and transforming it into a single platform.”

Paul Mais, HsBC

Jon bradbury, aia: Getting the single view of the customer across a global platform is a big challenge.

But over the last 10 to15 years technology has started to provide that opportunity. I started out in Asia with Standard Chartered 20 years ago. We were the first to introduce a consolidated bank statement. But they’ve now been left behind. You can’t get combined securities onto a single statement, because different systems are used. In fact you can’t even go into the branch and do securities with them; you’ve got to go somewhere else.

So they have failed to live up to the expectation they’ve already created. It’s all very well to head down that route, but it’s an expensive route because w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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you’re continuously upgrading the processes to meet customers’ expectations.

ChristoPher russell, hsbC: I’ve been involved with the kind of transformation you described at HSBC, at General Electric and Motorola. There is a theory that after an organisation reaches a certain size – let’s say $500 million in revenue – it no longer makes sense to try to execute revolutionary transformation because it simply runs into too many obstacles. The more effective approach in mature and sizeable organisations may be evolutionary change generally driven by a ‘burning platform’ such as cost out, productivity or revenue growth.

Revolutionary change is probably simpler when building a business from scratch and building a model from the ground up such as Michael Dell did to the PC industry.

neal lohmann, metastorm: There are large organisations that have transformed – what do you think drives that transformation? Online banking, for example, was a major transformation.

Jon bradbury, aia: There you are talking about

“If you can’t do it from the top it’s likely going to be a failure or limit the impact of change.” stanley CHan, Bank of aMeriCa Merrill lynCH

whole industries transforming, not just individual companies. The demand has come from the sophistication of the customer. If you asked your grandparents what they expected their bank to deliver to them 70 years ago the computer chip wasn’t even invented, so there was no expectation. They had to queue up and wait for the bank and be grateful for the fact that the bank was going to give them their money back. Today if I don’t get my money back instantly I’m on to the call centre, talking to somebody in Mumbai and giving them trouble.

neal lohmann, metastorm: There has to be a significant driver for an enterprise to change its culture completely, otherwise you’re going to have lines of business that operate differently. There has to be a major platform for change, a need for changing a culture significantly. Things like the internet and the economy are major drivers. But I think everyone wants to learn how to swim when the boat is already sinking.

The other type of change is that which occurs when it just bubbles up organically. In this instance you actually have something that’s working well someplace and it drives change elsewhere. A good example of this is Subway. One Subway shop owner wasn’t doing well with his franchise so he decided to sell the foot-long sub for five dollars and he created a little jingle called ‘$5 foot long”, and it took off. Now in the US every

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Subway has a special promotion where for $5 you get a footlong sub. Have any of you had this kind of transformation experience?

stanley Chan, bank of ameriCa merrill lynCh: I can talk about my experience through the transition in Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which involved two global companies with different entities in the region and huge complexity around regulation.

When we look into the client perspective, we are mandated to work as one bank.

Merrill Lynch is very strong in deals origination, global markets and wealth management. Bank of America has a very strong banking and treasury business. Both entities may be working with the same client using diverse management styles.

What we are moving towards is to deliver the enterprise together with a global integrated banking model. Our clients need this scale we are able to bring. There can be regulatory hurdles to changing the dialogue. In Japan and Korea and some South East Asian countries regulation is very tight.

We have so many systems as sales tools, but what we are looking into is institutionalising the concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). That will bring down the silos across the business.

With regard to how transformation is achieved we find it essential for senior top level executives to talk to everyone and get a mandate for change before we talk about any investment or any alliances. If you can’t do it from the top it’s likely to be a failure or limit the impact of the change.

neal lohmann, metastorm: How do you get your top executives to buy into a transformation? stanley Chan, bank of ameriCa merrill lynCh: There are many channels one can submit an idea through, such as various innovation groups. We can also leverage global partnerships to present a highlevel business proposal to the executives within the organisation and if they think the concept is good they will want to proceed with further analysis and may generate lots of discussions at the executive level.

Even within your departments you need to share concepts with the top person. We are committed to being open to speak up and share our thoughts across all levels without any worry of any negative consequence because opportunities are observed at all levels.

ChristoPher russell, hsbC: The acid test is whether it becomes their idea or not. Change

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management is all about getting it to be their idea.

It can be kind of irritating because you might pour your heart and soul into developing and selling an idea for change in the organisation, and it will likely take months or sometimes years to get the concept out, but you ultimately succeed when somebody else takes your idea – because they buy into it – and make it their own.

Jon bradbury, aia: The only saving grace is you know that if they acquire that idea and you’ve done a good job of convincing them, then they will actually embrace and possibly enhance that original idea by taking it into a broader activity that you, yourself, couldn’t see from within.

neal lohmann, metastorm: That brings up an interesting question – how do we capture ideas?

An idea doesn’t have to come from within. I could be on the way to work and read an article in a magazine that sparks an idea – how do I take that innovation onboard? leanne Wong, dbs bank: Everyone down to teller level can suggest improvements in processes. This measure is good because it encourages us to look internally as well as see things from customers’ shoes.

We then prioritise these suggestions and implement those with the highest customer impact.

In business transformation the key challenge is how we deliver the transformation processes cost effectively while improving the customer experience. This is when we can get the C-level to buy in very quickly.

neal lohmann, metastorm: MIT did a study which found 75 per cent of companies that come up with transformation ideas don’t make money on them. Someone else takes the ideas and makes money for them.

rakesh Vengayil, bnP Paribas inVestment Partners: It has to be timed to the market as well.

Innovation is not in itself good enough, you need to have power to implement now in a realistic manner.

So a lot of organisations are now changing their situational focus position, which is part of senior management, and looking at where they can get ideas and translate them into execution.

neal lohmann, metastorm: If I’m feeling frustrated because I have this idea to make the banking or the insurance industry better, and no-one’s

listening and I’m not getting anyone to buy, what’s the first thing I do? I start talking to other companies with my idea.

Many companies are dealing with this and with how to manage collaboration. One company did a study where they opened up a virtual world, Second Life, where everyone could come into this world and create their own avatar. The concept of this world was they would also throw out ideas and have people build on them collaboratively. They discovered that people are not collaborative. People would look at an idea and instead of taking it and building on it they would start a whole new thread of, “here’s how I think we could do that more effectively”.

It wasn’t until the company interjected facilitators that they were able to bring these people together to have a conversation. They found that without facilitation everyone would start taking the concept and building on their own idea.

Jon bradbury, aia: I did that from a customer’s point of view. I was asked by a fairly major bank to address their global treasury systems on what my company wanted from their bank. I said, all I wanted was for their retail bankers to talk to their corporate bankers. I’ve been in enough meetings where I’ve actually been introducing their own members of staff to each other because we needed something from both of them.

When online banking first came out we needed to build and execute treasury online, but still also see different bank accounts around the world. Banks have now moved towards that, but when it comes to investment settlements, you can find out where your deposits are, but you can’t always find out where your securities are, because they go into different systems.

To allow those two systems to talk together is to allow the Treasurer to sit in the centre and see the whole portfolio and make decisions.

How do you facilitate those decisions? When you deal with certain insurance companies that offer unit linked investment products, they’ve got standard transactions which are driven by the customer every day.

You just want to execute them, but quite often you have to go through six layers of bank protocols to be able to execute that decision. You can now start to do host-to-host as the bank’s security is as strong as the company’s security, and vice versa; consequently you can now transform the customer’s experience, from the back office process.

In our case by establishing host-to-host transacting with our bank and eliminating the manual work,

“MIT did a study which found 75 per cent of companies that come up with transformation ideas don’t make money on them.” neal loHMann, MetastorM

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we were able to allow our customers to trade two hours later than standard banking hours. This differentiated us in the market and became our competitive advantage.

neal lohmann, metastorm: One of the customers I was working with had trading, investment banking and the same financial instrument product, with different data structures. So they couldn’t actually hand off straight through without lookup tables going between the organisations.

The trades were flowing and being managed. But it was just amazing to me that they actually let three different organisations underneath the same company build their own data dictionaries.

Does anybody else have any insights into innovation and collaboration? gerard sitaramayya, aCe insuranCe: In my

“In my organisation there is a genuine culture of innovation – it is rewarded.” gerard sitaraMayya, aCe insuranCe

organisation there is a genuine culture of innovation – it is rewarded.

We incentivise innovation and build it into key objectives, so it’s formalised. We found that once there is formality attached, it is human nature that staff are more likely to generate new ideas. They are more likely to actually do things about it, rather than just sit in management meetings and talk about what you’re trying to do and what that’s going to achieve.

We changed that a few years ago and formally put that into our senior people’s objectives and it has worked wonders. We found key ideas bubbling up through the organisation. Also when setting financial objectives, we set stretch goals, stretch budgets based around these innovation concepts.

Paul mais, hsbC: How do you measure that? gerard sitaramayya, aCe insuranCe: We have fixed budgets which are standard and based on incremental growth and then we have a stretch budget. We have regular meetings, where the whole senior management team comes up with a plan as to how they’re getting to that budget. In January we look at our financial resources and what we want to achieve with regard to internal and external areas of innovation. And we monitor this facet throughout the year. Having this financial discipline works for us.

Paul mais, hsbC: It’s not just about ideas; it’s about the savings or additional revenue they generate. gerard sitaramayya, aCe insuranCe: Correct.

It’s either savings or any additional revenue that

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can be specifically tied to the particular initiatives that emerge.

neal lohmann, metastorm: Most ideas have to have some sort of financial benefit to the company.

When I work with a group of senior executives there are always more ideas than there is money, from a strategy perspective. So it’s about prioritisation of those ideas. You have to pick the right idea and make sure you execute on the idea. Around 75 per cent of the companies don’t make money off an idea and 70 per cent of all major initiatives fail. It’s pretty hard getting an idea deployed in an organisation, isn’t it? gerard sitaramayya, aCe insuranCe: Everyone’s selling ideas. They’re going to give you exceptional ROIs. No-one’s going to put forward an idea that’s going to generate very little cash flow or produce a low ROI – that will never get up.

We found how we filter through these ideas and cut through these projections and work out the ones that have potential was a critical process. That’s a tough exercise because essentially you’re making judgment calls on various initiatives. But it’s a very useful and fulfilling exercise.

neal lohmann, metastorm: When you deploy an idea, how do you make it transparent to ensure it gets funding?

Jon bradbury, aia: We had a situation where it was actually harder to buy a light bulb than it was to overspend the budget of $4 to $5 million. There was a historical process around buying light bulbs. Five or six signatures were required. But projects were new. One particular team didn’t know what was going on on the ground, so they could easily overspend the budget.

To stop that happening we established a strategic initiatives office which had financial oversight on all projects. But it was also a cost-sharing and cost funding area, trying to encourage local countries which had an idea to share it with somebody else.

The strategic initiative office was there to partly fund projects on a 50/50 basis. Scorecards were adjusted to specifically separate longer term project expenses from near-term business objectives to encourage co-investment. The first things that are cut when an organisation is set a higher profit target are expenses, innovation and advertising, two of which are about talking to the customer. So how do you keep those two ideas alive when you’re in cost efficiency mode? You get someone else to share the cost with you.

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rakesh Vengayil, bnP Paribas inVestment Partners: The most important thing in an integration/merger scenario, before you reward, is making it clear to people what their future roles are in the organisation. If this is unclear then things can go wrong because of insecurities; people try to protect their own territory and not being transparent and not willing to share the critical information, which is a key factor for the success of such projects. So in our case we have ensured that there is a transparent and credible selection process in place and wherever possible people are informed about their future in the new organisation and key people who are critical to the success of the project have been retrained.

Paul mais, hsbC: There are many challenges with change. We found the annual reward cycle does not necessarily drive the right behaviour, nor reward effectively in major business transformations that can often take five to ten years to deliver. neal lohmann, metastorm: How do we break long-term transformation down to simple components so you can show at the end of the quarter how much you’re going to spend and what value that provides? haily ChoW, hang seng bank: For us the program managers provided that. Then a planning and steering committee gave a mandate to change certain aspects of a small business that were included into an overall corporate plan.

It all depends on the steering committee’s expectations; sometimes they just want a progress report every three months. But in our case senior management expects deliverables every three months.

In many cases we try to plan out the projects in such a way that we do have small wins every quarter.

We’ve completed a business transformation that’s a probable crisis management project and we tried to replace one-third of our ATM machines in Hong Kong last year. We did that because a complaint was leaked from a customer that reached us.

To demonstrate to stakeholders internally, and external regulators, that we were making significant progress we tried to plan a process. We hired three consultants working with three teams to advise us and that task force started with a deliverable, tangible, target to achieve.

neal lohmann, metastorm: Why can’t we do agile business design? Why do we always have to have a perfect design before we start? Innovation, if you’re first to market, doesn’t have to be perfect. People will

accept it. But if you’re the second to market your only way to differentiate in that same new product is to have it perform better.

Do you have any good methodologies for an agiletype solution where you add innovation and then three months later you can add more, so you are continuously building a road map?

ChristoPher russell, hsbC: I like the way the Toyota guys go about things. They just hammer away at the process, the value stream, until they get it as lean as possible. Then and only then do they invest in technology. They’re not interested in cuttingedge technology either. They just want something dependable and proven that’s going to make the process more efficient.

With regard to transformation there’s a high likelihood that somebody’s already working in this space on one of the processes that you’re interested in. So one approach is to basically kidnap a project that’s already underway and rebrand it into the larger program.

What do they get out of it? They get the brand of whatever your program’s called, plus the resourcing and the funding from the Centres of Excellence and consultants you are engaged with and the air cover that you can provide at the C-level. You get immediate traction and momentum based on work already underway. It’s a win-win.

You enter into a sort of virtual circle – success breeds success. Then you can continue building as you gain credibility. You create a magnetic attraction to the overall program. People want to be a part of the larger program, adding momentum and resulting in more successful projects completed, generating additional funding so you become self-funding.

stanley Chan, bank of ameriCa merrill lynCh: It doesn’t work when you try to have a mission

“The most important thing in an integration/merger scenario, before you reward, is making it clear to people what their future roles are in the organisation.” rakesH vengayil, BnP PariBas investMent Partners

statement – then you kill a lot of the existing systems.

Eventually you will run into a lot of risk and then people will say, locally we are doing this process, it’s going to cost extra dollars to change it, then eventually the project will stop.

A better approach is to have a longer-term timeframe and then every quarter you make some changes slightly within your budget to migrate forward.

Eventually the system’s going to evolve a common terminology – that is a first step. We can achieve a significant difference before we move to a universal single platform and yet creating opportunities along the period to validate the return on the investment to set the pace of the change.

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who’s who They Are AsiA’s leAding finAnciAl services execuTives, shAping The fuTure of invesTmenT And sTrATegy. here, They shAre Their insighTs on The impAcT of emerging Technologies And The key Trends defining TodAy’s mArkeT. edited By patrice giBBons & melanie timBrell

QA &

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sa n dr a s ton h a m // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

sandra stonham mAnAging direcTor, Technology & operATions, dBs Bank Fst media: What technology priorities are shaping your agenda for the next 12 to 24 months?

stonham: As always, the technology is less of a concern than the integration of the different technologies. As such we are continuing our investment in serviceoriented architecture, allowing us to offer services via multiple channels, and we are continuing to invest in moving towards fewer but more strategic applications in order to minimise integration efforts.

Fst media: As part of its regional expansion DBS Bank (DBS) has transitioned to a single platform with the Avaloq Banking System.

What are the business benefits of this technology; and how is this progressing? stonham: Avaloq is an integrated frontto-back platform for high net worth customers. This means the entire investment portfolio for the customer is in one place.

This has huge advantages in terms of managing the customer relationship. Our relationship managers will have a more holistic view of their clients’ investment information; we can also manage credit facilities for the customers on a portfolio basis and in real time, and we can offer advisory services to the customer that best match requirements taking into consideration the entire portfolio. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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Fst media: How do you maintain a cohesive IT roadmap across the varying businesses you manage? stonham: Each business line is different and so has its own roadmap. However, there are synergies across the business lines and across the region as it is important to ensure the roadmaps are aligned to maximise those synergies. This is done very much in conjunction with our business partners, who express their needs and priorities. We work very closely together to define technology changes that meet those needs, while at the same time minimising work that may become obsolete.

Fst media: What role does mobile banking play in your private; treasury and markets; and securities IT strategy?

stonham: Mobile banking is an extremely important technology, both from the customer point of view, but also from a relationship manager’s point of view – being able to manage the customer’s requirements at anytime, anywhere is critical. As such we are investing significantly in mobile platforms, to allow customers the widest choice of channels when managing their portfolio with us, and also to facilitate our relationship managers’ ability to better serve their customers.

Fst media: How has the explosive growth of online trading impacted Straight-ThroughProcessing (STP); and what advancements are being made in same-day, or faster, settlement? stonham: There are many things which trigger the need for STP including volume growth, the need to minimise risk, continuous improvement regarding efficiency and the client expectations.

As such, many of our projects underway at any time provide greater STP. Examples are the adoption of industry standard platforms for online order confirmations and centralised clearing, continuous re-engineering of internal processes to streamline workflows and minimise turnaround time and errors, and introduction of strategic systems which 48

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we are investing significantly in mobile platforms, to allow customers the widest choice of channels when managing their portfolio. are fully integrated with other systems to facilitate optimal workflows.

Fst media: When comparing retail and private banking customers, where do the key differences in expectations of customer service lie?

and technologies as the people element is just as critical. When key components fail, redundancy is lost and so is high availability.

At this juncture, human errors become the biggest risk in bringing systems down. The bank continues to pay special attention to resilience and ensuring that our production environment remains stable.

Fst media: What emerging IT trends are you keeping an eye on? stonham: One of our biggest focuses is to address distribution of products and services to our customers through all channels they may want to use. This includes distribution both through third party multi-bank channels as well as through our own channels. It is important that we can meet the needs of our customers rather than asking them to adapt to us.

stonham: Although the offerings provided to customers are rather different, I think it is clear that expectations continually increase across all customer segments, so what is exclusive for private bank customers today becomes an expectation of growing affluent retail bank customers in the future.

As such, a wider range of products is being offered while the higher net worth retail customers benefit from having a relationship manager to manage their account in a more personal way. However, currently the key differentiator for private bank customers is that we manage their account as an overall portfolio, taking into consideration their risk appetite, and their investment objectives, and trying to provide them advisory services and suitable opportunities to meet those needs.

stonham: Technology leaders need to be multi faceted – similar to any other kind of leader. The understanding and partnership with the business is extremely important and for me very exciting, as it provides a purpose to technology and forms the basis for strategic planning. It is also important to stay abreast of external changes – this could be new technology offerings in the market or regulatory changes affecting the industry – and understand the impact on the business and how the competition is responding. It is important to remember that we are in a people business and our people are our greatest asset, so we have to be people leaders too.

Fst media: What lessons have been learned from DBS’s technology outage; and how did this impact your departments?

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?

stonham: Over the past few years, DBS has

stonham: At DBS we believe this is Asia’s time, and that the next 10 years will see enormous growth in Asia as a region and in its importance worldwide. This is already clearly underway. I want to be part of this evolution, and be remembered for taking advantage of the opportunities this creates and maximising our potential.

been investing in core infrastructure as part of the bank’s focus on resilience. This is to ensure no loss of key services to our customers in the event of a systems failure. The lesson learned in the outage is that we must take a holistic perspective when we look at resilience. It is not good enough to improve the processes

Fst media: What does it take to be a successful technology leader in today’s financial services sector?

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susa n h w e e // w h o’ s w h o Q& A

Susan Hwee Managing Director, Group Technology & Operations, United Overseas Bank (UOB)

the business segments within the bank. We also align the technology and operations function with the business segments and engage them proactively.

FST Media: UOB credits its heavy technology investment during the economic crisis as a key contributor to profit gains. Which technologies and strategies were behind this?

safeguard the interests of our customers.

Consequently, in the area of cloud computing banks are still tracking developments in regulation and security, both of which need to be addressed before the banking industry can review the technology for adoption.

FST Media: How is technology changing your customers’ banking consumption habits?

Hwee: Yes, the crisis was an opportune time to invest, especially in strategic areas for future growth. In fact, the bank started investing in an integrated regional platform four years ago and today, we continue to invest in state-of-the-art processing capabilities in the region. We are reaping results, leveraging on economies of scale and investment to grow our regional operations efficiently with the integrated regional platform initiative. This common platform empowers us to achieve scale and synergies.

The aim is to achieve consistency in regional customer experience, greater operating efficiency, speed to market and consistent risk management practices.

Hwee: As our customers become accustomed to instant access and response with the internet, the bank expects such habits to fuel demand for greater accessibility in banking.

Electronic and mobile banking will become key channels of choice, especially with working and younger customers who seek mobile banking services at their convenience.

That said, relationship and trust will remain important pillars as the foundation of the banking business is based on these values.

Consequently, we will continue to place emphasis on consistent positive customer experience through the various human touch-points.

FST Media: What IT priorities are shaping

FST Media: Which channels are proving to be

right now?

your agenda for the year ahead?

the most effective in acquiring and retaining customers; and why?

Hwee: Our chief priority is to invest in, and strengthen, our regional franchise to build UOB into a truly regional bank. For that to happen our technology platform must also be truly regional – a standardised and integrated regional platform that empowers our businesses to fully tap the strength of our regional distribution network. It is not just about a technology process.

FST Media: How far in advance do you formulate your IT mandate for UOB; and how responsive are such plans to market changes?

Hwee: We have recently completed our fiveyear plan to align with the bank’s overarching business goals and vision. We have also formulated strategic initiatives for the next one to three years in order to chart a steady progression towards achieving our goals.

We remain sufficiently nimble by keeping abreast of technological developments and also establish close relationships with

Hwee: Each channel plays an integral role in harmonising people, products and processes.

We complement these channels to meet the ever-evolving needs of our customers through the ups and downs of life and market cycles. For example, when the bank introduced UOB Lite branches, the objective was to provide valuable services such as express credit card issuance and selected services outside normal banking hours. This concept has proven to be immensely popular with the working population.

FST Media: Do you regard micropayments, Person-to-Person (P2P) payments and cloud computing as sustainable trends?

Hwee: Yes, we track developments and breakthroughs both with excitement and caution. Mobile technology is at an exciting stage. The banking industry is one of the most regulated industries – banks need to

FST Media: What IT skill-sets are in demand Hwee: Beyond IT skills, there is an increasing demand for IT professionals with strong business acumen who understand how technology enables broader business aspirations, and who possess the necessary management skills to deliver them. As most banks are integrating technology and operations as one family, professionals with skills in both technology and operations management will emerge as the next generation of leaders.

FST Media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?

Hwee: It would be building an IT governance and architectural framework that is sustainable and scalable. I also wish to leave a legacy of having groomed a new generation of technology and operations talent who not only make a difference to UOB, but set new benchmarks for the bank and the industry at large.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // m i c h a e L L e u ng

michael leung senior vice presidenT & chief informATion officer, china construction Bank

on customers’ trust to operate. The most central issue here is the strict conformance to the Personal Data Privacy Ordinance (PDPO) and a host of associated regulations, as required by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). So far, some retail banks have managed to adopt public cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approaches by stripping down the amount of sensitive customer data, maintaining a better segregation of computing resources at the service provider, and providing a full audit trail of activities performed externally.

Fst media: Can you elaborate on China Construction Bank’s (CCB) iPhone banking application; and are there plans to expand this offering to other mobile providers such as BlackBerry and Android?

Leung: The first mobile applications

Fst media: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months?

Leung: After three years of aggressive growth, from 15 to 50 branches, the next period will see the bank’s IT priorities shift from supporting growth to securing stability, while maintaining a competitive edge through the application of technology. A lot of systems and tools put in place in past years, while each individually functional and effectual in their own right, are not fully cohesive. So integrating, consolidating and enhancing the resilience of the various – often disparate – systems will be the top priority in the next couple of years.

Fst media: You have been wary of the hype surrounding virtualisation and cloud computing. Has your perception changed?

Leung: Like most things, there are always pros and cons. The benefits of virtualisation, cloud computing and the like are well recognised and in a lot of cases proven. In the banking industry however, regulatory compliance and audit controls are of particular importance, as banks rely

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are mainly for marketing and promotion purposes, including apps such as branch locator, discount hunter – using CCB’s credit cards, and CCB promotional events planner.

These will soon be followed by financial service functions, including various enquiry and transaction functions, and finally securities and treasury trading services that require much higher performance and security levels. We now support iPhone and Android devices at the same time, but not Blackberry at this stage.

Fst media: What is next for CCB’s online banking platform; and what specific enhancements will customers experience?

Leung: CCB Asia operates its own website separate from the CCB one in mainland China. The next focus will clearly be in wealth management services, where a great deal of transaction volume is generated every day. Securities trading, for example, already accounts for over 60 per cent of the total orders placed to the market each day. We are multiplying our effort to make this kind of online service more effective, efficient and reliable.

Fst media: Which channels have proven to be the most effective for acquiring and retaining customers?

Leung: Our experience shows that both physical (branches) and electronic (internet) channels are important, and indeed they complement each other. That’s why the bank has increased its branch network from 15 to 50 in just three years, and has spared no resources in enhancing its e-banking presence.

Physical presence is important to strengthen customers’ confidence and trust – the two most important factors for a successful bank – and which appeal to a mature customer segment. E-channels are preferred by the more affluent, professional customers who very often conduct their banking and investment business while ‘on-the-move’ 24x7.

Fst media: What technology trends are you keeping an eye on right now?

Leung: Cloud computing certainly holds a great deal of promise, as does Web 2.0. Their entries into the banking industry have been late, but I do expect a swift take-up in the coming years. Another key technology for banks is mobile computing, which allows sale and service platforms to go where the customers are, instead of customers going to where the bank is.

Fst media: What are your thoughts on person-to-person payments (P2P), near field communication (NFC) and bumping technology as sustainable trends?

Leung: P2P, NFC and bumping technologies are emerging but yet to be ‘tried and tested’ in industries like banking, where security and reliability are paramount. The potential is huge, especially in the e-payment and e-commerce areas, but it may take another couple of years before they find their way into banks.

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?

Leung: If I could be remembered by my staff as their respected leader, by the bank as a competent manager, by the industry as a knowledgeable opinion leader, and by the community as an empathetic worker for charitable causes, I would be very pleased indeed.

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si mon m cn a m a r a // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

simon mcnamara chief informATion officer – consumer, standard chartered Bank

Fst media: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months? mcnamara: Standard Chartered has moved from a product-led strategy to one where we place the customer at the centre of everything we do. This is a significant change in strategy, so we now have a program of work to deliver transactional convenience to our customers.

Across channels and touch points, we will strive to deliver great experiences to our customers.

We also continue to upscale and strengthen our infrastructure and core capabilities. Security is always of paramount importance and we regularly review relevant market events and independent research that will assist in maintaining our high standards – the idea is that we not only monitor but proactively manage the security envelope.

Lastly, we will continue exploring how we can better utilise synergies in our trade corridors. Every country in Asia is contributing in a positive way to banking and financial services technologies. The fact that we are in so many diverse markets

acts to our advantage. We can see what is happening across a diverse footprint, take the best solutions and use it across all our markets.

Fst media: How will Standard Chartered Bank (SCB)’s mobile offering, Breeze, evolve in the next year; and what smartphone technology are you using? mcnamara: We want to make our customers’ lives easier and we want to help them really actively manage their money.

For example, we have just introduced the Wishlist function, which acts as a ‘personal savings manager’ and helps customers keep track of their financial goals and work towards them.

As for smartphone technology, SCB was one of the first and biggest companies to standardise on the iPhone, and we continue to invest in this space. We’re the only bank to have our own dedicated, high-tech app development studio set up in the heart of San Francisco, which is focused on actively sourcing new ideas and developing new applications. Proximity to the creative geniuses of Silicon Valley means we are able to source and capitalise on new ideas quicker, and that we have direct access to emerging technologies through a consortium of partners.

Fst media: Which technologies are proving to be the most effective in driving SCB’s focus on customer centricity? mcnamara: It’s hard to single out one specific technology. For me, what’s more important is the way the technology is used. We are focused on closing gaps in our basic offering and, in parallel, investing in technologies and partnering with players that allow us to enter the market as a leader in terms of capabilities.

We are dedicated to scoping innovation through creative, useful ideas that can potentially be developed and deployed across the bank and really drive a true customerfocused agenda.

Fst media: What key technology trends are you keeping an eye on?

mcnamara: Any technology that allows our customers to interact with us more effectively.

There is a lot going on in the mobile space so this area is particularly important. For example, the development of apps is really exciting – the take-up has been phenomenal.

We have been able to create an environment where we develop customised apps that allow our staff and customers to perform more complicated tasks on-the-go. It has become an extension of our commitment to service delivery and enhancing the customer experience – key differentiators in today’s banking environment.

With an eye on the future, SCB is sponsoring a global mobile education program run by non-profit Berkeley Mobile International Collaborative (BMIC), where we invest in and tap the best young minds in this field, as business and engineering students compete to build the most innovative mobile apps for use in the real world.

Fst media: There is much hype surrounding cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Why has SCB resisted entering the cloud environment? mcnamara: Cloud computing and SaaS have actually been around for some time.

They have their benefits – efficiency, scalability, etc – and we do use them in a number of instances, but not for customer information or any data that has to be highly secure.

It’s worth remembering that technology is only ever as good as the people behind it – so essentially it’s still up to each company to see where this can help them manage risk or be more efficient. We track all of these technologies but use them only where we see clear business advantages.

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours? mcnamara: That remains as it has always been – I want to leave a function that has developed innovative, creative, simple, scalable business solutions that really make it easier for our customers to do business with SCB.

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51

w h o’ s w h o Q& a // V i k r a m su d

Fst media: What are the top technology trends right now; and why are they significant?

Vikram sud regionAl heAd, operATions And Technology, citi asia pacific

Fst media: Citi has created a global operations and technology ‘hub’ in Singapore, which services over 40 countries.

What innovative technologies are in use in the hub; and what have been the key benefits?

sud: The scope of operations and technology in the Singapore hub includes processing operations, application development and production support for Citi business, including consumer finance, retail banking, private banking, corporate banking and transaction services and markets.

For example, the concept, design and execution of Citi’s new global platform for retail banking and cards all take place in the Singapore hub, where we work closely with our technology industry partners to evaluate and deploy leading edge technical solutions.

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sud: Contactless payments and near field communications (NFC) technology are key trends. Citi is already piloting NFC and emerging mobile capabilities on devices such as mobile phones, tablets and kiosks for contactless payments. Early results are positive with good take-up from clients.

Secondly, smart banking is critical. Clients are looking for a different style of banking: when they need it and how they want it, via channels convenient to them. So we look for technology to enhance our mobile banking applications and improve the customer experience.

In branches we are introducing the concept of ‘smart banking’, which, in addition to offering a modern and relevant physical environment, also offers technology innovation to enhance and simplify the branch banking experience.

The third key trend is security.

Fundamentally banking is about trust: clients must have complete confidence in their bank’s ability to protect their assets and associated confidential information.

So security is the primary consideration in any initiative we launch. As such, we are working on new and convenient means of authentication, including biometrics and voice-recognition capabilities. We work closely with regulators and law enforcement agencies around the world to ensure our security solutions are as current and robust as possible.

Fst media: What are the most innovative technologies in mobile and online banking; and how will they change the customer’s banking experience going forward?

sud: In mobile banking, form factors and computation capacity of phones, coupled with features such as GPS and cameras, will bring more location-based services to clients. Combined with real-time decision management tools, these advances will significantly improve the relevance and importance of sales and service offers.

w h o’ s w h o Q& a // V i k r a m su d

The emergence of app stores such as iTunes, Nokia Ovi and Android Marketplace has significantly improved distribution capability for mobile banking. This is likely to dramatically increase adoption of mobile banking.

Though emerging, phones enabled with payment interfaces, such as NFC, have the potential to completely transform B2C and C2C payments. Cross-channel integration and a complete relationship view are key in online banking. The emergence of middleware technologies will allow banks increasingly to provide clients a complete view of their financial relationship, globally and across product types. Cross-channel integration will, for example, allow clients to begin a transaction through mobile or an ATM and then complete it at their convenience in a branch or at home via internet banking.

Real-time, relevant, smart and contextual offers powered by middleware abstraction layers will significantly improve banks’ ability to offer products that are relevant and tailored to individual clients, at the right time and in the right place.

Collaboration technologies such as web chat, co-browsing and video chat will also transform relationship management and customer service.

Fst media: Citi advocates smartphone technology, including location-based applications. What is the next frontier of mobile banking at Citi?

sud: Our location-based banking services provided on GPS-enabled smartphones are very popular. Users can click on Citibank Mobile to locate nearby restaurants or stores with special offers for Citibank cardholders on meals or products. We are continuing to include more countries so that our users will have regional and global functionality. In the near future, customers will be able to have all their financial account information such as prepaid card balances, coupons, rewards redemption and loyalty cards on their mobile along with the capability to make merchant and person-to-person payments. All of these will be delivered in a personalised, real-time manner to the customer when they need it.

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in the near future, customers will be able to have all their financial account information such as prepaid card balances, coupons, rewards redemption and loyalty cards on their mobile along with the capability to make merchant and person-toperson payments.

executed on-exchange, it is done by smart order routing to the venue with the best market price and depth.

Fst media: Can you elaborate on Citi’s biometric fingerprint trial; and what has been the customer and merchant response to this technology?

sud: We are looking at new technologies, including biometric methods of customer authentication as security is a primary consideration in any initiative we launch.

Voice and fingerprint authentication are both proving very reliable and cost-effective.

We have pilots running in a couple of countries that achieve high accuracy and it may be introduced soon in some of our channels.

Fst media: How is technology changing

Every customer is unique – consequently the mobile device will drive micro-segmentation, delivering personalised, relevant and timely financial services.

your customers’ retail banking habits; and how have you responded to the ever increasing demand for real-time interaction with banks?

Fst media: What are some of the most

sud: Everything we do in improving the Citibank banking experience is about providing speed, simplicity and convenience to our customers. Our customers expect real-time interaction with us. As such, crosschannel transactions will be our next value proposition. With improved connectivity, it allows our customers to begin a transaction on one channel – mobile or an ATM – and then complete it at their convenience in a branch or at home via internet banking.

interesting technology trends you see emerging in institutional banking?

sud: Electronic order volume has increased dramatically, contributed to by the fragmentation of execution venues and the increasing reliance on algorithms to achieve best execution. Ultra-low latency has also become one of the chief selling points for any institution wishing to brand itself a leader in electronic execution.

Execution quality, post-trade service, resiliency, product set and cost have all become key differentiating factors. Clients have the ability to direct-flow to multiple broker dealers and will use this ‘score card’ to make partnership decisions on a daily basis. In line with this, we also clearly see an increased demand for sophisticated product and transactional analytics.

Internalisation of flow and the ability to find the best price across multiple execution venues is becoming the minimum bar for electronic houses. At Citi, we are effectively maintaining our ability to cross orders outside exchanges; when flow needs to be

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?

sud: To ensure Citi continues to lead in technology and delivery, as these are the key sustaining differentiators in the highly competitive and commoditised retail and institutional markets that we are in. And it is our people and not just technology that is key to this legacy. At Citi we have produced great leaders by providing people stretch opportunities early in their careers and investing in their development. We will continue to do this.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // L i m k h i a n g tong

lim khiang tong group heAd of Technology, group operATions & Technology, ocBc Bank

Fst media: You are responsible for OCBC Bank’s technology and operations, including the Singapore and Malaysian transaction processing hubs. What are your top priorities for the next 12 to 18 months?

Lim: This year, we expect to see more regional-focused IT and operations initiatives as we continue to position OCBC Bank for further growth in the region. For example, there will be more collaboration by crossborder operations and technology teams and hubbing of relevant operations from Singapore to Malaysia. We will also continue to enhance the standardisation of our banking platform in both Singapore and Malaysia.

While we invest in capability building, we remain committed to improving our productivity and quality. I am putting a personal emphasis on instilling a quality mindset in the team and building a culture of innovation that is focused on empowering my staff to think creatively and develop solutions that will differentiate us from

the competition. In the past we focused on meeting project deliverables; now we actively leverage our expertise and knowledge to suggest ideas that our business units can implement to give us a sustainable competitive advantage. In transforming our role, we reaffirm our commitment to work hand-in-hand with our business units to lift our game.

Fst media: OCBC is in the latter stages of a five-year Asia-wide expansion plan, New Horizons II (NHII). What business benefits have been realised so far; and what role has IT played in the expansion?

Lim: Over the last five years, we have built a robust and extended infrastructure that is fully capable of supporting the bank’s regional expansion efforts. Knowledge and capability transfer between Singapore, China and Malaysia remain ongoing. The successful adaptation of business models from Singapore allows us to kick-start our operations and technological requirements in China and Malaysia more efficiently and effectively, hence speeding up our capability development in these two countries.

We have enhanced the group’s productivity and increased cost efficiency through standardisation of core systems and consolidation of data centres between Singapore and Malaysia, both for OCBC Bank

This year, we expect to see more regional-focused iT and operations initiatives as we continue to position ocBc Bank for further growth in the region ....we will also continue to enhance the standardisation of our banking platform in both singapore and malaysia.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // l i m k h i a ng tong

as well as Great Eastern Holdings. We will continue to harness synergies among various group entities to enhance our operational effectiveness by effectively coordinating the development and deployment of operations and technology resources.

FST Media: How far in advance do you map out OCBC’s regional technology and operations agenda; and how flexible are such plans to market volatility? lim: We have a five-year roadmap that is aligned with the bank’s strategy. Fully aware that the market is dynamic and constantly evolving, we have allowed flexibility in our plans to ensure its constant relevance to the market and continued alignment with business objectives. Having the agility to react to unexpected developments in the economy and market place gives us an edge over the competition. For example, when we were informed of our business unit’s intention to participate in China’s renminbi (RMB) trade settlement pilot program, we were able to quickly react to this new development and put in place the appropriate systems to support their goal. As a result, we became the first Singapore bank to participate in the RMB trade settlement pilot program.

FST Media: OCBC prides itself on promoting a customer-centric culture. Which specific technologies do you see enhancing the customer experience going forward? lim: When it comes to designing systems that cater to the underlying needs of our customers, we always do so from an ‘outsidein’ approach that begins with our customers in mind. The ability to identify the most relevant technology that will enable us to design a value proposition that would appeal to our customers is the key to delivering a differentiated experience for our customers.

The iPad is one very good example. On seeing how public interest was piqued and the level of excitement that was generated when it was launched in the US, we recognised that, similar to the popularity of iPhone, the iPad can potentially change consumer behaviour and become an important tool for engaging our customers. We broached the idea of

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lim: Channels like ATMs, internet and mobile

Lead time is required from idea conception to launching a product. It is therefore critical to stay ahead of the curve at all times. In a competitive industry, where consumers’ needs are always changing, whoever gets their products to the market first has the advantage.

developing a banking application that would be designed for iPad in advance of its launch in Singapore. The business personnel took to our idea and worked with us to develop an application that makes it easier for our customers to perform banking transactions anytime and anywhere. In 2010, we became the first financial institution in Singapore with a ready application available for iPad on the day of its launch in Singapore.

FST Media: From an IT perspective, what were the key challenges faced in developing OCBC’s foreign currency iPhone application, iOCBC TradeMobile? lim: We cannot over-emphasise the importance we place on ensuring our products and solutions continue to remain relevant to our customers regardless of what’s happening in the market place. After a product is developed and launched we still engage our customers regularly so we stay connected with their evolving needs.

The feedback we receive through such interactions allows us to further enhance our products and solutions.

FST Media: OCBC has launched an iPad banking and trading application. What do you see as the next generation of customer channels at OCBC?

phones will continue to stay relevant as they cater to the needs of different groups of customers. Given our changing lifestyles, these channels will continue to evolve, with each taking on multiple roles in a consumer’s life. Take, for example, the mobile phone.

What used to be a gadget for making incoming and outgoing calls is now packed with multiple functions, allowing one to call, text, listen to music, record videos, take photographs and more. The possibilities are simply endless.

FST Media: You have indicated that changes will be made to OCBC’s IT functions in the near future. Can you specify where these changes will occur; and why? lim: It is not so much about changing the IT function but more about adding value to the business by leveraging our expertise and knowledge to suggest ideas that will give us a sustainable competitive advantage. To take on this role and to do it well, I encourage my team to constantly keep their eyes open and ears to the ground so that we will always be aware of what’s happening internally and externally.

Staying ahead of the market is important as it allows us to anticipate customers’ needs and gives us the needed lead time to develop products that will help the business win market share. It is important to remember that lead time is required from idea conception to launching a product. It is therefore critical to stay ahead of the curve at all times. In a competitive industry, where consumers’ needs are always changing, whoever gets their products to the market first has the advantage.

FST Media: Every leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours? lim: It will be extremely satisfying to be able to leave behind a team of high-performance professionals,composed of innovative individuals who think strategically and creatively. A team that is well recognised for their thought-leadership and service excellence.

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pr av i r vo h r a // w h o’ s w h o Q& A

Pravir Vohra Group Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Bank

FST Media: What are the notable technology trends emerging in financial services?

Vohra: One mega trend is customer information management – a single view of the customer and accounts across products and channels. This implies restructuring data warehouses/marts, greater adoption of content management and business process management technologies to automate information management and decisionmaking processes. Internet banking 2.0 will leverage the web’s openness, network effect and many-to-many capabilities.

Branches will also need to transform, which will involve investments from refurbishing branch interiors and re-staffing to implementing new interactive technologies that invite customers to browse and learn, panel touch-screens offering access to product information, desktops enabling customers to videoconference with a product expert and laptops for simply surfing the internet.

FST Media: What’s next for mobile banking at ICICI Bank?

Vohra: Mobile banking has the potential to do to the mobile phone what email did to the internet. In India, mobile phone penetration, driven by fast-dropping call charges, reducing prices of handsets and reliable network coverage, has reached about 700 million subscribers in just over a decade. Moreover, operators are adding almost eight to 10 million new connections per month. Mobile banking provides huge potential to overtake even internet banking.

According to Gartner, mobile banking services will soon have to support a minimum of 50 different device profiles on upcoming operating systems. This is one area we are focusing on. While we already support a large number of handsets, we also have specific applications available on the Apple Store and Android market.

We are piloting initiatives around the mobile wallet, phone based credit and using mobile to service the banking requirements of India’s poor. Leveraging emerging technologies like Near Field Communications (NFC) could make traditional credit cards redundant and reduce fraud while enhancing customer convenience. Customers will use their mobiles to conduct a myriad of financial transactions from buying groceries to buying an expensive watch. We also expect legacy debit and credit cards to converge into mobiles in the future.

Vohra: Banks need to clearly define core competencies to ensure they are investing in areas that deliver competitive advantage.

One major constraint banks here face is the lack of adequate IT manpower and knowhow. In most cases, technology resources cannot fully comprehend the business imperatives. Also, there is an inability to efficiently match the right person with the right job. This carries a significant price tag and dampens productivity.

A further challenge is ensuring maximum advantage from investments in technology and avoiding wasteful expenditure from uncoordinated and piecemeal adoption of technology, adoption of inappropriate/ inconsistent technology or adoption of obsolete technology.

FST Media: What technology strategies does ICICI employ to meet increasing banking demand in rural India?

Vohra: The biggest challenge of rural banking is the cost of traditional branchbased banking not being commensurate with business generated. We are exploring a number of options like enabling business partners, creating multi-application smart cards and POS-capable mobile phones to reduce transaction costs and make services available.

FST Media: Which countries are taking

FST Media: What keeps you passionate about

the lead in implementing innovative banking IT?

your job?

Vohra: China and India seem to be emerging as the larger players with a clear focus on innovation to fuel growth. As an aside, Research and Development (R&D) investment in new technology in India has been growing at a compounded rate of 40 per cent annually.

Interestingly, financial institutions are now finding they need to shift from ‘grow’ to ‘grow profitability’. Growing profitability requires a focus on customers more than products and a lot of innovation is going into achieving this.

FST Media: From a technology perspective, what key challenges face the banking sector?

Vohra: India in this decade is a very exciting place to work. The opportunities, as per capita GDP marches from US$1000 to US$1500 or US$2000, are huge. The financial sector will clearly catalyse this growth and technology will enable the delivery of new products and services. My biggest inspiration comes from the ability to deliver innovation that will touch the lives of millions of fellow compatriots.

FST Media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?

Vohra: The best technology at the lowest cost that meet our ROIs immediately.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // su m i t pu r i

sumit puri chief informATion officer, prudential life assurance, indonesia

day from around 10 daily user registrations earlier, which clearly demonstrates that the applications are being very well received by our customers and agency force.

Even though Indonesia has low overall internet penetration currently, it is the second largest market for Facebook usage in the world, which means that today’s customers are increasingly value-oriented.

We strongly believe that if there is enough useful information available on mobile and online channels, our customers will definitely migrate to such convenient self service channels to save time and effort. We will continue to provide applications and systems which can be easily and comfortably accessed anywhere to increase our customer service levels and improve productivity of our distribution channels.

Fst media: How are PRU’s systems and services keeping up with the increased regularity of claims today?

Fst media: What are your top IT priorities for 2011/2012? puri: Our top priority is to simplify insurance transactions through automation in order to increase convenience of our customers. We are working on progressively increasing our understanding of customer needs through advanced customer analytics and business intelligence tools. We would also like to increase our speed to market of launching differentiated products which are better aligned with specific financial needs of our customers.

Fst media: Prudential Life Assurance (PRU) recently launched a number of digital initiatives including PRUaccess. What uptake are you predicting and what is next for mobile at PRU? puri: We expect significant uptake of these applications as the penetration of our internet and mobile users is growing by the day. We are already seeing web registrations increasing to over 200 users per 60

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puri: We have a very robust claim management and claim workflow approval system with our process turnaround times clearly one of the best in the industry. We have comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity planning processes in place for our systems and all our mission critical systems can be recovered in less than a day. In the unforeseen scenario of a disaster, our systems and processes are designed to quickly provide all necessary information to our operations and customer service teams for processing claims.

In parallel, we also ensure our customers are constantly provided updates via SMS etc. on claim status. We fully recognise the need to expedite claim processing and have been working very closely with hospitals and medical service providers to further improve their turnaround times and services to our customers.

Fst media: What differentiators do you need to offer to compete effectively in the Islamic insurance and finance space? puri: We are already the leaders in the Indonesian insurance market for Sharia products based on our superior rates and

high customer service levels. We have seen significant increase in new business premium income experienced by Sharia, which increased 76.2 per cent in the first quarter 2011 compared to the same period in 2010.

We would like to create tailored products even more suited to the financial needs of our Islamic insurance customers. Also, we would like to further increase our service level differentiators.

Fst media: Is PRU currently using cloud technology? What role do you see this playing in the future of the sector? puri: We are piloting the use of cloud technology and thin clients for some non-mission critical applications in our organisation given that the technology and standards are still evolving currently. We see this technology playing an important role provided the commitments on security standards and management are further enhanced by the cloud service providers.

Fst media: Does social media deliver business benefit to insurers; for what purposes can this channel best be utilised? puri: Social media serves as a very important tool for increasing our understanding about the needs of our potential and existing customers. Consequently, social media can act as a useful customer feedback tool to further improve our product and service offerings to our customers. We are tracking the evolution of social media very carefully using some tools so that we can leverage social media to enhance understanding of our customers.

Also, as insurance awareness and penetration levels are still pretty low in Indonesia compared with developed countries, advertising through social media helps insurers communicate some key business benefits of the insurance category as a whole to customer segments. We believe social media can be used for further educating customers about the benefits of insurance – and showcase its dual advantages of protection and investment so that customers are more aware of financial choices and can make more informed decisions.

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C o - S ponSo r e d a r t i Cle

Insuring a high-performance future

By Glenn Sedgwick

Past performance is no guarantee of future success. This is especially so in the dramatically changing global insurance environment. Technology-savvy consumers demand more speed, access and collaboration – and insurers must keep up. They must actively push information and services onto mobile and wireless devices and make the most of digital marketing, social media and analysis of consumer behaviour patterns.

Looking ahead, insurers will negotiate risks such as the increased frequency of catastrophic events and the higher traffic fatality rates projected for low- and middle-income countries. Carriers in mature markets will have to find ways to retain the knowledge of older workers as retirements mushroom and be increasingly diligent in protecting their technology assets.

After the global financial crisis, governments and regulatory authorities recognised the importance of a healthy insurance industry. As such, regulation is here to stay. Brokers are back in the picture as a result of radical consolidation; the professionalisation of advisory services; an increased focus on segments, customers and products; and better leveraging of technology. Aggregators, acting as price comparison platforms and online intermediaries, have already revolutionised insurance distribution in the United Kingdom and may do so in other markets.

A growing number of insurers are entering joint ventures and partnerships with large non-traditional players from other industry sectors. Successful insurers will also have to differentiate themselves through excellent customer service.

Given the combined strength of these forces, there will be no ‘back to normal’ after the financial crisis. The ‘new normal’ will include significantly lower returns on equity than those in the past decade.

Accenture has identified six business models likely to enable high performance in this new paradigm:

3. Global Conquerors – cover multiple geographies and lines of business. They must develop a multi-tiered governance model to balance central, regional and local market requirements. Strategic objectives are set centrally, then cascade down to regional decision-making structures. This requires skills in governance; asset development; and asset and resource allocation.

4. Emerging Titans – fully exploit growth opportunities in their emerging home markets. They operate at large scale with a high degree of standardisation and automation, and are managed from the top down. Despite this centralised structure, they have dedicated groups focused on innovation. Achieving high performance requires large-scale management; simplicity; learning; low-cost distribution; and using new technology to improve the business.

5. Risk Masters – have high degrees of specialisation, centralisation and standardisation – on an international level. These companies are structured and managed at the top level, according to specific types of risk and key accounts, rather than local entities. They need skills in underwriting; risk management; people management; and industry knowledge.

6. Brokers 2.0 – focus mainly on distribution, positioning themselves as an independent source of advice and price comparisons. Their sophisticated online processes address customers’ needs for convenience, transparency and individuality. Key processes and IT are organised centrally, while marketing decisions are made locally.

Brokers 2.0 will achieve high performance based on their technology and customer interaction capabilities.

The future will be challenging for insurers worldwide. By making clear and deliberate choices about future sources of growth, and aligning their operating model, governance and capabilities to their chosen business model, insurers can position themselves for strong growth.

Talk to Accenture to find out how these business models can lay the foundation for high performance.

1. Industrialisers 2.0 – create profitable growth by optimising and industrialising their operating models. They need a single, central governance authority to manage the business, and strong capabilities in operations, business architecture, marketing and distribution.

2. Value Pickers – leverage their strong position in a mature market to enter high-growth emerging markets. Their operating model and governance must balance optimisation and industrialisation in their home market with innovation and simplification in emerging markets.

This requires strength in strategic planning; mergers, acquisitions and alliances; risk management; and people management.

For further information please contact: Glenn Sedgwick Asia Pacific Insurance Managing Director d.glenn.sedgwick@accenture.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // sa n de e p m e h ta

sandeep mehta mAnAging direcTor, heAd of iT infrAsTrucTure, AsiA pAcific, uBs ag, hong kong

evolution of cloud-based services and their impact on the data center at one end as well as the demand for pervasive, feature-rich mobile functionality in the workplace at the other end are big drivers.

Fst media: How do you ensure your IT roadmap is responsive to regional market developments while also reflecting UBS’s global IT mandate? mehta: Our management objective is to achieve the right balance between regional business growth drivers and navigating the global organisation. That requires transparent communication and clear prioritisation on all sides. While each IT stream has global priorities, roadmap and an overall architecture we need to ensure that we are not rigid and tackle business demand and problems proactively.

Fst media: What are your thoughts on virtualisation and cloud computing as dominant trends in the next 12-18 months?

Fst media: UBS has several e-channels, including e-banking, WebShare and SMS Flash service. What do you see as the next evolution in investment banking channels?

mehta: There are a number of channels we are focusing on that leverage the web and mobile platforms. Social media is becoming essential to e-channels for both institutional and individual clients. The challenge for the industry is to provide the right functionality via these channels to maintain high levels of client retention. Portal offerings or tools via any platform have to be multi-functional from an information, analytics and execution capability to retain clients given limited screen space.

Fst media: What technology initiatives can we expect from UBS in the next 12 to 18 months?

mehta: Innovation and change are major themes in the coming year. Regulatory compliance, risk and market infrastructuredriven changes are relevant and a high priority across the industry. The continued 62

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mehta: Virtualisation itself is now a mature technology, however its deployment in financial services has room to grow.

Improved hardware offerings and better management tools are helping drive adoption, as are internal efforts at mitigating migration risk to a virtual estate. This is especially relevant for applications that have specific performance criteria.

Cloud computing is more a concept than a specific technology and it is not a panacea for all IT problems. What the industry needs from the cloud are IT resources delivered as dynamically scalable services with defined SLAs and the automation to support minimal human intervention. In addition, it must be available as a ‘pay as you consume’ model to make it commercially viable in either a public or private cloud.

For financial services, with the regulatory, risk, dynamic tenancy and resource consumption requirements the current market offerings are not quite mature – in some cases firms retrench from semi-private cloud services – but are rapidly evolving. The next 12-18 months will bring interesting developments.

Fst media: Which countries in wider Asia are taking the lead in implementing innovative, business-enabled technology? mehta: Market forces are driving exchange activity aggressively; we see that in Japan as well as other venues including emerging markets like India, Thailand and Taiwan where DMA and co-location capability have become reality. Market consolidation at one end and the relentless technology arms race on the other are driving innovation in the whole stack both at exchanges and with broker/dealers.

Asia has also been very aggressive with mobile adoption but differentiating value via mobile platforms is still a work in progress.

Early offerings have limited capability in the mobile space.

Fst media: What IT skills are in high demand in the investment banking arena? mehta: Technology skills alone are not sufficient in such an intensely change-driven market. Having the right combination of business and technical knowledge and partnering with the business on developing solutions is essential. Innovation is about driving a culture of change, taking risks and thinking outside the norm.

Fst media: What has been your proudest achievement since joining UBS? mehta: Understanding the people, organisation and culture of UBS is significant.

All major financial institutions have incredibly smart and talented people who use similar technologies to solve similar business problems. What differentiates them is how they harness the organisation and culture to deliver value competitively.

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours? mehta: The most important thing to remember is that for all the technology that drives financial services, it is still a peopledriven business. Getting that balance right is something I aspire to.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // r i c h a r d n e iL a n d

richard neiland chief informATion officer, gloBAl Technology cApiTAl mArkeTs, AsiA pAcific, deutsche Bank

Fst media: Deutsche Bank’s Global CIO for Asset Management has commented on the benefits of cloud computing and the positive role it is playing within Deutsche Bank. What are your views on the potential that cloud computing can offer the wider financial services market? neiLand: Cloud computing represents the logical evolution of how the industry provides, sources and consumes IT services. Our business is already highly regulated and will become increasingly so in the future. The single biggest impediment to wholesale adoption within the financial services market is not the availability of the underlying technology, which is already there, but how it can be implemented in a way that presents no additional risk. The natural phased approach is for financial institutions to internalise their cloud computing within their own infrastructure, firewalls and security and then progressively migrate

aspects to public or community cloud models.

I think this is a sensible approach that allows us to maximise the benefits of the offering with a cautious adoption model that never puts our clients at risk.

Fst media: What are your IT priorities for the next 12 to18 months? neiLand: Innovative technology is the key to achieving the Deutsche Bank strategy. In every business where Deutsche Bank has the most innovative, scalable and reliable technology platform we are number one in the market, for example, in global foreign exchange (FX), where we dominate our competitors. The key to this innovation is maintaining a long-term focus on the architectural vision, excellence in governance and disciplined execution.

Underlying this is our most important asset, our people. We need to continuously strive to realise the full potential of our IT professionals at Deutsche Bank and make the bank a magnet for the best and the brightest in the industry. Much of this will be achieved by adapting our operating model and focusing on leveraging the natural synergies in our technology and people investments across businesses, functions and geographies.

Fst media: Given Deutsche Bank has a strong worldwide presence, is there a global IT mandate; and how closely aligned is this with your regional technology roadmap? neiLand: Deutsche Bank is a global organisation with a global strategy and a clear management agenda as expressed by our Chairman, Dr Ackermann. The global IT mandate is equally unequivocal and shared by everyone at Deutsche Bank. From a regional perspective, we have to ensure that we fully contribute to the evolution and development of the global IT strategy. At the same time, we have to ensure that we are strong advocates for a region that encompasses 17 markets and that the inevitable variations of requirement, regulatory environment or business jurisdiction are considered properly within the global IT schema. We are successful in this because we are tightly connected into a global organisation and have a seat at the table.

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r i c h a r d n e iL a n d // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

Fst media: What are some of the emerging IT trends within Asia’s global markets sector? neiLand: The continued economic growth in the region and maturation of business climates in strategic countries such as China, India and Korea provide enormous potential. Market connectivity, low latency and world class risk technology are among the key differentiating technology offerings.

The quality of the user experience ‘UX’ is of utmost importance. Deutsche Bank has world class offerings in multiple areas including our FX and global transaction banking areas. Technology users are increasingly demanding intuitive, functionally-rich and high productivity experiences from their technology solutions. At Deutsche Bank, we have coined the term ‘simply instantaneous’ to describe the multi-year strategy that ensures Deutsche Bank continues to provide industryleading solutions with real competitive advantage across all of our businesses.

Fst media: How much is the mobile channel factoring in Deutsche Bank’s IT strategy across Asia; and what are some of the security concerns in communicating through this channel? neiLand: Mobile channel technology continues to develop rapidly and is critical to the success of our global transaction banking business. We already have a world-class offering and continue to invest heavily in maintaining our market-leading solutions.

Product coverage, availability, functional richness and security are all essential considerations within our IT strategy.

Authentication, encryption and data security are constantly invested in and updated to ensure the highest possible level of security.

Fst media: The Global Technology Capital Markets Department (GT CM) was established to improve Deutsche Bank’s operating processes with international financial markets. What are the department’s primary functionalities; and what benefits have been realised across the bank? neiLand: GT CM was recently established as part of the strategic evolution of our new IT operating model for Deutsche Bank. The new

mobile channel technology continues to develop rapidly and is critical to the success of our global transaction banking business.

operating model has been extremely successful in aligning the functional offerings of IT into a more efficient and high-quality solution. A good example is the establishment of a single unified production management group across the whole Deutsche Bank franchise. This group has made tremendous progress in standardising processes and technology that ultimately provide us with better incident resolution, higher availability, few production issues and greater client satisfaction.

Fst media: How do you maintain a cohesive IT strategy across multiple regions in which regulations and market maturity significantly differ?

neiLand: The variation in regulation, market maturity and business jurisdiction make life very interesting for everyone working in technology, particularly in the Asia Pacific region where we are located in 17 different markets. We are very successful in this because we combine strong leadership and expertise on the ground in each location, supported by a global IT organisation and strategy that maximises the use of global solutions but still retains the agility to provide local solutions when needed.

Fst media: What skills are you seeking in IT staff right now? neiLand: It’s difficult to single out one particular skill over another. Deutsche Bank is an institution that prides itself on innovation and diversity and although it may sound clichéd our people are our biggest asset. One of my primary goals is to ensure we provide the most rewarding and challenging careers

for our employees. We recognise that IT is a very dynamic environment, therefore we’ve recently undertaken an extensive competency mapping training process within Global Technology which identified the key competencies that we need in order to drive the business forward.

Coupled with that, we’ve invested in a competency management tool that will enable our employees to personally tailor a competency development plan that will support and develop their career within the bank. We are now capitalising on these investments and are already seeing improvements in productivity, internal mobility and in our overall talent management capabilities.

Fst media: Deutsche Bank’s global trading platforms have won a number of innovation awards. What makes them so innovative? neiLand: The best technology platforms in the world all have one thing in common: they make the complex seem simple. Our platform is simple to use, reliable, easy to upgrade and exceptionally well-integrated. Deutsche Bank has a long track record in providing world-class trading solutions. These solutions are based on excellence in architecture, software engineering, deployment and our support model. The innovation comes from empowering the right people within an operating model that cultivates creativity and knowing how to maximise the leverage of existing platform investments but also pushing hard continuous improvement and finally never resting on our laurels.

Fst media: Every leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours? neiLand: I have no great desire for a personal legacy. I do this job because I enjoy it, I get to work with a fantastic group of people and for an organisation that reflects my values. What is important to me is to continue to be part of the senior IT leadership team that continues to contribute to the long term success of Deutsche Bank and makes Global Technology the employer of choice for anyone considering a career in IT.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // r o b in L e u ng

robin leung mAnAging direcTor, heAd of gloBAl informATion Technology division, Bank of china international

Fst media: Bank of China International (BOCI) has gained significant value from cloud computing. What other cloud-based initiatives are currently in your pipeline?

Leung: To continue to move into the virtualisation area with more aggressive plans to consolidate production back office systems. In order to achieve this goal, we need to further consolidate our operating system platform into fewer types; most likely in Linux and Windows only. We will also begin to invest more in the desktop virtualisation technology to reduce the dependency on physical desktop availability.

Fst media: BOCI is focused on redesigning its settlement and trading platforms. How is this progressing; and what enhancements will customers experience?

Leung: We have made good progress with both. We are currently in the implementation phase with a solid migration plan. The first indication on using these systems is very positive and has met our original design goals.

Fst media: Given the explosive mobile user

base across Asia, how does BOCI justify not having a mobile banking strategy?

Leung: We have been looking into mobile solutions for some time now. The priority is mainly end users’ access to data. This includes internal and external users who require different sets of data viewing by their mobile device. At the moment, using mobile devices for day-to-day operations is not in the plan.

Fst media: What IT skills are in demand right now at BOCI? Leung: The IT skills needed most at the moment are application development and support. Infrastructure support can be outsourced relatively easily, but application support requires market and in-house knowledge and this has proven harder to find.

At the same time, this skill set is also in hot demand from most of the financial companies and therefore making the research for the right candidate even more difficult.

Fst media: How far in advance do you formulate your IT strategy; and how agile are such plans to market changes?

Leung: My IT strategy is based on a threeyear cycle; it is also based on changes in business demands. For longer term planning, the projects are normally larger and take longer to implement – these include such projects as data centres, settlement systems and trading system redesign. These major projects normally take up to 50 per cent of my IT budget and the remaining budget is there to handle business demands which can change according to the market and business development direction.

Fst media: What are your views on key trends including cloud computing, biometric authentication and next generation firewalls?

Leung: I assume most of the companies see actual benefits by studying or implementing virtualisation and cloud computing. The other two subjects are important IT security matters, however they don’t affect the bottom line as much. Within the virtualisation and cloud computing arena, it’s easier to do both

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who ’s who of fs i

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // r o b in L e u ng

in-house instead of externally, particularly for the financial services industry. My personal opinion is that virtualisation is easier and simpler to implement and adopt. Cloud computing needs suitable applications and the set-up can be quite complex. BOCI has implemented both technologies in-house and I know the other global investment banks have also done work in these two areas already; the only difference is the extent to which they have used these technologies.

my personal opinion is that virtualisation is easier and simpler to implement and adopt. cloud computing needs suitable applications and the set-up can be quite complex.

Fst media: What IT developments can we expect to see from BOCI in 2010-11?

Leung: Our focus is on enhancing our trading and settlement systems. On the infrastructure side of the business, we are focused on our data centre and networking design area. We are also going to spend quite a bit of our IT budget on supporting our private bank business.

Fst media: After many years supporting institutional investors, BOCI recently made a move into the private banking market. What impact has this had on your IT strategy?

Leung: The impact is quite significant as the technology needs in the banking area are different from the trading side. Since private banking is regulated by the MA instead of the SEC, the compliance and risk monitoring requirements vary. I am trying to leverage as much as I can, but there are many systems and requirements which are specific to private banking. In terms of resources, I have hired people who have private banking or banking system experience to the IT team.

However, in the long run, I think I can leverage these different resources. The impact of the private banking development on our original strategic IT plan has made me request increased funding and human resources to support the private banking side.

Fst media: BOCI’s server farms in Hong Kong comprise over 600 servers in at least five data centres. How do you manage the volume of data, while ensuring speedy, secure and accurate transactions?

Leung: This is why we are using virtualisation and cloud computing 68

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technology, and are undertaking a data centre consolidation project to streamline the support structure of all these servers and data storage centres. These projects have been going on for about a year now; I expect this will continue for another 12 to18 months before we can put a stop to the projects.

Fst media: How do you see the financial services sector utilising new channels such as mobile technology and social media?

Fst media: Automating business rules for corporate governance is critical for any bank the size of BOCI. How do you implement such systems; and how can you eliminate risk in the light of the recent global crisis?

Leung: Even in our company, not all the business and financial data is consolidated and automated; there are still a number of manual steps in risk monitoring. In my IT strategic plan, one major theme is to centralise the data management because without such centralised data repository it is very difficult to build any application on top of the necessary data. However, building a firm-wide data warehouse and firm-wide risk monitoring system is quite time consuming.

Our approach is to agree on a framework for the final picture, then start building each component as smaller blocks. At the end, we will be able to put them back together for firm-wide use.

Fst media: What keeps you motivated in your job – is it the technology, BOCI or the sector?

Leung: At the moment we are at the stage of catering to the basic needs of the mobile users such as off-site email access and remote computing platforms. Since I do have a lot of major projects in the application development and infrastructure area, I am not planning to expand my IT project scope to cover the mobile technology area for now.

Leung: My current role allows me to try out ideas which I could not attempt in a larger, global organisation. Knowing that my decisions affect the products and services we deliver and help the firm move forward is one of the major factors. It’s just like proving to those who did not believe in me that they were wrong. This alone helps to push me day after day to continue to make my organisation a stronger one.

Fst media: You have said that green IT has ‘great cost implications and therefore makes perfect business sense’. Do you see green IT as an emerging trend today?

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly

Leung: First of all, green IT is not only a symbolic element for a corporation to deploy; it has material advantages such as lowering electricity costs. Some simple firm-wide habit changes can also obtain reasonable results – for example, front and back printing set as a default, reminding people to switch off their monitors and using video conferencing instead of face-to-face meetings. When new technology comes out that can highlight the benefit of cost impact; it will certainly help push green IT into more organisations.

at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?

Leung: Every IT professional, with a career path starting from a junior staff member and growing into a senior manager, has many interesting stories. Mine is that I have had the opportunity to touch on a majority of technical areas, which has allowed me to build-up experience. The changes in my career (i.e. evolving from a developer to a system administration; or from an engineer to a manager) have been the most significant turning points and most memorable aspects of my career.

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h o sin k h eong // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

ho sin kheong heAd of informATion Technology, rhB Banking group

analytics; enhancing mobile payment capabilities; leveraging social media to reach out to our customers.

Fst media: What do you consider to be the most innovative technologies changing the face of the mobile and online banking?

ho: Where mobile banking and online banking are concerned, the use of smartphones, iPhones, iPads and tablet computing are all the rage now. The rapid adoption rate of smartphones will give the canvas of banking experiences a new look, thereby lending new meaning to mobile and online banking. I also believe that with the new generation of customers who are technologically savvier, community computing will get a fair share of opportunities which have been knocking on our front doors for some time now.

Fst media: What will the next-generation of payment channels look like; and with the rise of mobile payments, what are the more pressing security issues?

Fst media: What top technology trends are you focused on?

ho: RHB has included the three initiatives

ho: With the rise of mobile and internet payment channels, we envisage that the banking industry will be vulnerable to security concerns such as phishing attacks, trojans and malware. We expect banks will distribute on-demand anti-malware desktop software in order to protect the online banking user.We also foresee the banking industry using a layered security approach to enhance security for transactions that include authentication, fraud detection and out-ofband transaction verifications. We believe that consumer awareness is most crucial in countering security threats. In terms of the next generation of payment channels, there will be a need to accommodate collaborative payment schemes and mobile banking and payments. As such, there would be an increasing need for RHB to be innovative in using personalisation as a platform to differentiate ourselves from the other industry players.

mentioned above. The initiatives listed below have already been in our blueprint to roll out in the next 12 to 18 months: putting in place the foundation for enterprise

Fst media: How will online authentication, security and anti-fraud measures in the banking sector evolve; and what are your

ho: I view the following three as making an impact on the industry and judge them to be the top three technology trends in Asia Pacific and globally: advanced business intelligence; mobile banking and mobile payments; and social media.

Evolving customer needs and expectations, where managing customer intimacy, intelligence and accessibility, coupled with having a good grasp of customer behaviour and touch points, is our foremost strategic consideration. These factors dictate the current banking landscape.

Fst media: What new IT initiatives does RHB Bank Group (RBH) plan to roll out in the next 12 to 18 months?

views on the potential of biometrics as an anti-fraud measure?

ho: With every advent of any security measure to counter threats, there will always be a corresponding increase in sophistication in these threats to offset these measures. The introduction of biometrics in this aspect may take time to be incorporated in the online space. That said, RHB initiated an innovative solution last year that advocated paperless and speedy transactions through RHB Easy, which requires biometric fingerprint verification, inter-alia, as a process of verification and security.

Fst media: Do you foresee social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter playing a role in your future banking strategies? ho: The use of social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter encourage mass collaboration and are the most popular of the available social media websites. While they lend a personal touch when reaching out to the online communities and provide branding opportunities, RHB will proceed with great caution in using these websites for its banking strategies.

The opportunities for greater transparency, wider customer engagement and enhanced communications are some of the advantages to capitalise on, but at the same time such opportunities suggest that the degree of transparency should continue to remain a caveat in view of the nature of the banking business.

Fst media: What keeps you passionate about your job – is it the technology or the financial services sector? ho: The world of technology opens vast doors of opportunities which are both exciting and amazing. One can see future developments taking shape from the current technology available, with new devices and ideas springing forth like hot cakes from the oven. That in itself keeps me passionate about my job as I am able to see how technology can be applied to resolve banking business issues and drive business opportunities ahead of the curve.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // us h a se k h a r

usha sekhar heAd of iT, aXa life insurance singapore

Fst media: The online channel is proving an effective tool for improving customer service and increasing retention and acquisition. How do you see this channel evolving; and what’s the next big thing for online insurance? sekhar: The online channel seems to be evolving as the fastest and furthest reaching among customers who are savvier with the digital space. At AXA Life Singapore, we recognise this trend and are strengthening our presence online. We would prefer to take a long-term approach to implementing online services and IT solutions for our customers. Any online service is only a facade if your core systems’ data quality or efficiency is poor. While we are moving towards adopting cloud computing in certain areas of the business, we have identified key initiatives to build solutions that can support and sustain long term business growth.

Fst media: What impact is mobile technology having on your IT strategy; and what new developments are you keeping an eye on?

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sekhar: The rollout pace of mobile

sekhar: Information technology is in

devices is extremely fast. The development cycles are much shorter than five years ago. As for mobile solutions, my personal view is that mobile apps have to address the right customer needs. It is not about ‘how many apps’, it is more ‘how customer-focused and useful the apps are’ that creates a big differentiator.

On the impact of mobile technology on IT strategy, AXA Life Singapore has always believed IT strategy should be aligned to business strategy. Technology always changes, mode of delivery may change but if IT strategy is sound, I believe IT can and will be a great partner to deliver our business targets.

everybody’s pocket and it is exciting to see how IT can be used to differentiate organisations from competitors. From a customer’s perspective, easy access to information is always important. Delivering timely information to the selected device of the customers’ choice will fulfil a major part of customers’ needs. But in current times, well-informed and IT-savvy customers also like to be enabled with tools that have business intelligence capability to help them make decisions on their investment portfolios and design their own insurance or investment plans. I think enabling the customer with the information they need for personalised insurance/investment planning combined with quality service will be the key differentiators.

Fst media: You are an advocate of social networking. What role does social media play at AXA Life Singapore; and what benefits do you see it delivering to the business?

Fst media: What do you see as the key IT challenges facing the insurance industry over the next two years?

sekhar: As a service partner serving the

sekhar: I think one of the biggest IT

insurance needs of our customers, we place great emphasis on personal interaction.

It is the face-to-face interaction and the sincerity of helping each customer that builds our attitudes when we serve our customers. Although we use online media to engage our more digitally savvy customers, it is never a case of replacing personal face-to-face interaction.

challenges is continual advancement in new technology developments to improve business operations and customer relationship management, without increasing IT security risks. New developments must also be compliant to industry-specific regulations, and as insurers, we have to ensure these developments do not expose us to the risk of divulging customer information.

Fst media: What are your key IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months?

Fst media: What keeps you passionate about your job – is it the technology or the financial services sector; and from where or whom do you draw your inspiration to innovate?

sekhar: On top of my list is to reduce the number of older systems in the organisation.

We have embarked on this challenging initiative and have made very good progress.

We have already standardised our back office processes and implementation approach, which has helped to industrialise many processes within the business. We will continue to fine tune these processes and focus on building automation in our business.

Fst media: From a customer perspective, what technologies do you think will emerge as the key competitive differentiators between firms in the insurance sector?

sekhar: I always compare my work to the way a mobile phone salesman does his sales pitch. He speaks nothing about the technology behind that powerful handheld device, but he presents everything about how the mobile phone is useful to you and your lifestyle. To me, technology is a medium to deliver, irrespective of which technology you use. Technology is a tool that enables the business and that is what makes it exciting. It is the powerful combination of technology and business that makes my job exciting and challenging.

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C o - S ponSo r e d a r t i Cle

Capitalising on change with quality information, efficient processes

By Andrew Rickard, Partner – Insurance, and Nick Sorger, Partner – Wealth Management, SunGard Global Services

As insurance and wealth management organisations look to capitalise on unprecedented growth opportunity, they are faced with increasing competition, and operational and technology infrastructure that is struggling to keep pace. As a result, CEOs, CFOs and CIOs are under increasing pressure to manage the IT spend as an investment to derive business value.

Competition is growing rapidly due to economic growth, making Asia Pacific one of the fastest growing regions for insurance and wealth management. Well-conceived and constructed use of technology and enterprise architecture can help companies gain the cost-efficiency and responsiveness they need to serve and retain clients, and grow their businesses while controlling cost and risk.

As the insurance industry has evolved in Asia Pacific, point-in-time tactical processes and systems have been established to address specific pain points and competitive needs, leading to a multitude of disparate systems. Today’s CIO recognises that a robust information management strategy and a focus on business process management are needed to help bring processes and data together to facilitate cross-selling and deliver operational efficiency.

Regardless of the insurance model, the management of recruitment and sales activity are central to the organisation’s success. Recruiting the right agents, serving independents, and ensuring smooth processes for Bancassurance are all key to ensuring high levels of service to the end client. This requires personalised client service offerings, automation and control of data and transactions, and availability of information to the sales force as well as to clients.

In wealth management, where advisors are also concerned about competition and client retention, the ability to provide a consistent internal and external view of holdings is paramount to enhancing service. Highly accessible web portals can present holdings in a consolidated fashion to the client, advisor, operations staff and call center. However, to be effective, they require integration of various wealth management platforms enabling data consumption by multiple delivery channels.

These challenges can be addressed by two things: quality information, and efficient and effective processes. With the right technology and architecture in place, to achieve a consolidated, holistic view of sales activity and the client, insurers and wealth managers are able to identify issues and take action quickly. In the end, by focusing on improving information availability – whether for people, processes or systems – organisations can increase their efficiency, thereby winning market share by being more responsive to their clients.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // c h a n dr a g u p ta

do you see as the most important technologies to invest in for banks operating in India?

gupta: The banking sector in India is unique and is considerably different from that of other nations. This can be attributed to the country’s unique and diverse geographic, social, and economic characteristics.

India’s economic policy framework combines socialistic and capitalistic features with a focus on public sector investment. The banking system serves the goals of economic policies, particularly concerning equitable income distribution and balanced regional economic growth.

India has followed the path of growth-led exports rather than the export-led growth of other Asian economies, with emphasis on selfreliance through import substitution. These features can be seen in the structure, size, and diversity of the country’s banking sector.

The last two decades have seen the advent of various banking institutions in India. To maintain the competitive edge going forward, banks need to focus on how technology can enhance various things like data and process management, enterprise content management, web content management, customer relationship management, business process management and risk management.

chandra gupta direcTor And heAd of informATion Technology, Barclays corporate india

Fst media: What key technology trends

Fst media: What digital initiatives have recently launched by Barclays India and how are they impacting the business?

do you see shaping the future of banking in Asia Pacific?

gupta: We are augmenting our product

gupta: Asia Pacific is on the road to becoming a very significant financial services market. Institutions are on the rise and consumers are becoming more and more technology savvy. Technology will therefore play a very vital role in the growth of the sector.

Emphasis on bettering banking IT and operating models, innovation in products and services, and effective IT cost functioning will help banks to capture the digital opportunity and use technology effectively as a strategic enabler.

Fst media: What are the factors that make the banking sector in India unique; and what 72

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offering in the internet banking and mobile banking arena to cater for a globalised setup in India. We believe that digital penetration is something Barclays does very well and we have proven that in the UK market.

In India, people are becoming more and more accustomed to banking ‘anytime and anywhere’ and our internet banking and mobile banking platforms are strong drivers to penetrate the Indian clientele.

Currently on the internet front, we have a very customer-friendly, easy to use interface which allows customers to bank from anywhere across the globe. As for mobile banking, Barclays is in the process of launching a very advanced operator agnostic mobile banking system for its customers.

c h a n dr a g u p ta // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

Currently we offer mobile banking service to our customers under ‘Hello Money’

Fst media: Mobile penetration is currently booming in India. What are the most popular channels for connecting with your customers and how do you see this evolving in the future? gupta: There is huge competition to penetrate the financial market in India by various global players. To outplay the competition, the easiest and the quickest way is to offer ‘digi banking’ solutions to customers leveraging our global suite of products, especially from European markets.

This brings many advantages, ensuring our profitability by driving our core product competencies across the globe and offering Indian customers channel banking platforms which are best in the class.

Currently, the popular channels for us to stay connected with our customers include ATMs, tele-banking, internet banking and mobile banking. The mobile banking channel in particular is gaining an increased popularity in India, especially in the tier 1 cities where people are technology-savvy.

The model is very beneficial to the banks as well – the cost per transaction on mobile banking is around 85 per cent lower than branch banking.

Fst media: What are the differences in how technology is used for competitive advantage in the commercial versus consumer banking context? gupta: Both public and private banks are spending large amounts of money on technology to provide innovative products and services to their customers with more convenience and satisfaction. Technology is helping in reducing the cost of transaction and increasing customer base while enabling wider reach. These innovations are happening in the consumer banking as well as the commercial banking segment.

The key differentiator between how technology is used to provide solutions is the interface and usability. The role of technology in consumer banking is to stay connected with the customers and

provide easy and prompt banking solutions and methods. In commercial banking, on the other hand, advanced products and automation of the financial supply chain is the focus of technology.

Fst media: What is Barclays’ current stance on cloud and Software-as-a-service (SaaS); and how do you see this evolving in the future? gupta: Barclays is on private virtualisation, not cloud computing. Barclays has experienced one of the grand success stories of virtualisation – the Wintel platform for its retail bank and the NBFC arm to bring down the Wintel estate from around 160 servers to 48 servers – which is close to a 75 per cent reduction. This has resulted in an annual cost saving of around 800,000 pounds year on year on RUN saves. The VM Ware 3.5 provides enhanced features for reduced effort on administration, V Motion to move servers within the same cluster with minimal to zero impact on production services, reduced rack space and power consumptions and increased processing power by optimally allocating the hardware resources to the need of applications.

Fst media: From a technology perspective, what are the key challenges banks are facing in the Asia Pacific region?

gupta: Technology is a key driver in the banking industry, which creates new business models and processes, and also revolutionises distribution channels. The capabilities and opportunities provided by the internet have transformed many business activities, augmenting the speed, ease, and range with which transactions can be conducted, while also lowering many of the costs. Banks that have made inadequate investment in technology have consequently faced a depletion of their market shares.

However, there are various challenges that banks are today facing on the technology front as far as the cost, security, and effective innovation is concerned.

The foremost challenge is to ensure that banks gain maximum advantage from their investments in technology and avoid

wasteful expenditure. Another challenge is the increase in cybercrime. The rapidly growing interconnectivity of IT systems, and the convergence of their technology towards industry-standard hardware and software components and sub-systems, renders IT systems increasingly vulnerable to malicious attacks.

Another issue is matching innovation with the cost, security and business requirements, a challenge which most companies face.

Looking ahead, another challenge which companies will face is consumerisation.

In the last decade consumer technology improved by great leaps and bounds, making consumerisation a part of the corporate world. While this technology is helpful in reaching out to clients faster and better, it also has its own share of threats, including data protection, device management, and security issues. However, if regulations and policies are appropriately followed, the challenges can be dealt with in a smooth manner.

Fst media: What IT skills do you think are in demand right now and how do you see this changing at Barclays? gupta: The IT skills which are very much in demand right now are cloud computing, virtualisation, security management, web 2.0 and unified communications. Of course, there are some skills like programming, project management and business intelligence for which the demand will always be there.

Barclays is in sync with the advancing technology and we accordingly recruit and train our workforce.

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level has some legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours? gupta: I would like to be remembered as someone who helped the franchise use technology as a strategic tool to build its business rather than a support service to the institution. I would like to put my stamp on innovations in the different banking products offered by Barclays to its customers through faster product enablement, more rigour in controls, better operational efficiency and optimising operating costs.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // b ob ca isL e y

we are upgrading our securities clearing and depository solutions, migrating them from a mainframe environment to an open system solution

by June 2012.

response times. The new securities trading engine will provide additional order types and, within the next 12 months, pre-trade risk management.

Fst media: You have indicated SGX will pursue a new data centre and replace security clearing and depository solutions. How are developments progressing? caisLey: We announced the launch of a new

Bob caisley chief informATion officer, singapore eXchange (sgX)

Fst media: The Singapore Exchange (SGX) confirmed its new trading platform, Reach, will be launched with an aim to build the world’s fastest trading engine. What are the key deliverables of this project? caisLey: Reach has four key components: a state-of-the-art data centre; a new high-speed securities trading engine; Points of Presence (POPs) in key liquidity centres around the world; and a new co-location facility.

The data centre and the co-location services will start operations from April 2011, the trading engine from August 2011 and POPs by the end of 2011. In the years that follow we will continue to innovate and improve the securities trading engine and launch the equivalent high-speed trading engine for our derivatives market.

Our customers will be able to make use of our co-location services to be as close to the trading engine as possible to gain the fastest

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state-of-the-art data centre in June 2010, and I am pleased to say the work is completed and we are now establishing network and storage infrastructure and will be moving our equipment in shortly.

We are upgrading our securities clearing and depository solutions, migrating them from a mainframe environment to an open system solution by June 2012. Once complete we will look at providing additional functionality such as electronic interface and other features.

Fst media: What are your key technology priorities for the year ahead? caisLey: 1. We launched our OTC clearing services for Singapore dollar interest rate swaps in November last year. Over the last four months, it has shown good traction and we have cleared over S$24.2 billion (notional).

A strong focus is the next phase of this project which will see the launch of OTC FXFs in June 2011.

b ob ca isL e y // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

2. The Reach initiative is an important technology investment and we will implement the new trading engine for our securities market in August 2011 and create POPs in key liquidity centres around the world by the end of the year.

3. Securities clearing and depository re-hosting from mainframe to an open system.

4. New risk management system.

5. Focus on costs. While there is a significant investment in technology and services, these need to be delivered with a reduction in costs.

Fst media: From an innovation standpoint, what sets the SGX apart from its international counterparts, and which of the world’s exchanges lead the innovation charge? caisLey: From an innovation standpoint we are looked upon as the leading exchange in the region. We’re ranked seventh in the world by market capitalisation and we continue to punch above our weight. In order to continue to innovate and remain competitive, it is essential to have a sound and well regulated marketplace. We have a strong and collaborative regulator that wants to see Singapore remain a vibrant financial marketplace. At SGX we operate a securities market that constitutes approximately half our revenue. The other half comes from other core businesses, namely: the derivatives and commodities suite of products, issuer services, market data and depository services.

Competition is a factor of life impacting 50 per cent of our revenue and I believe competition breeds innovation.

In terms of which of the world’s exchanges lead the innovation charge, I would nominate NASDAQ-OMX given they provide much of the technology we use.

Fst media: What are your views on cloud computing, and is there a place for it at the SGX?

caisLey: Yes, there’s a place for it here in Singapore but not for all services we offer. We need to be careful with our confidential data and ensure it is appropriately secure, backed up and not comingled with other companies’ data. It is also a matter of what data is

intended for the cloud. While we use some cloud services for our corporate solutions, for the near to mid-term future I can’t see cloud use for our trading and clearing services.

Fst media: What do you feel are the most pressing IT needs facing the exchange sector today? caisLey: Firstly, latency and what we generally describe as the race to zero. We’re trying to give our customers the lowest and most deterministic latency possible.

Exchanges also face tremendous peaks in terms of throughput of transactions. From one day to the next you can have 300 per cent increase in transaction volume, so ensuring systems can cope and managing response times is one of the biggest issues facing the exchange sector, especially with high frequency trading.

Regulation is also something with a heavy IT focus now. The ‘flash crash’ of May 2010 and its causes have generated a lot of discussion between regulators and exchanges around the world. Implementing appropriate safeguards is providing a lot of IT development, whether pre-execution checks, circuit breakers or improved monitoring.

Fst media: What are noticeable trends within exchanges worldwide?

caisLey: I believe SGX started a serious race when it announced its Reach initiative in June 2010 to implement the fastest trading engine in the world, build a world class data centre, place POPs in major financial centres around the world and provide a new co-location service. There are now at least three significant exchanges in the region looking to update and replace trading and data dissemination engines and investigating co-location services.

In terms of trends, given recent announcements by SGX and ASX, Deutsche Bourse and NYSE Euronext, and LSE and TMX, I would have to say consolidation. I believe the trend will continue for a while, not always resulting in a merger, but more complimentary partnerships.

Fst media: What core skill set do you look for in an IT protégé? caisLey: Enthusiasm is a great start; I always look for people with a spark. But I don’t want ‘yes’ people, I want staff able to think outside the square, with common sense that are hard working!

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What’s yours? caisLey: Today SGX is associated with

in order to continue to innovate and remain competitive, it is essential to have a sound and well regulated marketplace. we have a strong and collaborative regulator that wants to see singapore remain a vibrant financial marketplace.

leading technology as we will be launching the fasting trading engine in our securities market in the months to come. While I know records are made to be beaten, I would like to at least have some time with the knowledge I launched the world’s fastest trading system!

We have also built a state-of-the-art data centre, remarkably in less than six months, and for a number of years I know it will be admired as one of the best data centres in Singapore, if not the region.

Finally, my IT team have replaced almost every legacy system with first class solutions delivering powerful products and services.

This has been no small task over the past three years and has taken a lot of blood, sweat and tears! I have a great team with me and as you know, you are only as good as the person or team working for you.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // daV i d Ly n c h

david lynch chief informATion officer, china, standard chartered Bank

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Fst media: How is Standard Chartered China progressing with e- banking, automation and mobile initiatives?

Lynch: Automation levels have improved significantly, most evidently in our global cash and trade platforms where we have invested heavily. Our straight-through processing rates continue to improve. The throughput in our wholesale banking Straight2Bank platform continues to be strong. We recently launched a simplified version aimed at small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Traditionally the SME segment has lower electronic banking rates, so the uptake is encouraging.

We have taken decisive steps to lead in mobile. Affordability of 3G services and the rapid consumer switch towards fast response, on-demand, context and location-based services means the smartphone has huge advantages over other channels.

To meet this demand, in March we launched ‘Breeze Living’ for iPhone.

Conceptualised, designed and developed in

China, Breeze Living is about great dining and lifestyle deals around Shanghai (soon to be other cities). Several features make it unique.

Firstly, you don’t need to be a customer to enjoy great deals, but you can enjoy ‘privileged offers’ as a cardholder. Secondly, it incorporates its own social network called the Tribe. You can also syndicate activity to favourite social networks in China. Thirdly, it incorporates augmented reality, game mechanics and location-based deals. It even has a daily group buying function provided through our partner.

We have studied many non-bank success stories – Skype, Facebook and Groupon each have features we wanted to learn from. We needed to engage prospective customers in an innovative way, and be creative in raising brand awareness. Within two weeks of launch, TechNode published a blog naming it Best Augmented Reality App in China.

In May, we launched Breeze Mobile Payments for the iPhone in China. It offers cardholders simple, fast, convenient access to make payments from their mobile.

Subscribers can pay bills, make Peer2Peer (P2P) debit card payments, pay other bank’s credit cards, top-up their mobile, pay traffic fines and even purchase travel services.

We have been running for several months in pilot. The P2P feature, card and bill payment services have been extremely popular.

We also launched Breeze Places for iPhone in China this year, offering customers added convenience to locate branches and ATMs, also incorporating augmented reality. Our award-winning Breeze mobile banking solution for iPhone/iPad as seen in Singapore/Malaysia, with its newly launched Wishlist, is also on our roadmap for this year. We also plan to broaden our existing capabilities to other mobile platforms.

Fst media: Virtualisation and cloud computing play a key part in Standard Chartered’s IT infrastructure. How are these technologies evolving?

Lynch: The major advance was the recent memorandum signed with the National Supercomputer Centre in Tianjin. The Tianhe1 Supercomputer is now the world’s largest, located almost adjacent to our new

daV i d Ly n c h // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

Tianjin Technology and Operations Centre.

Capable of 2.51 quadrillion computing operations per second, supported by 14,000 CPUs, the memorandum gives us the ability potentially to farm our computational load into a cloud-like environment. We get the added benefits of low latency processing given the proximity to our processing centre.

The possibilities are endless.

We are looking at cloud computing as a major trend that will ultimately remove much of the physical computing from our own environment, provide more agility and reduce cost. It makes sense for us to continue to adopt a low-risk approach here and focus more on private cloud solutions, virtualisation and non-mission critical/data sensitive applications first. Because of regulation and the nature of banking, you’re typically going to see the cloud pioneers coming from other industries. We will plug into those capabilities where and when they are market proven and don’t add unnecessary risk.

Fst media: Globally, Standard Chartered is advocating social media. Which social media networks have been most effective in acquiring and retaining customers?

Lynch: A social media engagement strategy is a core function of business now, so understanding how to engage and how not to disengage your customers is absolutely critical to building brand advocacy.

The World’s Coolest Intern campaign was recently awarded a ‘Googlie’ for the best use of search in Social Media. It was a competition based around giving a unique opportunity to join our Singapore mobile banking team and be part of the experience we are creating.

In the UAE, we have managed to drive some very positive customer engagement through Facebook, especially in the dining space.

Across several markets our award-winning Breeze online/ mobile banking is attracting strong followers via Twitter, through offline events and our continued innovation.

In the China context, the likes of Kaixin, RenRen, Douban and Weibo are the Facebook and Twitter equivalents. We launched our Digi_Camp blog alongside Breeze Living and are steadily building followers around our thought leadership on technology and

A social media engagement strategy is a core function of business now, so understanding how to engage and how not to disengage your customers is absolutely critical to building brand advocacy.

in the Chinese context. NFC technology and variants of it will advance rapidly, as battery technology improves.

In terms of where our focus will increasingly shift, it’s data and analytics. The concept of predictive banking is something that intrigues me. People are generally lazy in managing their finances. They leave deposits in low yield accounts, for example. I see the industry evolving progressively towards a predictive model, where choices can be easily prompted by the bank.

Fst media: You are Chairman of Standard Chartered China’s Environmental Council.

What are some of the green IT initiatives the council is undertaking? lifestyle trends. Breeze Living is as much about enriching our existing customer’s lifestyle, as it is about engaging potentially new customers in a completely new social context. But I would say the strong bias for our activity right now is engagement, brand awareness and not direct sales.

The sales we are generating now are mostly indirect. People are starting to bank with us as a mobile lifestyle choice. We packaged all these capabilities recently into an entire CVP for the emerging affluent, ‘Breeze Banking’, centred on mobile with simple banking products underpinning it.

Fst media: What is the most notable technology trend in financial services, here or abroad, that you are keeping an eye on; and how do you see this evolving in the next three to five years?

Lynch: The race and posturing for technology and card providers to own Near Field Communication (NFC) and merchant payments is one worth watching. Apple managed to own music by changing the distribution platform and creating the ecosystem. There’s an obvious prize there for the winner/s. It will be far more complex here in China though. The market size is immense and for the ultimate benefit of the consumer we may end up seeing this space licensed much the same as a telco would be.

There may be two to three players in the end and there is one very obvious one in Union Pay, which will continue to play a major role

Lynch: Green IT has been a passion for several years. We encourage staff to take paid time away from work to get involved in our social responsibility programs.

Initiatives include: • PC Power Saving: The Bank joined the US EPA low carbon IT Campaign to reduce PC power consumption using the EZ GPO tool.

We extended this further with our recent deployment of Nightwatchman.

• Green Data Centre: We reduced energy consumption more than 20 per cent after launch with virtualisation activities starting to reduce it further.

• Paper consumption: We have 95 per cent of consumer bank customers on eStatements in China. The corporate uptake is now past 30 per cent in paper saving volume. We planted 6,000 trees in Inner Mongolia last year to offset our consumption.

• Green Building Technology: We achieved LEED Gold standard in our Beijing premises and our Tianjin premises will be the same.

Fst media: Every leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?

Lynch: I hope people remember me as someone who has always put the needs of the organisation as a whole and its people first; someone with passion for doing business in a sustainable way, with a sincere focus on understanding the Chinese people and local market.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // u m esh Ja i n

Fst media: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months?

Jain: Top technology initiatives include private cloud, mobile wallet and social media.

The bank intends to move all applications to private cloud by the end of 2011. Another project is deployment of a Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) with the team currently evaluating brand offerings.

YES BANK launched the m-wallet (mobile wallet) facility in Chandigarh and Pune last year and a priority is the roll-out to other cities. The bank will also facilitate the use of the mobile platform to help achieve a greater level of financial inclusion.

While budgets will be reduced (maintenance budgets have been cut by 20 per cent), a greater focus will be on growing and transforming the business.

Fst media: What do you foresee as the next ‘big thing’ in banking innovation?

Jain: Newer technologies will spur innovation

umesh Jain presidenT & chief informATion officer, yes Bank

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Fst media: YES BANK is one of India’s fastest growing banks. What adaptive processes are you implementing to address the needs of your expanding customer base?

Jain: At YES BANK we have deployed technology as a strategic business enabler to ensure competitive advantage. The objective is to effectively employ technology in a cost-efficient manner to achieve superior customer service. Since our inception in 2004 we have had to offer a different and compelling value proposition to our customers to compete, using IT to develop a strong innovation quotient.

Outsourcing has enabled more costeffective and responsive IT infrastructure for service stability and reliability. Core decisionmaking (policies, strategy, governance, architecture) are in-house, however commoditised services like infrastructure management, application development and maintenance are fully outsourced.

in payment and settlement systems to facilitate affordable and accessible banking services. Currently, the consumer is exposed to browser-based systems through different channels of internet and mobile. Therein lies opportunity and scope for banks to innovate and integrate all applications in the back-end for user-friendly interfaces front-end.

With 3G technology and Web 2.0 tools gaining ground, mobile banking will emerge as a powerful channel. Within banks, social computing can be leveraged for managing both outward-facing (customer) and inward-facing (employee) relationships.

Externally, banks are creating a new kind of customer intimacy with Web 2.0 and social networking technologies and tools like blogs, micro blogging, podcasts, rating, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), tagging, video sharing, wikis and sites like Facebook and MySpace. Internally organisations are relying on technologies like mash-ups (a web application combining multiple data sources into a single tool) and blogs to keep the line of communication open. Also, tools like wikis encourage peer-to-peer interaction among employees for sharing ideas, thus deepening the company’s knowledge pool.

u m es h Ja in // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

Fst media: Customer centricity is a core priority for YES BANK’s senior management team. How are you delivering on this philosophy; and from an IT perspective what can customers expect in the future?

Jain: YES BANK embodies a high-quality, customer-centric, service-oriented financial institution. A holistic and comprehensive view of customer requirements is integral for the realisation of this objective. The entire process chain from customer acquisition to service and retention is managed through three inhouse conceptualised applications: • CRM system: automates the entire sales and customer service process. It records and tracks leads and customer interactions including queries, requests and complaints • OneView and Insights2Engage: provides an integrated view of the bank’s relationship with a customer including demographic, profile, channel usage and registration • Kaleidoscope: in-house developed automated business intelligence solution.

It provides non-cluttered financial, operational, risk, regulatory and productivity-related information and analysis for real-time, well-informed business critical decisions Customer service benefits include improved agility while business benefits include productivity improvement in sales and service delivery. On the risk management front these applications ensure hierarchy level-based access to secured information.

The way forward includes video-based banking; integration with social networking; the option to choose language in various channels; and play customised flash through IVR voice authentication-based low risk services.

Fst media: The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) recently launched the country’s first interbank mobile payment service (IMPS). Given YES BANK is offering this new service, what are the potential business benefits and security concerns?

Jain: NPCI is a fantastic innovation. The Reserve Bank of India recognises the need for interoperability between mobile platforms of various banks. This is one of the biggest enablers for microfinance/microbanking

we have enhanced flexibility, agility and interoperability of the bank’s current application systems, achieving better customer service through reduction in turn-around time

in India. Only when 300 to 400 million unbanked customers enter the system can the churn of money be optimised and percapita income increased. We can finance these micro-banking customers resulting in better income, resulting in investments.

It’s a positive cycle. IMPS has a big role to play. Another business value proposition is m-wallet or mobile as a replacement for cash/ cards. Another area is augmented reality/ context-aware devices providing value-added services to banking customers.

Fst media: In early 2010, YES BANK announced a business process management (BPM) partnership with Cordys. What benefits have been realised?

Jain: The partnership has enabled a robust platform for process improvements by building solutions that embed business rules, promote process visualisation and leverage real-time technologies. We have enhanced flexibility, agility and interoperability of the bank’s current application systems, achieving better customer service through reduction in turn-around time. Better processes produce lower costs, higher revenues, motivated employees and happy customers.

Fst media: How has YES BANK’s OneView platform performed in terms of providing a single customer view; and what is next for CRM innovations?

Jain: After the success of OneView, we recently launched phase two, Insights2Engage. This is an in-house initiative to develop a single

interface for all customer contact. The benefit is better understanding the customer, enabling deeper cross-selling opportunities, proactive customer engagement and intelligent customer profile searches.

Fst media: Information security and integrity are major responsibilities for banking CIOs. How are you managing fraud and security vulnerabilities?

Jain: Most operational risk management activities are reactive. Pro-actively you keep abreast of information, tools, techniques through research papers, news/features and vendor meetings, seminars etc. Based on need/maturity/applicability in your business, you form a vision and risk register, and work towards mitigating high risk items rather than trying to do everything at once.

Fst media: A large proportion of India’s rural population is unbanked, however mobile banking technology is unlocking this demographic. What mobile innovations is YES BANK introducing to capture this market?

Jain: Last year, YES BANK and Obopay India introduced a revolutionary mobile-based pre-paid instrument. This mobile payment service enables transfer of money using mobile in a secure manner. Mobile Money Services by YES BANK has created a financial eco-system which is inclusive, sustainable and scalable with cutting-edge technology facilitating convenience and ease of use across the country.

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?

Jain: People, processes and tools that help the organisation manage a balance between key objectives. On one hand I want robust, efficient and effective technology solutions to continually drive down costs and risks.

But I also want a very agile and innovative team and institutionalised processes to drive business transformation from the front.

On a personal front I would like to make a significant impact on primary education in India. I don’t know how, but that’s a dream I want to work on.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // t i m h a r r ison

tim harrison chief informATion officer AsiA pAcific, rBs

harrison: I try not to separate out IT priorities from those of the business; one of my key initiatives is to build a stronger partnership with key stakeholders in the bank.

The three key things we are responsible for as a technology organisation are production, control and projects. Production is our primary focus and we are constantly searching for ways to improve. Control is always a challenge in APAC, with a diverse and rapidly changing regulatory environment. On projects we are looking to support the business with new products and in new locations. In parallel we look to pay down technical debt (i.e. keeping applications and technology current) and use the opportunities offered by new technologies and by RBS’s investment in our Indian development centre.

Fst media: How is RBS using channels such as mobile and online within Asia Pacific to connect with customers; and what will the future of retail banking look like?

Fst media: What key innovative technology trends are shaping the future of banking within the APAC region?

harrison: In the Asia Pacific region RBS has the full product suite you’d expect from a global top five wholesale and investment bank.

The technology trends that particularly interest us are ones that make us more efficient and give our business an edge. We are looking at a number of disruptive technologies , including cloud computing and social media. The key is to make sure that in introducing them they have a real positive impact for our businesses.

We are interested in highly innovative mass consumer technologies, concentrating on human computer interaction. Currently we see a lag between how people experience technology in the home, where we have advanced touch screen and motion sensing technology and in the workplace where we have keyboards and screens. Having won awards for data visualisation we feel there is more to come in this area.

Fst media: What are your key IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months?

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harrison: As a wholesale and investment bank our clients are corporates and financial institutions. A key focus for us is providing them faster access to our research and strategy expertise – consequently apps for mobile devices to deliver these is a current focus. According to a recent survey, 72 per cent of RBS clients use a mobile device to access macro or investment research when they are out of the office, so this is an important focus for us. We recently launched an iPad app to give our clients immediate access to our research insights.

We also see huge demand for mobile devices from within the bank and we have a number of initiatives up and running in parallel with our social media strategy to make our people more efficient.

global transactional banking and private banking under the Coutts name.

Fst media: Singapore and Hong Kong have long been considered the financial trading hubs of Asia, but increasingly China and India are being looked upon as the leaders in financial technology solutions. Who do you see as the future customer base for RBS Asia Pacific and what part does technology play in capturing this market? harrison: Our clients are and will continue to be corporates and financial institutions that want to do business within, into and out of the Asia Pacific region.

Fst media: Is social media currently part of RBS’ digital strategy? harrison: This is currently a hot debate within the bank. We are discussing the best way to utilise social media on a number of fronts because it has to add value for our businesses.

In the short term we want to build communities of interest as a means of engagement and sharing information initially for staff and later for clients. We see this as a great way to build deeper and stronger relationships.

Fst media: Issues such as privacy versus cost benefit of cloud computing and Software-as-aService (SaaS) remain under discussion. What is RBS’s current stance on cloud and SaaS; and how do you see this evolving in the future?

Fst media: Which demographic currently

harrison: In common with most investment banks we are pursuing a private cloud strategy; our aim is to get to a point which we are calling ‘platform as a service’.

We think this will give us a high quality internal set up which will cover the basic compute and storage functions and offer high value additional options such as complex market data analytics.

forms the majority of your retail customers and which channels are proving the most effective in acquiring and retaining these customers?

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has some legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?

harrison: RBS in APAC provides the full product suite of wholesale and investment banking products and services. We also have

harrison: For me it’s all about the people – building a strong team that people want to be part of.

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k a n c h a n n i Jasu r e // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

kanchan nijasure chief informATion officer, Bank danamon indonesia

niJasure: Bank Danamon sees substantial growth opportunities across multiple customer segments given the strong growth momentum of the Indonesian economy. In our trade business, we are implementing a new trade finance system that will widen our customer reach, provide superior functionality and higher levels of straightthrough processing.

Similarly, we will be further expanding our ATM network and branch network for retail and mass market customers. We will roll out credit acquisition and human capital management systems for our mass market business. Additionally, Bank Danamon’s Gadai Syariah business will roll out 150 branches across multiple cities for growing the pawn-broking business. This business will be supported by a special system interfacing with our new core banking solution.

Fst media: What is your stance on cloud computing and virtualisation; and is there a place for these within Bank Danamon’s IT roadmap?

Fst media: What emerging technology trends are changing the face of retail banking today? niJasure: Mobile communication devices and internet-driven social networking have a significant impact on the lifestyles of retail customers across many countries. Mobile phones impact all three types of retail customers – wealthy, middle income and mass market. In Indonesia, social networking is mainly impacting wealthy and middle income retail customers.

The important challenge for retail banks is getting tuned to the lifestyle changes of their customers and prospects. This has implications for managing external communication with customers during marketing, sales and servicing as well as managing internal communication.

The focus shifts much more from pure transaction management towards relationship management.

Fst media: What IT priorities are shaping your agenda for the next year?

niJasure: Since 2004, an important element of Bank Danamon’s IT strategy has been an ongoing process of market watching for different innovative technologies and their careful adoption depending on clear requirements, proven performance and tangible benefits. Bank Danamon IT is in touch with different parties offering cloud computing solutions and we will make a decision after the necessary evaluation process is completed. Virtualisation will figure in Bank Danamon’s IT roadmap after 2011.

Fst media: Bank Danamon is creating a communication hub that houses product processing and delivery channels for the bank. What stage is this at; and what innovative developments are emerging from this initiative? niJasure: A communication hub that is located at the crossroads of different product processors and delivery channels is a key architectural component for achieving customer-centricity. The essential prerequisites for this project are organisational

and business process maps aimed at customer-centricity. Once these essential steps are completed, Bank Danamon will embark on the related IT project.

Fst media: What role has IT played in Bank Danamon’s branch and ATM expansion strategy across South East Asia; and what advantages will customers experience? niJasure: With more than 1,900 branches, Bank Danamon group has one of the widest branch networks in Indonesia reaching out to a large number of mass market and retail customers. At each of these branches – including those serving the mass market and located in Pasars (wet market areas) users are able to transact with high availability connectivity to multiple applications located in our data centres. In addition to speedy transaction processing, it provides an up-tothe-minute picture to our business people about the way business is growing. In addition to necessary security and compliance features, our ATMs provide multiple bill payment capability to our customers and targeted marketing capability to our consumer banking business.

Fst media: Bank Danamon has invested significantly in mobile banking. How do you see this channel evolving at the bank in the next two to three years? niJasure: As of now, Bank Danamon is using mobile EDC machines for our mass market business. We do see a lot of potential in using mobile channel both for high-end and mass market customer segments. These will be prioritised in tune with the related business initiatives.

Fst media: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours? niJasure: I would like to be remembered for the effectiveness of Bank Danamon’s IT model that incorporates certain key principles, processes and work culture to deliver value to our customers and users by managing ever-changing IT amid everchanging financial services.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& a // iswa r a a n su ppi a h

iswaraan suppiah

Fst media: CIMB Group is currently undertaking a RM1.1 billion regional core banking initiative called 1Platform. What are the business benefits of this initiative?

heAd, group informATion & operATions, cimB group

suppiah: Before implementation we drafted the target process model for the regional manufacturing functions of the consumer bank. We realised about 80 per cent of processes could be standardised while the rest had to be country specific.

We combined process standardisation with optimisation to yield faster, more effective operations. This blueprinting phase of the project is complete. We are now in the first leg of implementation in Thailand with other countries to follow.

The main business benefits will be cost efficiencies and time to market. From standardisation and rationalisation of processes we expect a significant return on investment (ROI). The second outcome will be the ability to roll out product enhancements, new products or services

significantly faster as they only need to be implemented on one common platform.

Fst media: CIMB Group has been awarded a number of IT innovation awards across Asia Pacific. What specific technologies are driving CIMB’s success? suppiah: On one hand, we are focusing heavily on cost management technologies.

With thin client, virtualisation and green computing, we want to reduce our cost base while being an ecologically responsible company. On the other hand, we are emphasising technology for market differentiation.

We want customers to see us as their preferred bank. Our focus on transforming customer experience, such as reducing queue times, easing account opening processes, shortening loan approvals turnaround and many other initiatives have won us awards.

Fst media: Which channel is proving to be the most effective for CIMB in acquiring and retaining new customers? suppiah: Alternatives to branch banking are experiencing high growth. Self-service terminal systems (SSTs) and the internet have experienced the highest increase.

In terms of new customer acquisition, each channel plays a role. The branch, SST, internet, call center/phone banking and mobile banking are all important to attracting different customer segments.

We recognise channel preferences of a young, busy, tech-savvy executive versus a high net-worth retiree are different. On top of that, certain customer segments require multi-channel propositions with the flexibility of using multiple touch-points.

Fst media: What are your top IT priorities for the year ahead? suppiah: The first priority is 1Platform, which will serve as a pillar to achieving our business vision in ASEAN. Sustaining the focus through the long implementation cycle is important.

The second is data center consolidation to achieve greater robustness and scalability

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iswa r a a n su ppi a h // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

while seeking avenues to drive down costs.

I have already mentioned the focus on customer centricity and enhancing customer experience. We call this program 1View. The focus is to provide a single view of the bank to customers across all financial products and services, across all channels.

Fst media: What emerging IT trends are you keeping an eye on? suppiah: Green IT, particularly thin client technology and cloud computing, is on our radar. Since 2009 we have been progressively replacing our branch computers with thin clients; computing devices that function as access points to a centralised processing and storage unit (server). The devices do not have any hard drive to store applications or data locally. Thin client protects customers’ information and enhances system security.

Regional synergies from hubbing or shared investments are becoming increasingly important for cost efficiencies.

We have successfully implemented several regional hubbing initiatives, including our treasury system.

Fst media: While a number of banks cut IT budgets during the global economic downturn, CIMB Group reinvested in business-enabling technology. How has this benefited CIMB Group? suppiah: While most banks were cutting budgets, we invested in enabling business, taking advantage of the lull to engage stakeholders more effectively and obtain quality input. In Malaysia we made significant investments in customer centricity and transforming customer experience across retail banking channels. Regionally, IT investments were led by a strong integration vision and carefully vetted business justifications.

While we focused IT investment on transformational business initiatives, we simultaneously placed a strong emphasis on cost efficiencies in ‘business as usual’ (BAU).

Fst media: How far in advance do you formulate your IT strategy; and how agile are such plans to market changes?

we don’t outsource anything strategic. To assess if an initiative or process is strategic, we ask ourselves – is this how we differentiate ourselves from the competition?

suppiah: Given pace of growth, thinking ahead is essential to scale capability. For example, we commenced the 1Platform journey recognising the do-nothing approach would hit us five to six years down the road in terms of escalating operating costs and lack of agility in cross-border implementation of initiatives or products.

We began the 1Platform journey in late 2008, in early days of regional expansion.

With the momentum in regionalisation, we are glad we started early.

Our IT strategy is two-fold. We are building a platform to deliver CIMB Group’s regional banking vision with transformational, multiyear roadmaps. At the same time, we respond to immediate business opportunities using our BAU team for immediate cost savings or new business capabilities.

In a nutshell, we harvest immediate opportunities while working in parallel on long-term priorities. We often reconcile the two streams to ensure our short-term versus long-term investments are aligned and cohesive.

Fst media: Which areas of IT are too important to outsource and why? suppiah: We don’t outsource anything strategic. To assess if an initiative or process is strategic, we ask ourselves – is this how we differentiate ourselves from the competition?

Is there a proprietary or intellectual property component key to our strategy? Are our existing skills and domain knowledge essential to managing risk? Is there regulatory

compliance to adhere to? To quote an example, our treasury business systems have our proprietary business practices and risk management knowledge embedded.

We require high availability to support trading and risk activities. Therefore, neither applications nor corresponding infrastructure will be outsourced.

Fst media: How do you maintain a cohesive IT strategy across multiple regions? suppiah: Regulations will inevitably be a challenge. Our existing IT strategies, especially around shared service synergies, have to be re-visited. We have learnt to use a dual-template model for any standardised system so we can either hub or implement a replica. Similarly we realise we need a growth-oriented, multi-step enterprise architecture based on whether the current stage of our evolution is green-field, growing or large-scale in a specific market. There is a third dimension, which is harmonising IT strategy in a merger or acquisition scenario, and our approach to this is blending the best of both sides.

It is also important to note fixing every last local deviation is not imperative. We believe in defining ‘across the board must-haves’, ‘preferred but not mandatory’ and ‘develop locally’ segments of IT strategy.

Fst media: CIMB Group is poised for regional expansion. How important is technology; and what are the biggest challenges? suppiah: We use technology to enable differentiation in sales and service in all channels. Technology also plays a powerful role in cost control by leveraging investments across borders, taking advantage of scale, controlling risks, and disseminating best practices.

In building our ASEAN franchise, another challenge is obtaining regulatory clearance on IT approaches for cross-border synergies.

It takes detailed sharing sessions to ensure objectives, strategies, implementation plans and risk assessments are debated with regulators to ensure each country’s laws and regulations are not compromised.

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ro u n dta b l e // C us t o m e r C e n t r i C i t y

The Power of Customer Centric Business Models (Left to right): Deborah Merrens, Senior Business Leader, Vice President Consumer Marketing, MasterCard Worldwide; Francis E. Avellana, Director for Systems & Technology, BAP Credit Bureau INC; Manuel R. Batallones, Manager, BAP Credit Bureau INC; Peter Ku, Director of Product Marketing, Informatica; Suganthi Shivkumar, Managing Director, Informatica; Sandeep Pahwa, Head of South East Asia Investment Banking, Barclays Capital; Rob Findlay, Head of Customer Focus & Experience Strategy, OCBC Bank; Dong Jun Choi, Group Head of Pricing, Retail Banking, Standard Chartered; Gary Tiernan, Global Head, Investment Advisory & Fiduciary, Standard Chartered; Melisa Teoh, Regional Head of Marketing, Aviva; Sze-Meng Soo, Director of Cross-Border Business, Visa Worldwide; Paul Stefansson, Managing Director, Head of Investment Products Distribution, South East Asia, UBS; Radhika Bangaru, Head of Investment Products, Citibank; Say Boon Lim, Chief Investment Officer, DBS Bank.

The executives featured in this roundtable editorial held the above positions at the time of publication.

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C us t o m e r C e n t r i C i t y // ro u n dta b le

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: Our first guest speaker is Francis Avellana, who is with BAP Credit Bureau, which is the equivalent of the Credit Reporting Agency in the US, dealing with consumer and commercial banking and also focused on micro-lending. Also we have Manuel Batallones from BAP. They will share with us how they’re using Informatica’s technology to identify customers and support their business model and services. More importantly it’s about their business and less about technology, although technology is a key enabler for their business success. manuel r. batallones, baP Credit bureau, inC: BAP Credit Bureau is the credit bureau that’s owned by the banks and was set up on 16 March, 1990. We’re wholly owned the BAP. We have a number of BAP institutions in the Philippines and over 100 subscribers from commercial banks, financing companies, government financial institutions and soon the microfinance industry and NGOs.

To give you an idea of how many banks we have in the Philippines, the Central Bank, which is the third biggest commercial bank, has 74 credit banks, 99 savings banks, 95 development banks, 27 micro-finance institutions; and we have 600 mobile banks located all over the country. We also have some non-banks that allow the Central Bank to operate their lending operations. So it’s a big, big population of bankers and financial institutions.

Our mission is to gather and organise secure credit information, submitted by our subscribers, and respond to their enquiries in a timely and cost-effective manner. We engage in continuous dialogue to ensure changing business requirements are addressed. With BAP Credit Bureau one of our office requirements is conference servicing. Weekly and monthly, we meet with our members. We have several committees that discuss requirements; we have a personal loans group that meets every month to discuss credit information requirements for the personal and salary loan business. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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We’ve also got credit executives who give us directives about where to go. Our business process involves both corporate and individual loans.

In 1990 when we were created, the main focus was corporate banking and so the first loan information exchange system in Asia was born. This is an exchange of information among commercial banks. It provides details about the loan facilities: when it was started, when it’s to expire, how much the facilities are and so on. Basically all the data that we have in the bureau comes from our members. We do not get this from the Central Bank; we do not get it from any of the agencies.

The principle of reciprocity is the guiding force in our bureau. You can only participate in the bureau if you contribute data. Another principle that’s strictly observed is confidentiality. That’s why our client base is only the banking and financial institutions. We don’t deal with the public. You can’t check your own record in the bureau.

Paul steFansson, ubs banK: If I can’t check my own record, how can I check if it’s wrong? manuel r. batallones, baP Credit bureau, inC:

“With the new search engine, we were able to migrate our manual systems to automated processing. We were able to scale up our operations without having to increase manpower.”

Francis E. avEllana, BaP crEdit BurEau, inc

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There is a process; the banks are allowed to check the information. Sometimes the client finds out that wrong information exists. They can change it when they find out that it’s wrong. Sometimes they are indirectly informed.

Paul steFansson, ubs: Well that’s an important part of the economy, how does the government view this? manuel r. batallones, baP Credit bureau, inC: The Central Bank requires the banks to adjust data if it’s wrong. That’s part of the system that we’ve been looking at for the last 17 years. The first data that existed was corporate banking and some Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) data, but the data is also for consumer products.

This is not data from bank accounts. It’s data like cancelled credit cards, adverse loan amounts, charges written off, and some court-case data. Our services can be accessed through the internet by banks all over the Philippines. They can try and match the names in the name search and data port that we have. There is no National Identification(ID) system in the Philippines as the activist groups would never allow it.

There are other challenges that the banks in the Philippines encounter while trying to acquire data. For instance we may get data without full names. People have names in common; we get reports without middle

names; sometimes we get reports without birthdates.

Sometimes ID and account numbers change as the banks record the data. We tried for 15 years to find a proper names-search-and-match technology. Then we discovered one.

FranCis e. aVellana, baP Credit bureau, inC: That’s the key word, ‘discovered’. Our main problem was being able to correlate the different negative records that were being submitted to the bureau. At the time we had to work with a manual process, with several people indentifying possible matches of occurrences like ‘Frances Avellana’ and ‘Francis Havellana’. The fact that we didn’t have a national ID or a reliable tax ID number as a matching key was a problem.

We had to stick with what we had, which was basically the name. We thought about using the address as another key search element, but that wasn’t reliable either. When we looked at birth dates as a secondary matching identifier we found that it was also unreliable.

Some of the participants were not reporting correct dates. Some were reporting the same birth dates for about 1,000 names. So we had to stick with the names.

Google came to the rescue. We found a new search and matching engine in 2007 that allowed us to search through a database of names with various negative variables, so that we would be able to consistently provide a result to our subscribers. If you search a name on the net, for example you will always see five possible best matches. You will also see false positives perhaps.

The thing about the Bureau is that our mission does not require us to positively say to the subscribers, yes this is the person that you are looking for, but rather give them the best possible matches, which they can use for evaluating the credit risk of a particular individual or corporate name.

soon sZe-menG, Visa WorldWide: Is that why consumers can’t check their own names?

FranCis e. aVellana, baP Credit bureau, inC: A consumer is not able to access the Bureau database. It’s only the banks as subscribers and data sources that can access the Bureau. soon sZe-menG, Visa WorldWide: I understand the policy, but do you think that even if they wanted to check it, they might not be able, because it could return a false positive?

FranCis e. aVellana, baP Credit bureau, inC: That’s right. Even if you were able to access the database, you wouldn’t be able to check with certainty.

C us t o m e r C e n t r i C i t y // ro u n dta b le

With the new search engine, we were able to migrate our manual systems to automated processing. We were able to scale up our operations without having to increase manpower. Initially we might try to process 1,000 names a day, and still need extra time. Last week, we did about 35,000 and came up with the enquiry results within the day.

We were able to meet our turnaround standards for subscribers. We use open systems and since we went live four years back we haven’t had any major problems; it just runs on its own. Once you have the indices built, your applications take over. We have automated systems and we built our own application program interface to allow subscribers to send us their enquiries directly.

Within a specified timeframe we give them the results in the formats that they want.

soon sZe-menG, Visa WorldWide: Is there a feedback process so a subscriber can say the result is actually a correct one?

FranCis e. aVellana, baP Credit bureau, inC: We tell the subscribers that this is what we see in the data. There is a scoring system that indicates whether the name is a 100 per cent match or it’s 90 per cent and so on.

soon sZe-menG, Visa WorldWide: Does the subscriber tell you that this is a correct match, and you can feedback into the system?

FranCis e. aVellana, baP Credit bureau, inC: No. This is basically an enquiry system; just a check on a name. The benefit to the subscribers is a means of checking. They have even expanded the use for checking their own employees’ records.

One positive result is the use of the system for collection purposes. Even if I do not make an enquiry, the fact that I report data to the system allows me to benefit. For example, when a name is on the system and that individual asks a bank, “Why am I not able to get a loan?”, the subscriber could refer to the fact that the individual has an outstanding amount in some other bank. It benefits the institution that submits data to the system by also being able to collect.

That’s where we are in terms of the technology.

We will be scaling up because we expect a lot more participants. Giving subscribers the ability to search on a name has expanded our capabilities to allow smaller communities of financial institutions to set up their own bureaus. We have approval from our board to expand our services and offer them to other institutions as well. Everybody benefits because subscribers from big

institutions to small organisations will be able to access this information and share. Technology is not really a problem, even when using open systems. We have a simple setup where the usual model for web services is offered to the clients. We will move towards more integration with the customers later on, but at this point they’re not requesting that. They say they need a capability to search a name for a particular product or service that they’d like to offer. That ability allows them to offer more services and benefits.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: One of the things apparent from the service BAP is offering is the ability to recognise who the individuals are. It is a challenge to really understand and recognise your customers – who they are, and the relationship they have with the institution. We talk about needing accurate, holistic and consistent customer information as being the endstate of business success, but we still end up creating additional silos of customer information. Whether we’re investing in new applications to grow the business, going through industry consolidation or expanding into other countries, we face the complexity of managing all that data. For example, a global financial services organisation is a customer of Informatica and one of the challenges they had was Financial Advisors (FAs) spending too much time collecting information from multiple sources about prospects. What we did was collect that data to create a single view of the client.

After their merger with another global financial services organisation, they had a challenge to distinguish between their wealth management client base and their clients who had a banking relationship with the retail side of the business.

By creating a single view and disseminating that information into the applications that their FAs were using on a daily basis, they now have a complete view of that relationship. This allows them to improve their cross-selling opportunities and improve overall FA productivity. They have extended this into a global ‘customer index’ solution where they can identify who an individual is across all lines of the business.

Sandeep, how does having a single view of your clients impact business needs and is IT able to deliver that type of view to the business users in your company?

“We talk about needing accurate, holistic, and consistent customer information as being the end-state of business success, but we still end up creating additional silos of customer information.”

PEtEr Ku, inFormatica

sandeeP PaHWa, barClays CaPital: I can talk about this from an investment banking perspective, but the challenges are all the same. ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) exists across every business product on different levels. There is a strong need to understand clients across the spectrum. The same need exists between transactions whether you’re doing a takeover or an w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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equity listing. You’ve got to understand who your client is and the deal history. Most important for us is understanding their associations and behaviour, which can impact our risk profiling. For instance, are you taking someone to the London or New York Stock Exchange who has a reputational risk issue? Are they someone that showed high risk behaviour in the recent Indonesian or Asian crisis? It’s issues like that. Like most investment banks we have local franchises, and people on the ground. I’m not aware of any one data source that allows us to tap into all the intelligence in one place, you’ve just got to pick it up from different nuggets and relationships that you’ve had over the years.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: And from the investment side at UBS?

Paul steFansson, ubs banK: For data on the clients, administration is quite a nightmare. I think that’s where systems can be improved. That’s a big topic. So much of the time gets sucked into administration.

“We’re facing new challenges as we get more sophisticated in terms of cross-selling. It’s an added challenge to the single customer view because it has to cut across systems.” dong Jun choi, standard chartErEd

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: How many of you are involved on the risk side of the business? Dealing with counter party information, creditors, and mergers and acquisitions? It’s the same challenge in terms of the regulatory requirements for improving management activities – the need to have a single view of your primary customers. If another Lehman Brothers situation were to happen could you effectively tell me what your exposures are?

A single customer view is the objective that every organisation wants. Dong Jun, from Standard Chartered, do you feel that your organisation has a complete view of what your customers are doing with the bank, and how the data can be used to drive sales and services? donG Jun CHoi, standard CHartered: We’re trying to get there. As with the others, our systems are built on product silos, so it’s difficult to have a view that cuts across all of them to get a single view of the customer. We’re trying to build new systems and we’ve started that. By understanding our customers’ needs we’re now getting into a new area, and that is bundling. But as we bundle our products and sell to new or existing customers we have new challenges. For instance, we might sell a mortgage bundle that comes with a credit card and so on, but when a customer phones up the bank and refers to the bundle they bought, there is confusion because there’s no system that can capture the bundle according to the legacy

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product silo systems. Within the bundle, the wrapper is basic, but the systems are siloed. We might have a customer who already has a credit card, but then says, “Can I get updated to your mortgage bundle for the benefits?” or “How can I get that bundle scheme without having to fill out a new passbook and credit card application?” So how do we treat them differently?

Afterwards, how do we keep reminding the customer about the benefits of the bundle? We’re facing new challenges as we get more sophisticated in terms of cross selling. It’s an added challenge to the single customer view because it has to cut across systems.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: Businesses are saying, “We wish we had a better understanding of where our customers are so that we can do things like cross selling.” Bundling is a great concept, but you have to look at the individual demographic characteristics of the products.

Deborah, MasterCard is extending the definition of a customer beyond the issuing and acquiring banks, right down to the consumer level. It seems like a pretty interesting idea. How is Mastercard approaching this? deboraH merrens, masterCard WorldWide: We’re in the position where we can understand consumer behaviour, by modelling behaviour around the world. We’re looking at systems which give us more access to the data, for instance by segmenting the consumer by type and demographic. We have this data; the challenge is putting the systems in place to be able to mine it effectively.

soon sZe-menG, Visa WorldWide: Our focus is also to deliver the best possible payment experiences to our cardholders through our banks. In terms of data, we do have access to a lot of transaction data, and the key is to be able to translate that into practical usage for ourselves and our banks.

The ‘what’ is straightforward, but we need to look at the ‘so what’ and the ‘now what’ – what are the insights and how should we use the data to drive increased payment transactions and meet the needs of our customers? In addition, it is important to also incorporate consumer research, external market data and our internal data to provide actionable insights and recommendations to our banks and merchants.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: Rob, you’re with OCBC, tell us about your ‘focus and experience’ approach, and how having the right information about your customers impacts your business.

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rob Findlay, oCbC banK: There are three groups that are spearheading this ‘focus and experience’ approach. The first group looks at market research, collecting information on the consumers using an aligned methodology. The second group looks at improving our customer touch points. We’re designing better forms, better interfaces, better branches and so on. The third group is building a customer centric culture in the organisation. In a nutshell, these three teams are working towards entrenching customer experience discipline and management into the design of our products, services and customer touch points, and building a strong customer-focused culture within the bank.

Over the years, the bank has been collating information on customer’s needs and behaviour and reviewing them. However, consumers’ needs are always evolving. Hence the challenge lies in ensuring we have the most updated set of customer information on hand in order to continue to deliver service that meets their expectations all the time.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: How do you link that information together?

rob Findlay, oCbC banK: As we all know, information is king. Having the most accurate information on hand will allow us to be able to match our products and services as close as possible to what the consumer wants.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: Businesses have operated in silos for hundreds of years but now we have this notion of transforming the card business from a productcentric to a customer-centric model. How about retail?

How well is becoming customer-centric taking off in your companies? donG Jun CHoi, standard CHartered: We started becoming more customer focused in retail banking in the second half of 2008. For instance, our customer charter commits to fast and friendly service, providing solutions and rewarding relationships. Having worked out all of the high level stuff, now it’s time to deliver on the detail; for instance not having customers shop around for different financial products so we fulfill as many needs as possible and win main bank relationships by offering better deals.

It’s like a McDonalds Happy Meal, buy items together and you get a better deal without having to source different products. We started looking at the end-to-end process last year and as a result we’re bundling. By understanding the background

economics we can offer a bundle with a discount, and understand what conditions and risk policies we need to enable such bundling.

For instance, if we give a million dollar mortgage and then give the same customer a $2,000 monthly credit on their card, that is not treating risk at the customer level. Our risk policies now allow for exceptions to our bundle customers. We ensure that the customer doesn’t have to fill in their address and sign their name on five different forms. Our marketing makes sure that we’re very clear about what the bundle proposition is as opposed to merely aggregating the propositions of single products. We make sure that everyone, as in the Happy Meal, is not getting a burger, french fries and coke separately.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: What is OCBC doing to help differentiate your customer experience? Is it through bundling, is it through online services? How do you differentiate yourselves from your competitors? rob Findlay, oCbC banK: We take the position that customers interact with products through channels, so we focus on their experience during these interactions.

We’ve found that simple things, like using simplified terms, can be differentiators. We found that one of the things that consumers do not like about banks is the use of complex terms and conditions. The expectations of our customers differ across the different segments.

Hence, we make it a point that we interact with them as much as possible, finding out their experiences at every touch point. We believe that customer experience is one of the critical factors that determine the customer’s decision. We have customers, especially business customers, who tell us they choose their bank based on how good their banking experience is.

If they have to fill out a credit card application that is five pages long, they don’t want to press ‘submit’ because they’re too scared of furnishing the wrong information or they don’t have all their assets and liabilities available. Banks are trying to get the channels and basics right because it’s critical.

“We believe that customer experience is one of the critical factors that determine the customer’s decision.

We have customers, especially business customers, who tell us they choose their bank based on how good their banking experience is.” roB Findlay, ocBc

Paul steFansson, ubs banK: One thing I realised recently is how far ahead consumer computing is. I look at what I’ve got at home and what I get at the office and the office is light years behind. At home you’re filling out all of your forms on the iPad. It seems to me that corporate IT departments and corporate IT companies have lost the game; they are just so far behind. rob Findlay, oCbC banK: I know of some airlines that are using iPads at their check-in kiosks. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: You’re absolutely right; the whole iPad revolution is taking off in the States. Some banks are trying to differentiate themselves based on the apps they’re designing for these devices. With all the different companies I’ve been doing business with, one that I’m still struggling to move away from even though they charge me $9.95 for each trade is E*Trade. Their iPad application is amazing.

Paul steFansson, ubs banK: Do Informatica have an iPad app now?

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: No we don’t. We provide technology that helps banks get the right information into those apps that iPad devices run on. That is the foundation technology that we provide.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: You’re talking about the regulatory requirements for retaining information and safeguarding it?

deboraH merrens, masterCard WorldWide:

Gary tiernan, standard CHartered: Yes, but also

Everyone around this table needs to be both aware and excited about what’s happening in mobile. Take India as an example. For many people, mobile is the first and only screen. And of those, over half don’t have a bank account. What a massive opportunity. Technology is moving quicker than we’ve ever experienced. There’s no precedent for this pace of change.

understanding what are good principles to work by.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to get ahead of the game and not be chasing the pack; that’s how we like to think. You have to be prepared to treat that data in a way that you would like your own data to be kept.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: On one side, business is “You have to be prepared to treat that data in a way that you would like your own data to be kept.” gary tiErnan, standard chartErEd

always demanding more. On the other side IT budgets have shrunk considerably, so they’re forced to do more with less. IT has always been looked on as a cost centre. Outsourcers claim they can do the same for a third of the cost. The reality is that when it comes to squeezing IT they take shortcuts. Whether it’s iPad, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, or marketing applications, IT treats these on a project by project basis and it doesn’t scale. Over the last three years we have seen the adoption of formal data governance in companies where the business now actually ‘owns’ the data. The business is responsible for defining what the data looks like and how it’s managed.

IT’s job is purely to deliver, and if they can’t deliver there are other options. Is ‘data governance’ a program that exists in your companies today? Gary, does that point ever come up?

Gary tiernan, standard CHartered: Working in private banking, we are always aware of the issues of confidentiality. Many banks, particularly in Europe have lots of concerns there. IT departments are often seen as a weak spot because that’s where data can leak out.

That’s one of the biggest challenges that we face.

I take Paul’s point that you can do a lot more at home than we can do in organisations. But at home

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I think people switch off the common sense switch in their heads and share what they shouldn’t. Many people are learning the hard way that they’ve been open with a lot more people than they thought. We can move a lot of data quickly. But governance is not only about whether data is owned by the front end or back end. It’s actually about what sort of data you feel comfortable keeping and what you feel comfortable using. Ultimately clients are going to care a lot about that too. Not many businesses are thinking about that.

Lots of businesses are just thinking about how to use it better and more effectively.

rob Findlay, oCbC banK: You talked before about trying to find information on a potential investment or Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A); you get that from bits and pieces. It’s hard enough there, but we’re talking about trying to protect customers’ information.

Where’s the balance point between reaching out to get information versus protecting that of your own clients?

sandeeP PaHWa, barClays CaPital: It’s also about the culture of the firm that you work with. I’ve worked in about four investment banks over the last 22 years. Some are very closed; some for the right reasons and some because they’re concerned that if they share too much, their systems are not matched to compensate people for how they work. That’s a refreshing thing about where I work. It’s a very open culture in terms of being able to share ideas, thoughts, and numbers. We have numerous discussions going on with GIC or Temasek or KKR on how that can assist everyone. As another example, I got a call today from Singtel about a technology subject I would never have found out in an M&A group or in investment banking. So it’s a culture thing, it’s about how to share information. Many firms use Reuters and Bloomberg data feeds but how many convert that Reuters and Bloomberg information into money?

Another aspect is the customer experience versus data that is used by corporates for themselves. Corporates tend to use data very well, because they need to think

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about either selling or buying other organisations, or raising capital. For each of those activities you need a defined set of data that benchmarks you against your competition, best practices and other benchmarks – like knowing what your board is like and what your track record is. That part organisations do very well, but when it comes to aggregating data and using it for the customer, that’s where there’s room for improvement.

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: Of all of the things that have happened recently in the global financial markets, data governance is now a must have. In the States, the new Dodd–Frank Act not only requires increased reporting requirements and regulations around how banks deal with consumers on the lending front, but now some of the larger banks are required to transmit their risk data directly to the Office of Financial Reporting. Businesses now have the responsibility and the accountability to ensure that they have very consistent and accurate data.

Informatica has over 600 client companies in financial services. It is our biggest segment. Thirty six out of the top 50 global banks use Informatica in their organisations. soon sZe-menG, Visa WorldWide: What do you see as some of the leading trends in terms of data management?

Peter Ku, inFormatiCa: In the technology space in general, I would say the whole cloud movement. We see that continuing not just in applications like a CRM system or a Salesforce automation, but also on the analytics side, like business intelligence and reporting solutions. Some companies are providing cloud services around specific industry needs like Anti-Money Laundering (AML). Some very large system integrators are now looking at putting KYC in the cloud. Cloud adoption will become more vertical.

The second trend we’re seeing right now is integrating social media data into a single view of the customer. Look forward to social media generated payment structures. Also consider cross sell and up sell. If I went on Facebook and said I had opened up an account with DBS in Singapore because they have the best services, even though I’m not paid by DBS to do that, the impact and influence in the social media world is huge. What the banks are now looking at is how to integrate social media analytics from customers on Facebook and MySpace talking about their business.

The third thing that we’re seeing is the notion of, ‘Do I really need a database? Do I need to store data within my walls?’ Security and privacy are concerns as organisations look at virtual archiving but everything

is moving to the cloud. We are trying to understand if organisations are moving their CRM systems to Salesforce.com, or they’re moving their AML systems to a new cloud player. How do we integrate data to cloud applications with on-site applications? We’ve all heard of managed services; to me cloud seems like the same thing with a different spin. Your terrestrial systems and applications won’t ever go away. You’re still going to need to integrate that data together. Some business users are saying, “Let’s just go talk to that vendor. If we use that application for HR, and this app for incentive management, do I really need IT?” There is a fourth area, and that is dealing with the vast growing amounts of data. Hadoop is a highly optimised query language to analyse mountains of data in a very prompt way. Standard SQL queries won’t perform when you have petabytes of data and you need an instant result.

One thing relevant to today’s discussion is Master Data Management (MDM). Master data includes data such as customers, counterparties, products, and channels. It represents the ability to access, manage, and create a golden source of ‘the truth’ about your customers. I could create a link to bundle four products across traditional categories, or on the investment side I could create hybrid exotics that cut across traditional asset classes.

Then I could deliver that information as a trusted source outside the business line applications and manage those catalogues. MDM is driving next generation KYC because it’s removing the restrictions of managing data in the core systems. It becomes the broker of information across your lines. Three years ago many banks got onto the MDM hype, but they found that organisationally they weren’t ready for it and the technologies didn’t support some of the more interesting uses. There are systems like Oracle and PeopleSoft that maintain single domains of data. So PeopleSoft are good at human resources information.

Siebel is really good at CRM. But your product information resides in your loan origination systems, credit card systems, and deposit systems. The product data is separated across multiple systems. There is no one single application that actually brings all that together and ties those relationships into customer growth. What are their households, who are the members of the households?

Who are their extended members, what commercial or small business accounts do they have? What wealth management products do they potentially have? There is no way of linking all that information and becoming that universe of the truth. This is where MDM will really shine.

“There is no way of linking all that information and becoming that universe of the truth.

This is where Master Data Management (MDM) will really shine.”

PEtEr Ku, inFormatica

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Evoking Loyalty Through Multi-Channel Innovation

Front row (from left to right): Melissa Wong, Head of Market Development, Asia Pacific Japan, HP; Usha Sekhar, Head of IT, AXA Life Insurance; Sandra Stonham, Managing Director, Technology & Operations, DBS Bank; Cindy Weisscher, APAC Regional Head of IT Systems and Development, Rabobank; Suresh Sethi, Group President, Transaction Banking Group, YES Bank. Back row (from left to right): Satish Menon, Executive Vice President, Growth Ventures and Innovation, Citi; Shane Tyrrell, Director of Sales, HP; Rob Findlay, Head of Customer Focus & Experience Strategy, OCBC Bank; Ian Parker, Chief Information Officer, HSBC; Nick Dean, Head of Business Partnership, APAC, ANZ; Neil McMurchy, Research Vice President, Gartner; Peter Marini, Business Development Manager – South East Asia, HP; Daniel Sheahan, Strategic Engagement Manager, HP Exstream; Ingo Noka, Head of Country Risk Management, AP CEMEA, Visa International.

The executives featured in this roundtable editorial held the above positions at the time of publication.

daniel sheahan, hP exstream: Customer intimacy through relevance is a critical issue. The last few years have seen an absolute explosion in the number of channels through which we are supposed to communicate with our customers. How we as technologists deliver those channels is one of the greatest challenges we are all facing. Channels range from SMS to handhelds, the internet to paper to direct contact. Customers are expecting us to be able to deliver those channels but still have the same sort of experience.

Regardless of what channel they access, customers expect us to be intimate with them, their requirements and the products they already have. A further challenge is the fact that the market is evolving extremely quickly.

My experience is that every organisation is looking at how they can address this issue profitably and securely.

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neil mCmurChy, Gartner: I’m speaking from a marketing and channels perspective rather than a technology perspective today. You’ve all spent a lot of money and experienced significant organisational angst executing customer relationship management (CRM). The interesting thing about that acronym is that it implies that you manage the relationship. What’s very clear to us is this notion of a customer-managed relationship determines how they interact with you and the channel through which they want to interact. They will choose a variant of that channel for a particular transaction, and another time use a different set of channels. You’re not going to control that.

We are seeing some tangible evidence about the power of the customer. They’ll determine what your value is to them rather than your broad scale value

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propositions. They will determine and value what communication and content they want to receive from you and how often. I’d argue that in this commoditised world the nature of your engagement becomes a differentiator. The beauty and the terror of this is that it’s not simply a matter of applying technology. This is about how your culture is organised to deliver from a customer acquisition engagement perspective.

Everyone is talking about the critical importance of customer satisfaction, but customers now want you to understand their implicit as well as explicit needs and how different messages may suit different channels.

For example, we are already seeing a split between the sorts of messages you want to receive on your personal phone versus your Blackberry. That leads to a very interesting question about who the customer is. Is the customer simply a collection of traditional demographic data or are there other personas that need to be dealt with depending on the channel?

A second issue is grappling with the fact that you are only as good as your weakest channel or the weakest interaction. Your customer experience is essentially at the whim of the capability of all your delivery points.

Customers don’t care about your organisational silos. They don’t care about your internal challenges around delivering a high quality experience to them.

They’re getting smarter and they do understand about commoditisation and product, particularly in deregulated markets. They do understand much greater transparency about product pricing, features and functions is now normal.

The investment that you put into your call centre gets blown out of the water with a bad customer experience, or when a customer gets a letter misspelling their name. Unfair as it might be, your brand equity and the customer experience can be destroyed in an instant at that point of interaction. All points of interaction matter.

So the competitive differentiation in your world is a very thin margin business. Your product margins might be healthy but the differentation is a very, very thin margin.

A third principle is the importance of treating every single interaction with a customer with respect.

Interaction is an opportunity to establish value, but the nature of the interaction and the value of it changes depending on the channel. Customers want just enough and just enough in one transaction might be a very deep and meaningful conversation with a personal banker.

In another interaction, it might be that the value proposition is speed. So each interaction has an entirely separate value proposition.

No interaction has a neutral value, it’s either positive in terms of reinforcing a relationship or it’s negative because it doesn’t meet expectations. It’s a dangerous

mindset to think that okay is acceptable enough. That’s only okay if the expectation is okay. I’ll use a personal example. I am currently considering retirement and I don’t understand why the wealth of information banks have about my spending habits via my credit cards hasn’t prompted them to proactively offer options around personal financial planning. For example, instead of just a crude advertisement for financial planning services why don’t they use the data available to really add value?

People are spending more time online than offline – not just at work but also at home. So the number of personas any one customer has is growing. Smart phones are going to overtake PCs in 2013 as the source of primary internet access for both consumers and corporations. As people try to engage with those customers, it is critical that your organisations understand these customers and how they are interacting with your organisations. You need to understand how they behave in an online environment, not just in their relationship with you, but in terms of their other personas.

You also need to consider the collaboration aspect of social media and its impact on decision making.

Right now 60 per cent of CRM spend is on operational CRM – that is, back office stuff – but that only represents about 10 per cent of the real growth opportunities. Thirty percent is spent on analytics and only about 10 per cent is spent on collaborative CRM and social media. The growth in that area, however, is about 60 per cent in terms of our forecast. So unless your budgets are going to massively increase, it clearly requires you to put even more relentless pressure on process efficiency in the back end so you can shift resource to that front end of the business.

Finally, we need to consider the nature of loyalty.

Loyalty is relevance supported by trust. It is about consistently engaging with clients in the way they want to be engaged with. Relevance of communication helps you break through all the noise that surrounds customers, for example we do a lot of work around rolebased messaging.

But relevance implies accuracy of content and consistency in terms of how it supports the expectations of relationship. Expectation is about moving from satisfaction of needs to my expectation that you anticipate my needs. And I don’t mean the advertising campaign where you show somebody who’s progressively getting older and you have a series of products that are attached to each of their life stages – that’s a superficial perspective. It’s about systemising your ability to anticipate based on the information you have or can predict.

“All points of interaction matter. So the competitive differentiation in your world is a very thin margin business. Your product margins might be healthy but the differentiation is a very, very thin margin.”

Neil McMurchy, GartNer

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Customers are going to keep increasing their flexibility and their expectations in terms of the channels they choose. That will change over time, in different markets, and from transaction to transaction.

You are only as good as your weakest channel and your weakest interaction. It’s really an organisational challenge rather than a technological one. But you can’t ignore the technology, particularly as the consumption of your relationship is going to be driven by lightweight, easy to use technology.

daniel sheahan, hP exstream: What are your organisations doing and seeing with regard to these issues?

“The challenge is to create more customers engaging supply. If you’re able to delight customers in that manner, they will increasingly come to you.”

SatiSh MeNoN, citi

satish menon, Citi: A lot of what Neil has said about multichannel interactions and how they all need to talk to each other and make sense are very relevant.

Silos are no longer acceptable. Research needs to be done on seeing the true impact of digital channels like internet and mobile compared with traditional physical touch points.

Obviously there is a move towards mobile but physical touch points are not totally irrelevant. It’s just that customers won’t accept them the way they used to. Formerly customers would walk to a branch at some distance from their place of residence or work, but now it has to be where customers are living their lives.

The second important point is that the same person can appear as different people at different points in time. For example, I could research an investment decision on the net and then execute it on the fly on a mobile phone. Or I could do the same thing at a physical touch point branch. So continuity of customer interaction and seamlessness is now an increased expectation. And I’m not so sure it exists in the right form, but I imagine that if you threw supply at delighted customers, demand would invent itself.

So the challenge is to create more customers engaging supply. If you’re able to delight customers in that manner, they will increasingly come to you. We’ve adopted flexible options where, for example, physical touch points have integrated logic at the back end which talks to the wired internet, talks to the mobile through the physical terminals where the interactive devices are working. ian Parker, hsbC: Within our organisation we are going down the route of building some of these channels, and there is a degree of ‘build and they will come’ mentality. But a lot of research has gone into that as well as product testing. One thing we’re still struggling with is the conflict between security, control

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and ease of use. Some might want to put everything out on Facebook and the iPhone so customers can open it up and do whatever they want. But there are internal controls and operational risks to be considered so someone else might want things locked up, with 20 character passwords and two factors of identification.

At the same time we have regulators requesting the same sort of thing. I don’t know if anyone’s solved the problem or those competing factors.

daniel sheahan, hP exstream: How many organisations have iPhone apps out there for their online banking? Probably 50 per cent of this group.

How did that evolve and what were the challenges involved in getting the security aspects of that sorted out? Was it simply an interface into an existing system that had the capabilities? rob Findlay, oCbC bank: Unfortunately many businesses think that mobile is just an extension of the internet, which it is, but it’s also a massive right turn at the same time in a different direction. An app is really a bit of a novelty item, but it’s the way customers use us. But at the same time it’s not a sustainable business model compared to other competing things out there that are more powerful. If PayPal wanted to kill us, they could probably do so. I think we’re amusing ourselves with toys but not avoiding the real conversations about the topics that Neil talked about.

daniel sheahan, hP exstream: Is that an elephant in the room? Is that something that we know is coming but our organisations are not actively addressing it?

Or is it something that we know is coming and we are having discussion groups and focus groups and steering committee meetings and so on?

Cindy WeissCher, rabobank: It always starts with a good business case. If there’s no drive from the business, then an IT gadget or toy will never be adopted by the business. For Asia there is a different perspective because we are very small in retail banking and more focused on wholesale banking, so we have different customers to start with.

You have to go back to two basic things: who are your customers and what’s the business case? It is good to start by looking at who your customers are – are they corporate clients or are they retail clients?

Then within your retail customer base, you have different demographics to think through. Young people are much more adaptive to new media and they expect it, but is that where the money is or is it only for your future potential?

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usha sekhar, axa liFe insuranCe: The focus on the customer has shifted from pre-sales to post-sales now. In the past we used to focus a lot on acquiring new customers. Now retention is in the limelight because if you can’t retain your existing customers, no matter what you spend on the acquisition, it doesn’t pay off.

Making the existing customer feel good through service and touch points is critical. Technology is one of many touch points we create, but we have to blend it with the human factor and the cultural factor, and localise it within different countries. daniel sheahan, hP exstream: Most of us have organisations that span several countries and those countries all have different cultural aspects and they have different stages of technology. How do you evolve a strategy that has to encompass all those different things?

Is that actively being discussed in your organisations? rob Findlay, oCbC bank: Most of the conversation is about how we extend our current situation as opposed to reading the future situation.

daniel sheahan, hP exstream: But what do you see as the biggest challenge to actually being at the forefront of the market? Conservatism is important in banking and finance but so is dynamism. satish menon, Citi: Security is a very important aspect of the product or service, but we forget that customers also realise that it’s in their interest and it’s their intrinsic desire to make it safe. So there is a reasonable tolerance for not being ‘cool’ with security on an application; customers will accept that.

But beyond security, how interactive can you be and with whom? If you don’t innovate and change in that regard you will lose out to competitors. In the past other banks were competitors; now everyone is competing with us. The challenge is always to move from being transactional and reactive to the next cool gadget in the market to create a new customer interaction mode with which new gadgets will automatically align.

Peter marini, hP: I’ve been hearing from many banks that regulators also play a big part in what can and can’t be done in the innovation space. Regulators are a little behind the times with regard to connecting via iPhones and things like that.

Cindy WeissCher, rabobank: The good thing is that we are all facing the same regulators so we all have the same issues – nobody has a competitive advantage.

But I wouldn’t necessarily say that they are behind, I would say they always take the worst case scenario and that makes them seem a little bit behind.

suresh sethi, yes bank: The regulators expect very strong growth in certain channels and determine what sort of technology is used. But because the customer may not really understand how to manage those channels you have to build safeguards into them. Consider mobile technology in the developing world; a tiny minority have these gadgets but may only want to use simplistic technology. Say you want simplicity of use, but a device uses the same technology as something more advanced. The right safeguards ideally contain the extremes of going into N factor authentication, for example, but if all you are doing is transferring five dollars from one point to another, you don’t really want it to go through that.

Cindy WeissCher, rabobank: What you’re saying is very interesting because you’re making a distinction between delivery channels and products. Normally we’ll have a standard portfolio of products, and we deliver through different channels. But here you’re saying the portfolio actually has sub-products underneath and some of those are good for this channel and maybe less appropriate for that channel.

niCk dean, anZ: With regard to the challenge of innovating while dealing with risks at ANZ, we established a separate innovation team about one year ago. We spun ourselves around, and gave the innovation side venture funding, knowing that maybe 75 per cent of that funding will never come to anything, but hopefully one or two things a year would come to something. I’ve been in areas which wanted to innovate and had business case after business case but it was impossible to overcome the traditional hurdles.

“Now retention is in the limelight because if you can’t retain your existing customers, no matter what you spend on the acquisition, it doesn’t pay off.” uSha Sekhar, aXa life iNSuraNce

sandra stonham, dbs bank: One of the difficulties when you’re doing that kind of thing is how much you do yourself and how much you need engagement from other areas. You can put a little team of three people on it but realistically they don’t know everything and they need to talk to all the business groups and ask what they think and how things might need to evolve.

When you really want to get some traction going you need buy-in from all parts of the business. niCk dean, anZ: There are some tensions between that group and the other areas of the bank, but it has worked successfully. Some of the team were fairly senior, with long, established relationships so there w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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was personal connection. So if they went to the credit card unit and asked their view and for some help with analysis they would engage.

versus the benefits you’re going to get back through client satisfaction and client intimacy, and through cross-product penetration?

satish menon, Citi: If you are a standalone group you only have so much traction. When the business is the arms and legs and some element of the funding and some element of technical expertise comes through it, the business has a stake in getting things done. A cooperative model works – it shouldn’t be a siloed venture or a ‘kids in the lab’ scenario.

usha sekhar, axa liFe insuranCe: AXA definitely looks at that. One mistake we definitely don’t want to make is to oversell to the same person. A very common mistake that most financial industries make is giving one product to a client and calling them 10 times for the same product, or a different product which is similar to it. Sometimes this can end the customer relationship rather than build it. That is one mistake we would like to aviod at any cost.

Financial industries recognise that retaining a customer is not about calling them frequently, it’s understanding what they want. There’s a lot of data available but how good are we at analysing it and what do we want from it? Putting innovation teams together is good, but what do you want to start with?

neil mCmurChy, Gartner: Is it seen as a technology initiative or a business initiative?

niCk dean, anZ: It sits in our strategy and marketing function, so it’s deliberately outside technology although a lot of it is technology related.

Cindy WeissCher, rabobank: Our experience is that everybody loves to talk about these kinds of things as long as they don’t get presented with the bill. So if you use central funding make sure the right things happen and that you listen carefully to everybody’s requirements. If you bypass these two basics you will not get the buy-in and will not be able to be successful.

neil mCmurChy, Gartner: But how is success “Security and safety are as important product features as any other functionality.

Not only do we need to protect our customers, we also have to protect our brand and reputation.” iNGo Noka, ViSa iNterNatioNal

measured?

Cindy WeissCher, rabobank: Before starting initiatives like this the business is asked to define measurement points, KPI’s if you like, up front. During the initiative life-cycle fixed measuring times should be established and be reported on. These reports should be used for management to decide if they want to continue or stop the initiative.

niCk dean, anZ: There are two answers to that. I’m not closely involved with the groups or the KPIs, but I’d say that primarily they are around positioning ANZ in the market as an innovator, particularly as we come into Asia where you don’t have a big branch network.

Secondly it’s really around learning – about how people use smart phones or other touch points. We’ve already got stats, and hopefully they’ve given us some insights but I don’t think anyone pretends they’re going to make money out of that because often you’re just moving from one interactive channel to another. daniel sheahan, hP exstream: Do your organisations think there is a reasonable cost benefit reward for the investment in multi-channel delivery 96

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daniel sheahan, hP exstream: The cost of retaining an existing customer is infinitely cheaper than acquiring a new one. If we are taking something across multiple communication channels out to the market how are we going to protect and make sure we don’t actually destroy a customer?

Customer loyalty used to be measured and developed over years but with multi-channel communications you have the ability to breed incredible loyalty in a very short space of time. But you also have the ability to destroy it very quickly. Customer loyalty is now typically measured on the experiences of the last three months. inGo noka, Visa international: One single data compromise can turn a perfectly happy long-term customer into an unhappy one very quickly.

Of course, for risk management to tell the business that sometimes we can’t do things because of risk and security issues can be challenging. But if you have a non-secure product, you don’t have a product. Security and safety are as important product features as any other functionality. Not only do we need to protect our customers, we also have to protect our brand and reputation.

With regards to regulators, I believe that, in Asia Pacific, banking regulators are not falling behind, they are often at the forefront. Typically if an industry player is the only one to invest in a new technology that is more secure, that investment is not fully effective if the industry does not follow.

It sometimes takes a regulator to move an industry onto a new technology platform especially given that no one entity in this industry controls the entire

C h a nn e l s // ro u n dta b le

infrastructure. The problem is that no single financial institution has control over the entire channel, which leads to regulators saying if we want to move to the next stage we all have to build a more secure infrastructure. That’s what’s happening in South East Asia, for example.

ian Parker, hsbC: We have done a number of things to satisfy the regulator in Singapore that have been taken throughout the global HSBC business, so we’ve seen those regulations come to other countries in due course. In a lot of times that dynamic has enabled us to lead the pack in other countries because we’ve been conforming with regulations locally.

rob Findlay, oCbC bank: How much do banks need to rely on telco or technology partners to really push their outcomes and their delivery? Can we operate alone, or do we have to rely on a SingTel or a handset provider or an infrastructure or a cards provider?

We have to have true partnerships for the delivery of these things. Consider wholesaling and retailing.

We’re good at wholesaling because our whole industry is based on wholesaling, but retailing is where we are slowly being whittled away by third parties. So how can telcos, for example, help us retain that retail connection with customers?

Cindy WeissCher, rabobank: We used to have a very close working relationship with the mobile providers in the Netherlands in the late 1990s.

Sometimes you have to be first in line to make these kinds of steps and go for it. But considering how the market looks right now, you can’t. I think it’s impossible.

rob Findlay, oCbC bank: In Australia Telstra is the main communication provider. National Australia Bank, which I worked for, was a big part of Telstra and they worked together on a range of initiatives. But we also sometimes thought that potentially Telstra was a competitor. They could start their own bank if they wanted to. So there’s a dual threat and opportunity for each of us; we have to work together and dance nicely otherwise it could get ugly.

ian Parker, hsbC: Australia is fairly unique in the developed world in that the telco providers are still dominated by Telstra. In many other countries the problem is who to pick.

suresh sethi, yes bank: Today there is a lot of interest in telcos taking on the role of a bank, because they’re actually better enabled.

rob Findlay, oCbC bank: If customers could use mobile devices for all their banking, they would. But to use these services we need to rely on two things: one is SingTel to be connected to the bank. The other thing is Apple for the app they want to use. So all of a sudden banks are reliant on companies that everyone’s relying on for their own customers to use their own services.

suresh sethi, yes bank: The topic of loyalty becomes interesting in this context because as banking becomes very limited to a few a channels, how can we maintain advantage? When mobile number portability was introduced at AT&T volumes fell by 40 per cent overnight. That’s exactly what the banking industry faces today because the variance from one bank to another is becoming less and less. We will face a very different paradigm as we go forward, even in terms of attracting and retaining the customer.

neil mCmurChy, Gartner: You are at the risk of disintermediation because increasingly other people are controlling the customer experience. That’s what telcos represent. You also have the non-bank or the non-insurance company-owned channels, the brokers, who have a significant impact on the customer experience. If you accept that product innovation or differentiation is increasingly difficult to achieve, you’re potentially squeezed from one end in terms of disintermediation, and from the other end in terms of undifferentiated price. inGo noka, Visa international: It goes

“If customers could use mobile devices for all their banking, they would.” rob fiNdlay, ocbc baNk

both ways. New channels do not always have a disintermediation effect. For example, we see increasingly that airlines are getting back the direct customer relationships they thought they’d lost when they had to sell almost all of the tickets through travel agents. They are now offering these tickets over the internet, maybe at a slightly cheaper price, which usually means that their internet business grows extremely fast. In fact, they are sometimes trying to grow the new channel too fast, which creates a whole lot of other security and risk issues of course.

New channels do not necessarily mean that you lose contact with a customer. I think it often means that you can get closer to the customer, at least closer than you have been in the past.

neil mCmurChy, Gartner: But if you were to use the airlines as an example, they spend a lot more effort on loyalty programs and adding value in that relationship. I spend about $50,000 a year with Singapore Airlines and I spend a whole lot more than w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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“With social media… you still need the human intervention and human relationship.” ciNdy WeiSScher, rabobaNk

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that with my bank, in terms of interest. And yet the level of engagement and anticipation is infinitely greater with Singapore Airlines than it is with my bank.

they want. And at the moment I think most companies and most CRM systems are struggling with that.

satish menon, Citi: Returning to the issue of who

challenge in that?

owns the customer, we all live with the myth that the banks own the banking relationship and telcos own distribution. But no customer ever believes he’s owned at all. We have this patriarchal mentality.

My sense is that if you come up with a truly customercentric proposition, where the customer actually values the proposition, and you build yourself around the proposition partnership can be built. So the answer to the question – do you do it alone or do you do it with partnership? – should always be devised around how you can create the best customer experience. If you can do it alone, so be it. If that needs partnership then go for it, not because the partner’s great but because that creates the best proposition. If you think a little less about the ownership issue, you find customers have a dramatically different view of you than you think you have of them.

usha sekhar, axa liFe insuranCe: These cycles don’t work because of customer preferences – your competitors change the market dynamics. New products into the market change how people work. The launch of the iPad changed what customers wanted. So you have to work around what your customer wants.

There are piles and piles of information and we still haven’t figured out how we are going to use that information to our advantage and to the advantage of the customer. We are just taking small bits and pieces of loose information and trying to make sense of everything. We still don’t have an industry suite of rules or a suite of applications which tell us if this is how your customer is behaving or if this is the spending pattern of your customer, he’s probably heading right or left. We still don’t have that maturity in the dynamics.

rob Findlay, oCbC bank: No one is entitled to have

neil mCmurChy, Gartner: That is where the impact

customers; it’s a privilege to have customers – that’s a new mindset in itself.

of social networks and collaboration starts to emerge.

There is a network effect of a decision or potential decision, which suddenly gets multiplied. You might be concerned about a single customer, but suddenly that customer is actually influencing 10 or 20 or 50 others as a result of that decision.

daniel sheahan, hP exstream: What is the biggest

daniel sheahan, hP exstream: That’s a very important point – it is a privilege to have customers.

What does that do to the concept of expanding channels out over the next three to five years? It doesn’t matter whether it’s sitting on a cloud or sitting on a phone; whether we see a telco as a competitor or as a channel.

The point was made earlier that nobody owns the customer from the customer’s perspective, and if you want the relationship it has to be about the offering that you provide and specifically the intimacy you have by knowing what that customer needs. To what extent are your organisations thinking along those lines?

Cindy WeissCher, rabobank: That is where a human component comes in because we’re trying to make the analysis by technology, but ultimately the relationship manager has a relationship with the customer. If he has too many customers to take care of there is no relationship or intimacy anymore. So with social media, we could be much more on top of it but you still need the human intervention and human relationship.

usha sekhar, axa liFe insuranCe: The customer is the only focus of any business. Whatever we do is focused on the customer because without a customer, our business does not exist at all. So we regularly take the pulse of the customer. It’s easier said than done, however, depending on the life stages they are in at any given time. They had two kids yesterday, they have three kids today – that changes the whole dynamics of the interaction, what they want to spend on the lifestyle changes and with that their preference.

Relationships are now measured in months or even days. So if we want to really reach out to the customer, it’s by giving them what they want, not what we think

sandra stonham, dbs bank: Complex Event Processing has typically been for trading, you manage risk in real time and you have all these streams of market data coming in. More recently it has become much more of a consumer thing. You have all these events occurring and you listen to them and you extract what’s going on. Ultimately that’s where everything’s headed and the technology and architecture parts of it are about quickly adding additional channels for the same kind of functionality or quickly leveraging other areas.

The real way forward now is targeted marketing.

The information out there is going to be received and spread through social networking, people are already

C h a nn e l s // ro u n dta b le

getting over phobias about sharing information. So data is going to become much more available and it is these huge event and number crunching machines that are going to make this data something valuable that then allows you to extend your reach and offer something very good for the customer. So to me it’s much less now about technology and about making use of data and understanding your customer and getting out to huge numbers very quickly.

thanks to location-based tracking – there could be a lot more contextual information that has to emerge.

You need to add context to the personalisation so you don’t intrude on the customer and create dissonance.

Success rates can increase if you get context and timing right. A lot more sophistication will go into that process and a lot more subtlety – sometimes it’s about how much you hold back rather than how many bullets you fire.

rob Findlay, oCbC bank: Consumers’ macro needs

sandra stonham, dbs bank: The emergence of GPS has made people a lot more open to us recognising and using context. In the past if somebody had done a transaction at a particular store in Vivo City and you pick up the phone and call them and say I know you’re in Vivo City, they’d have been upset. But it’s very different now.

are quite simple, but their micro needs are quite complicated. It will take personalisation to solve those micro complex needs. But often mounds of information simply say the same things. Customers all want five things out of their bank but on an individual level they want their own new thing. And those macro things are influenced by many different things: technology, family and demographics. But the data has to be more low level because it’s the only way you can create relevance to the customer.

neil mCmurChy, Gartner: So why do you spend so much money on core banking platforms if the differentiation is based on how you use the data and how to apply it in terms of differentiated value propositions and offerings and your interactions with customers? The Chief Information Officer of Commonwealth Bank of Australia recently said that we’re all doing core banking systems but why not just have the same one and focus our attention on the stuff that really does differentiate.

sandra stonham, dbs bank: You’ve got to be able to access through one channel and be able to reuse that again through another channel. If you have multiple different systems all over the place, and you don’t have common core banking systems with common access to your channels, it’s very hard to deploy these things quickly. So to some extent you end up building and integrating masses of different times to offer the same thing across your market.

There’s always an element of needing consistency and uniformity to be able to do things quickly. To me core banking is quite fundamental and you cannot not invest in it; otherwise you can’t achieve the other things you want to achieve. They go hand in hand. satish menon, Citi: There is an additional component to personalisation which is contextualisation. A bank might have something that is relevant to me, but send it to me at the wrong time, or the wrong place. I see a lot of contextual information

neil mCmurChy, Gartner: When there’s a clear value exchange it is different. The unsolicited call probably lacks value to the recipient. Whereas delivering a precise point of value that’s relevant at the time is critical.

daniel sheahan, hP exstream: As an industry are we capable of taking advantage of that in the next two or three years? satish menon, Citi: Yes, because the iPhone has dramatically changed a lot of things. It has accelerated a lot of theory that was going on five years ago. GPS is an absolute reality and people are opting in at points where it’s relevant. neil mCmurChy, Gartner: Part of the challenge is the complexity of regulation your industry faces. The scale is also different. Clearly the people who have started in an online environment have an advantage. A company like Apple is very good at this but telcos are appalling at it. Manufacturing companies typically don’t have the customer base. So it is really consumer product companies that are excelling.

As in most cases of consumer marketing, the interesting people to watch are those who build their strategy from a customer backwards. Many of your businesses are built around products and product silos, so it’s more of an issue of how quickly you can genuinely move the organisation as opposed to driving your product strategies, driving your marketing and channel strategy back from the customer into the organisation rather than from the product out. I think consumer product companies are probably the best examples of doing this well.

“To me core banking is quite fundamental and you cannot not invest in it; otherwise you can’t achieve the other things you want to achieve. They go hand in hand.”

SaNdra StoNhaM, dbS baNk

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The Who’s Who of Financial Services 2011/2012 Directory Asia’s top product, service and solution providers

100

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Agile/Lean Software Development

102

Document Management Systems

111

Analytics

102–103

Enterprise Data Warehousing

111

Back Office

103–104

Enterprise Information Management

112

Banking

104

Infrastructure

112

Business Intelligence

105

Investment Management

113

105–106

Outsourcing

113

106

Recruitment

114

Business Process Management Call Centres Cloud Computing

107–108

Risk & Compliance Management

114-115 116–117

Compliance

108

Security

Consulting

109

Telecommunications

117

Customer Communications

109

Unified Communications & Messaging

118

Customer Experience

110

Virtualisation

Customer Relationship Management

110

118–119

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w h o’ s w ho Di r ec t o ry

agile/lean software Development

analytics

thoughtworks

Dst global solutions

ThoughtWorks is a global IT consultancy providing delivery, integration and consulting services, both onshore and offshore. Based on a track record of consistent real-world success, we are leaders in the evolution and adoption of agile and lean methods within the enterprise.

ThoughtWorks takes on high risk, business critical projects and creates high quality, innovative software assets.

ThoughtWorks thrives on projects which present a high degree of complexity from factors like integration with legacy applications, diverse groups of stakeholders, demanding time scales or strict performance requirements.

We are at the leading edge of the continuous design/continuous delivery movement, aiming for tight feedback loops and getting assets into production as rapidly as possible.

We also help clients to tailor and adopt agile and lean practices in their own IT organisations, driving to eliminate waste and improve speed to market.

at the heart of our clients’ business

we can solve your toughest technology challenges • Consulting: Our advice is pragmatic and grounded in delivery expertise • Global delivery: Designing and building enterprise-scale systems onshore and offshore, with quality, on time and on budget • Agile tools: Global leader in Agile Application Lifecycle Management • Market leader: With over 1,800 staff in 22 global offices, ThoughtWorks is the market leader in agile and lean methods, adding long-term value and growth to our clients. Through our talented, passionate and innovative people we deliver leading edge products and systems that give our clients in the financial services sector competitive advantage in the market.

thoughtworks software technologies room 1105, 11th floor guohua plaza no.3 Dongzhimen south street, Dongcheng District Beijing, china, 100007

We are a leading provider of technology, analytical solutions and consulting services to the worldwide investment management community. We serve 500 clients in 55 countries from 20 different centres.

Many of these clients rely on us to help them manage businesscritical processes – functions that cannot and must not fail.

We also serve many of the world’s leading financial institutions, utilities and communications companies. Our business process solutions help them contain cost, raise productivity and improve service quality.

a consultative approach A common thread runs through all we do. We put the client at the centre of our thinking. We listen before we act. We focus on understanding our clients’ issues and goals. When we propose a solution it is business-driven. With a keen focus on service, we make sure we deliver from day one. Mutual trust and integrity are important to us. We look to establish long-term relationships in which we work with our clients as a valued adviser.

trusted across the globe Six of the top 10 asset managers in the world use our solutions. Our clients range from the largest third-party administrators that service asset managers, fund managers of all sizes, pension funds, alternative investment managers and sovereign wealth funds. Their needs vary but they all realise that we are a partner they can trust.

Dst global solutions shanghai ltd phone: +86 21 6888 3622 +86 1391 871 3315

contact: Liam Bussell, Regional Marketing websites: www.dstglobalsolutions.com www.dstglobalsolutions.cn

phone: +86 10 6407 6695 fax: +86 10 6407 2011 102

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w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

analytics

Back office

netezza

Broadridge financial solutions

Netezza, an IBM Company, is a global leader in data warehouse appliances that dramatically simplifies high-performance analytics across an extended enterprise. IBM Netezza appliances enable financial services organisations to process enormous amounts of captured data at exceptional speed, providing a significant competitive and operational advantage in financial services while lowering the cost of service provisioning.

Netezza combines storage, processing, database and analytics into high-performance data warehouse appliances that are purposebuilt to make advanced analytics on big data simpler, faster and more accessible.

Today, Netezza users include CompuCredit, FICO, IntercontinentalExchange, KCB, Nationwide, NYSE Euronext and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), where Netezza is deployed in a variety of application areas including deep analytics, risk, compliance, surveillance and customer intelligence.

With simple deployment, out-of-the-box optimisation, no tuning and minimal on-going maintenance, the Netezza data warehouse appliance has the industry’s fastest time-to-value and lowest totalcost-of-ownership.

IBM acquired Netezza in November 2010 for $1.7 billion.

Broadridge Financial Solutions is a leading global provider of technology-based outsourcing solutions to the financial services industry.

Our systems and services include capital markets transaction processing solutions and investor communication solutions. In 2010 Broadridge acquired City Networks Ltd, a leading provider of reconciliation, trade confirmation matching and multi-asset process automation and operational risk management solutions. Broadridge helps financial services institutions and public companies increase productivity, streamline operations, enter new markets with new products more quickly, drive down back-office costs and better manage risk.

iBm china/hong kong limited 10/f pccw tower 979 king’s road Quarry Bay hong kong iBm singapore pte ltd (co. regn no: 197501566C) 9 changi Business park central 1 the iBm place singapore 486048 website: www.netezza.com

solutions • Gloss: leading cross-border capital markets processing solution, from trade capture to settlement, supporting international, regional or local market operations • PROactive Reconciliation: enterprise reconciliation solution for any type of financial instrument across all internal systems and external agents • PROactive Matching: confirmation matching solution that automates the processing of trade confirmations • PROactive Commission & Fee Management: solution to manage brokerage fees and commissions, improve the terms of trading relationships and ensure accurate internal allocation • SWIFT Service Bureau: international outsourcing service for SWIFT messaging • Investor communication solutions: comprehensive outsource offering for all participants in the global proxy process, facilitating electronic communication and proxy voting among custody banks, brokerage firms, issuers and their worldwide shareholders

Broadridge financial solutions 8 robinson road, aso Building #09-00 singapore 048544 phone: +65 6438 1144 email: info@broadridge.com contact: Akhter Khan, Alan Kingshott website: www.broadridge.com W ho ’ S W ho o F FSi

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Back office

Banking

genesys

polaris software

Because customer experience relies on all resources within and outside the contact centre, all employees responsible for customer-related tasks and customer service delivery must work efficiently and costeffectively together. The problem is employees in these increasingly decentralised, customer-impacting roles face unique challenges when managing human-related tasks that typically reside in the back office.

Founded in 1993, Polaris Software (POLS.BO) is a leading financial technology company with a comprehensive portfolio of products, smart legacy modernisation services and consulting. It offers state-of-the-art solutions for core banking, corporate banking, wealth and asset management and insurance, and is the chosen partner for: • Nine of the top 10 global banks • Seven of the top 10 global insurance companies Relationship, expertise, technology, intellectual property and global reach are the routes that enable Polaris to come closer to its customers worldwide. The experience of relationships across developed markets like US and Europe and emerging markets like Vietnam and Chile is a significant differentiator for Polaris, making it the foremost domain expert in delivering the right financial technology solutions.

• Polaris has 29 offices in 20 countries with 10,000 solution architects, domain consultants and techno bankers The company owns the largest set of intellectual properties in the form of a comprehensive product suite, Intellect™ Global Universal Banking (GUB).

• A pure play service-oriented architecture (SOA) based application suite comprising nine key platforms and over 95 products • Delivers mission critical solutions Polaris’ global sourcing is driven by business outcomes rather than pure cost arbitrage-led outsourcing. The company services global customers from its Centres of Excellence called ‘Entity’.

Polaris’ strategic intent is directed towards delivering future-proof technology.

challenges: • Underutilisation of staff resources which adds significantly to operating expenses • Backlog of work that can be days or weeks old, leading to customer frustration • Proliferation of customer-facing channels and systems to manage • Lack of visibility into operational performance Alcatel-Lucent’s Genesys solves these challenges using intelligent Workload Distribution (iWD) to dynamically prioritise the distribution of work tasks to the people best suited to handle them. It provides out-ofthe box functionality designed specifically for the business user that integrates resources, contact centre capabilities and internal processes.

advantages: • Creates compelling back office optimisation • Improves employee performance across the enterprise • Adheres to internal and external service level objectives • Enhances visibility into operational performance and compliance • Strengthens business agility throughout the enterprise

genesys at alcatel-lucent singapore pte ltd 750D chai chee road #06-06 technopark@chai chee singapore 469004

polaris software polaris house 244 anna salai, chennai – 600 006 india

phone: +65 6240 8273 contact: joseph.lim@alcatel-lucent.com

phone: +91 44 3987 4000

kate.liew@alcatel-lucent.com website: www.genesyslab.com/horizontal_solutions/backoffice_ improvement

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+61 3 9674 0419 (VIC) +61 2 9267 1955 (NSW) fax: +91 44 2743 5166 website: www.polarisFT.com

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

Business intelligence

Business process management

cam management solutions

pega

CAM Management Solutions (CAMMS) is a world leader in the provision of performance management and business intelligence solutions for progressive organisations. The Australian-based company is currently experiencing accelerating global growth, throughout Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Asia and North America.

CAMMS’s ground-breaking products and services are unmatched in the market place, assisting organisations to go to the next level of integration and effectiveness. They are developed and implemented from an exceptional conceptual base by experienced and dedicated professionals. Since 1996, CAMMS has been committed to building long-term partnerships through above-expectation client support and the highest quality of service.

Pega business process management and customer relationship management solutions help organisations enhance customer loyalty, generate new business, and improve productivity. Our patented technology enables organisations to realise rapid and significant business returns by directly capturing business objectives into fully automated processes and eliminating manual programming. Pega solutions enable clients to quickly adapt to changing business conditions in order to outperform the competition.

intelligent performance for forward-thinking organisations CAMMS is a global leader in performance management, offering outstanding products , complementary and stand-alone services, cost effectively. CAMMS products and services bring together an organisation’s complete performance management framework, business intelligence needs and business operations into one tailored solution. This establishes essential links between services, strategic direction and all aspects of operations, control, assessment, monitoring and engagement, creating value for an organisation’s bottom line, while aligning the business to meet corporate strategy. CAMMS’s unique training and implementation approach builds internal capacity through a combination of e-training, virtual and on-site consulting and interactive consulting products. Our proven approach ensures reliable on-time and effective implementation of our world-best software.

turn business obstacles into business advantages Pega delivers an unprecedented level of flexibility and puts change into the hands of business owners. With Pega solutions on the cloud and on-premise, you gain the agile process intelligence you need to compete more effectively, drive productivity across every corner of the business, reduce risk and ensure compliance. Solution areas include: • New business: Gain the competitive edge with agile processes for customer acquisition and on-boarding that increase conversion rates, reduce costs and shorten time-to-market for new products and services • Customer relationship management: Maximise profitability by successfully balancing customer needs with business objectives across all channels and lines of business • Service delivery: Substantially reduce costs with automated front- to back-office processes and consistent operations across the enterprise • Risk, fraud and compliance: Successfully increase compliance, mitigate risk and reduce fraud with comprehensive audit trails and reporting Pega Asia Pacific headquarters are located in Sydney and there are offices across the region in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Melbourne.

cam management solutions corporate office level 17, 45 grenfell street adelaide sa 5000 australia

pega level 6, 19-31 pitt street sydney, nsw, 2000 australia

phone: + 61 8 8212 5188 email: mail@cammanagementsolutions.com website: www.cammanagementsolutions.com

phone: +61 2 9251 0566 email: apac.marketing@pega.com website: www.pega.com W ho ’ S W ho o F FSi

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Business process management

call centres

software ag

genesys

Software AG is the global leader in business process excellence. We offer our customers end-to-end business process management (BPM) solutions delivering low total-cost-of-ownership and high ease of use.

Our industry-leading brands – ARIS, webMethods, Adabas, Natural, Centrasite and IDS Scheer Consulting, represent a unique portfolio encompassing process strategy; design; integration and control; SOA-based integration and data management; process-driven SAP implementation; and strategic process consulting and services.

Software AG has more than 6,000 employees serving 10,000 customers across 70 countries. Our customers include some of the world’s leading financial services organisations.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise organisation is a world leader in communications and customer service solutions for businesses of all sizes, serving more than 250,000 customers worldwide. Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise organisation delivers communication solutions that enable meaningful conversations among customers, employees and partners.

Today’s customers expect multi-channel customer service: phone, e-mail, SMS-text messages, chat, Web self-service, video calls, fax and other multimodal applications. Yet because these channels are usually isolated from each other, the challenge lies in combining them to operate as one. Customer service and sales are no longer confined to the contact center, as the back-office, marketing, outsourcers, and branch/remote resources now play an integral role in customer service.

New social networks also give the customer great power to freely express their opinions to an open audience impacting brand loyalty. To conquer these challenges, Alcatel-Lucent’s Genesys contact center and customer service solutions enable businesses to maximise the value of customer interactions and differentiate experiences by driving multichannel customer conversations including social media – and linking frontline customer service to the back office to optimise processes.

transform your processes – and your business – with Bpm Improved efficiency, customer service, compliance, cross-selling/upselling, straight-through processing and reduced costs are common goals for financial services organisations. But the road to get there varies greatly. Why invest in partial solutions, when Software AG can take you the entire distance – faster?

Our end-to-end BPM solutions – combining software, methodology and expertise – help you better adapt to changing business requirements and become more competitive by: • Ensuring consistent, business-driven processes that reduce costs • Increasing process performance, transparency and agility • Collaborating across stakeholders to build the best processes • Analysing and optimising processes throughout their lifecycle, from strategy definition to monitoring process execution • Cost-efficiently building on existing IT investments to improve processes and performance

• 2011 APAC Best Contact Centre Application Vendor (Frost and Sullivan) • 2011 Service Leader Award for IVR (CRM Magazine) • 2010 Global “Leader” in Contact Center Infrastructure (Gartner Magic Quadrant) • 2010 Global “Leader” in IVR & Enterprise Voice Portals (Gartner Magic Quadrant) • 2010 Global “Leader” in Web Customer Service (Gartner Magic Quadrant)

software ag (singapore) ltd 8 temasek Boulevard #24-01 suntec tower three singapore 038988

genesys at alcatel-lucent singapore pte ltd 750D chai chee road #06-06 technopark@chai chee singapore 469004

software ag (hong kong) limited room 1701/02, 17/f no 8, fleming road wanchai, hong kong

phone: +65 6333 4556 phone : +852 2866 8788 email: enquiry.asia@softwareag.com email : enquiry.asia@softwareag.com website: www.softwareag.com website: www.softwareag.com 106

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market recognition

phone: +65 6240 8273 contact: Kate.liew@alcatel-lucent.com website: www.genesyslab.com

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

clouD computing

clouD computing

emerson

red hat asia pacific

emerson network power – a proven partner in Data center infrastructure transformation

Cloud computing is a hugely important evolution in the way that businesses and individuals consume and operate computing. It’s a fundamental shift to an operational model in which applications don’t live out their lives on a specific piece of hardware and in which resources are more flexibly deployed than was the historical norm. It’s a fundamental shift to a development and consumption model that replaces hard-wired, proprietary connections among software components and the consumers of those components with lightweight web services and web-based software access.

Red Hat delivers the infrastructure needed for reliable, agile, and cost-effective cloud computing. We recognise that your IT infrastructure is – and will continue to be – composed of pieces from many different hardware and software vendors. We enable businesses to use and manage these diverse assets as one cloud.

Red Hat delivers the world’s leading solutions for private clouds, hybrid clouds, and public clouds: CloudForms for building and managing your own cloud plus the revolutionary OpenShift Platformas-a-Service (PaaS).

Red Hat’s cloud solutions are unique. Unlike other approaches, Red Hat delivers choice to customers: choice of platform; choice of virtualisation; and choice of cloud provider – choice that only the open source leader can deliver.

What’s more, Red Hat builds clouds using the experience and technology of more than a decade powering the mission-critical infrastructure and applications for the world’s most demanding organisations.

To learn more on how Red Hat can deliver cloud solutions that meet your business needs: www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud

Hundreds of data centres worldwide rely on Emerson Network Power products, solutions and services to optimise their infrastructure management.

With the transformational power of the Trellis™ platform, extensive resources, experience and technologies, Emerson Network Power is uniquely positioned to help organisations bridge the gap between data center and IT infrastructure layers, driving new levels of high availability, operational excellence and agile, responsive service.

• Leader in data center infrastructure solutions • Pedigree of solving facilities and IT infrastructure challenges • Part of the Global 100 software developers • Selected by world-leading OEM technology vendors • History of innovation and investment in research and development • Holistic vision and expertise based on deep services capabilities Emerson Network Power is revolutionising data center management with the Trellis™ dynamic infrastructure optimisation platform. Unlike siloed monitoring or static planning solutions, the Trellis™ platform delivers real-time visibility into the performance and relationships of all the components in your IT infrastructure, from the data centre to facilities.

Leveraging Emerson Network Power’s proven expertise in asset, power, cooling, infrastructure management and embedded firmware technologies, the Trellis™ platform ends compartmental decision-making so that you can optimise every aspect of your IT infrastructure operations.

The result is a new level of data centre performance that makes it possible for you to achieve the high availability, operational efficiency and agility your business demands.

emerson

red hat asia pacific pte ltd apac headquarters 8 shenton way #10-00 singapore 068811

email: ap.marketing@emerson.com website: www.emersonnetworkpower.com

phone: +65 6490 4200 website: www.redhat.com W ho ’ S W ho o F FSi

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clouD computing

compliance

vmware

Quest software

The future of business is defined by those who are prepared for what’s next. Cloud computing has the potential to change everything about IT. It promises a more agile and efficient IT environment that leverages pools of elastic, self-managed virtual infrastructure, consumed as a service at the lowest possible cost. It enables organisations to eliminate traditional, costly and inefficient silos of IT infrastructure and create an infrastructure that can intelligently and dynamically respond to business needs. As organisations make this transition, they want to achieve the benefits of cloud, with a scalable, secure and manageable solution that addresses their unique business challenges.

With VMware, your organisation can accelerate its transition to cloud computing while preserving existing investments and improving security and control. Our solutions significantly lower costs, increase business agility and ensure freedom of choice – accelerating IT so that, in turn, you can accelerate your business.

The global leader in virtualisation and cloud infrastructure, VMware delivers customer-proven solutions to more than 250,000 customers, including over 99 per cent of Fortune 1000 and 97 per cent of Fortune Global 500 companies. We are accelerating IT by reducing complexity and enabling more flexible, agile service delivery. We are helping enterprises adopt a cloud model that addresses their unique business challenges.

It’s not about just any cloud – it’s about your cloud.

Quest Software simplifies and reduces the cost of managing IT for more than 100,000 customers worldwide. Our innovative solutions make solving the toughest IT management problems easier, enabling customers to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Quest Software provides solutions for: • Administration and automation: Reduce IT costs, enhance security and improve policy compliance. Automate repetitive tasks – such as deploying patches – and enable self-service to minimise burdens on IT • Data protection: Minimise system downtime, prevent data loss and ensure business continuity. Back up and recover data in physical, virtual and application environments • Development and optimisation: Simplify the development process, accelerate release cycles and increase code quality for database and SharePoint applications. Deliver automated testing, expert advice, and intuitive workflows, plus access to user communities full of best practices • Identity and access management: Reduce the complexity, cost and risk associated with managing user access. Automate provisioning, role management, password management, single sign-on and privileged account management. Plus, unify identities and ensure they support business objectives • Migration and consolidation: Efficiently move and restructure user accounts, data and systems – without impacting users or business productivity • Performance monitoring: Improve user satisfaction and ensure that applications meet the needs of the business. Continuously monitor service levels and quickly resolve performance bottlenecks.

vmware website: www.vmware.com

Quest software asia pacific & Japan 9 temasek Boulevard #22-02 suntec tower 2 singapore 038989 phone: +65 6720 2601 email: APJenquiry@quest.com contact: Sriram Prasad – Marketing Director, APJ website: www.quest.com 108

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consulting

customer communications

sungard global services

thunderhead

SunGard Global Services combines business consulting, technology and professional services for financial services firms, energy companies and corporations. Leveraging SunGard’s global delivery model, more than 5,000 employees worldwide help customers manage their complex data needs, optimise end-to-end business processes and assist with systems integration, while providing full application development, maintenance, testing and support services. SunGard Global Services offers scalability and delivery support via solution centres in China, India and Tunisia.

Thunderhead believes that customer communications are the frontline of your brand. Those organisations that share our belief that sending the wrong message through the wrong channel is wasteful at best – and damaging at worst – partner with Thunderhead.

As a business 100 per cent focused on customer communications and with experience in working with 150 of the world’s leading financial services organisations, Thunderhead can show how we will transform the way you communicate.

Thunderhead helps build richer, stronger, longer lasting relationships – making every interaction personal and relevant and delivering each communication through the channel your customer prefers while automating inefficient processes.

Thunderhead delivers both top and bottom line benefits – cutting costs and streamlining key processes, while driving revenue growth by enabling better retention, cross-selling and up-selling.

With a single, enterprise class, integrated solution Thunderhead NOW can manage all of your customer communications today. Built on open standards Thunderhead ensures that as future challenges and channels arise you will not be constrained by technology in meeting new customer expectations.

With a fast growing, global footprint, Thunderhead has three regional headquarters – London, New York and Sydney.

Our Australian business has 22 unique customers within the retail banking, insurance, wealth management and superannuation markets.

Business consulting We can assist you with strategy setting, process reengineering, business process management improvement, and risk and regulatory compliance. We combine business and technical knowledge with program management and analysis capabilities to provide project coordination, governance and stakeholder management.

technology consulting Includes custom application development, systems integration, custom solutions, and information management services harnessing data from diverse platforms, and comprehensive testing services to enhance quality and accelerate implementations and upgrades.

managed services We provide full service 24/7 maintenance and production support through application management and BPO. We provide remote support for mission-critical software and infrastructure to help keep your systems running smoothly and improve operational efficiency.

sungard global services 71 robinson road, #15-01 singapore 068895

thunderhead 80 raffles place levels 35 & 36 uoB plaza 1 singapore 048624

phone: +65 6308 8000 email: globalservices@sungard.com contact: Jeff Spencer, Managing Partner website: www.sungard.com/globalservices

phone: +65 62484850 email: nsmith@thunderhead.com contact: Nick Smith, VP APAC website: www.thunderhead.com W ho ’ S W ho o F FS i

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customer experience

customer relationship management

thunderhead

rightnow technologies

Thunderhead believes that customer communications are the frontline of your brand. Those organisations that share our belief that sending the wrong message through the wrong channel is wasteful at best – and damaging at worst – partner with Thunderhead.

As a business 100 per cent focused on customer communications and with experience in working with 150 of the world’s leading financial services organisations, Thunderhead can show how we will transform the way you communicate.

Thunderhead helps build richer, stronger, longer lasting relationships – making every interaction personal and relevant and delivering each communication through the channel your customer prefers while automating inefficient processes.

Thunderhead delivers both top and bottom line benefits – cutting costs and streamlining key processes, while driving revenue growth by enabling better retention, cross-selling and up-selling.

With a single, enterprise class, integrated solution Thunderhead NOW can manage all of your customer communications today. Built on open standards Thunderhead ensures that as future challenges and channels arise you will not be constrained by technology in meeting new customer expectations.

With a fast growing, global footprint, Thunderhead has three regional headquarters – London, New York and Sydney.

Our Australian business has 22 unique customers within the retail banking, insurance, wealth management and superannuation markets.

RightNow is helping rid the world of bad experiences one consumer interaction at a time, seven million times a day. RightNow CX, the customer experience suite, provides what an organisation needs to deliver exceptional customer experiences across the web, social networks and contact centres, all delivered via the cloud.

With more than six billion consumers served, RightNow is the customer experience backbone for nearly 2,000 organisations around the globe.

CX (Customer Experience) is a revolutionary approach to delivering great customer experiences that create loyalty, grow sales and increase efficiency. CX is not a new name for customer relationship management; it is built from the ground up for consumer organisations and puts customers at the centre of the experience.

RightNow has empowered over 140 financial services organisations worldwide to not only deliver superior experiences but also to save on operational costs and drive increased revenue. Our solutions give you the power to optimise your contact centres, reduce incoming calls and emails, and provide the personalised experience your customers expect.

RightNow will enable your financial services organisation to: • Lower the cost of managing your customers • Show reported improvements to your customer satisfaction • Introduce a dramatic efficiency rise to your contact centre • Centralise your knowledge so it is accessible to everyone • Increase up-sell and cross-sell opportunities • Demonstrate accountability for all customer interactions • Drill down analytics to accurately measure customer service, sales and marketing interactions

thunderhead 80 raffles place levels 35 & 36 uoB plaza 1 singapore 048624

rightnow technologies level 31, six Battery road singapore 049909

phone: +65 62484850 email: nsmith@thunderhead.com contact: Nick Smith, VP APAC website: www.thunderhead.com

phone: +65 6322 1414 email: ted.bray@rightnow.com contact: Ted Bray, Vice President Asia Pacific, RightNow website: www.rightnow.com

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Document management systems

enterprise Data warehousing

thunderhead

netezza

Thunderhead believes that customer communications are the frontline of your brand. Those organisations that share our belief that sending the wrong message through the wrong channel is wasteful at best – and damaging at worst – partner with Thunderhead.

As a business 100 per cent focused on customer communications and with experience in working with 150 of the world’s leading financial services organisations, Thunderhead can show how we will transform the way you communicate.

Thunderhead helps build richer, stronger, longer lasting relationships – making every interaction personal and relevant and delivering each communication through the channel your customer prefers while automating inefficient processes.

Thunderhead delivers both top and bottom line benefits – cutting costs and streamlining key processes, while driving revenue growth by enabling better retention, cross-selling and up-selling.

With a single, enterprise class, integrated solution Thunderhead NOW can manage all of your customer communications today. Built on open standards Thunderhead ensures that as future challenges and channels arise you will not be constrained by technology in meeting new customer expectations.

With a fast growing, global footprint, Thunderhead has three regional headquarters – London, New York and Sydney.

Our Australian business has 22 unique customers within the retail banking, insurance, wealth management and superannuation markets.

Netezza, an IBM Company, is a global leader in data warehouse appliances that dramatically simplifies high-performance analytics across an extended enterprise.

IBM Netezza appliances enable financial services organisations to process enormous amounts of captured data at exceptional speed, providing a significant competitive and operational advantage in financial services while lowering the cost of service provisioning.

Netezza combines storage, processing, database and analytics into high-performance data warehouse appliances that are purposebuilt to make advanced analytics on big data simpler, faster and more accessible.

Today, Netezza users include CompuCredit, FICO, IntercontinentalExchange, KCB, Nationwide, NYSE Euronext and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), where Netezza is deployed in a variety of application areas including deep analytics, risk, compliance, surveillance and customer intelligence.

With simple deployment, out-of-the-box optimisation, no tuning and minimal on-going maintenance, the Netezza data warehouse appliance has the industry’s fastest time-to-value and lowest totalcost-of-ownership.

IBM acquired Netezza in November 2010 for $1.7 billion.

thunderhead 80 raffles place levels 35 & 36 uoB plaza 1 singapore 048624 phone: +65 62484850 email: nsmith@thunderhead.com contact: Nick Smith, VP APAC website: www.thunderhead.com

iBm china/hong kong limited 10/f pccw tower 979 king’s road Quarry Bay hong kong iBm singapore pte ltd (co. regn no: 197501566C) 9 changi Business park central 1 the iBm place singapore 486048 website: www.netezza.com W ho ’ S W ho o F FS i

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enterprise information management

infrastructure

informatica

intel

Financial services organisations require trusted, timely, and comprehensive data in systems and applications for risk management, regulatory compliance, trade execution, client management, accelerated value from ongoing mergers and acquisitions and combat fraud.

Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA) is the world’s number one independent leader of data integration and data management software to access, cleanse, govern, standardise and deliver the right data your business depends on for success.

Over 4,200 organisations including 600+ financial service companies around the world are gaining a competitive advantage with Informatica’s products and services.

Informatica provides solutions in the following areas: • Counterparty and legal entity reference data management for Basel compliance and credit risk management • Data services for a single view of risk across your enterprise • Data quality and metadata management for enterprise data governance • Data masking for data safeguard and privacy compliance • Client/customer reference data management to deliver a 360 degree view of your clients, accounts, households, extended relationships across all lines of business for your business and customer facing systems • Securities reference data management to improve securities trade execution and settlement • SWIFT certified data transformation solutions for payment and trade integration

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices As a leader in computing innovation, Intel enables the adoption of industry standard architecture across all industries including financial services (FSI).

Over and above leading performance, Intel processors-based systems present a unique opportunity to leave behind expensive, proprietary RISC systems and transition to a more scalable and efficient solution to meet growing data and highly demanding computing environments.

These systems ensure maximised performance potential for solutions in FSI – ranging from low latency trading, high data processing risk applications, high volume throughput in settlement and financial messaging, mobility and delivery channels to lower cost core banking systems.

Intel® Xeon®-based systems deliver for FSI – performance, RAS, scalability and security – all with a breakthrough economic model.

To learn more about Intel in FSI, please visit www.intel.co.uk/fsi

informatica phone: asean: + 65 6396 6679 india: +91 22 40700816 china: +8610-5879-3366 hong kong: +852 3750-7620 website: www.informatica.com 112

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email: asean: info-asean@informatica.com india: info-india@informatica.com china: info-cn@informatica.com hong kong: info-hk@informatica.com

Intel, Intel Xeon and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries. * Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

intel websites: www.intel.com newsroom.intel.com blogs.intel.com

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

investment management

outsourcing

nitt technologies

fuji xerox global services

NIIT Technologies is a leading IT solutions organisation, offering services in application development and maintenance, managed services, cloud computing and business process outsourcing.

NIIT Technologies provides an asset management solution platform that is highly flexible and customisable in providing end-to-end customer support, service escalations and SLA monitoring.

Fuji Xerox Global Services is the industry leader in document outsourcing services. We help companies optimise their printing infrastructure and streamline customer communications and business processes to grow revenue, reduce costs, and operate more efficiently.

We specialise in the planning and delivery of the following services: • Managed print services for office, production and virtual worker printing sites • Consolidating in-house production and commercial printing under a single point of control • Improving communication processes and back-office functions associated with creating, capturing, managing and routing customers, employee and supplier information • Designing, authoring and translating technical and user documentation • Creating personalised, multi-channel marketing communications We recognise the importance of service delivery and have built a global service delivery organisation based on these capabilities: • Use of Lean Six Sigma methodologies and tools to foster continuous process improvement and drive cost and waste out of your business • A single worldwide services delivery management model underpinned by a global network of service delivery centers aligned to industry standards, developed and refined over several years, and focused on seamless service transition, business continuity and ongoing innovation • The knowledge and skills of service professionals, including consultants and technical experts Our document outsourcing services deliver measurable results that can improve your bottom line and create a better experience for your customers.

solution We provide a highly efficient, robust, reusable, cost effective and scalable framework, which can help your organisation gain competitive advantage and at the same time help reduce operational costs. We provide services in: • Portfolio management • Advisory platforms • Trading and order management • Transaction settlement and accounting • Highly efficient master data management • Customised reporting framework • Exchange integration

Benefits • Enable seamless integration across the world’s exchanges • Reduce operational costs by highly efficient master data management techniques while automating business processes • Provide next generation portfolio analytics and portfolio modelling • Provide customised reporting framework that can help your platform generate complex reports at the ease of a few clicks • Provide globally enabled, multi-lingual, multi-currency data models and user experience architecture • Provides role-based user experience framework

niit technologies phone: +65 6848 8336 email: sales.asia@niit-tech.com.sg website: www.niit-tech.com

fuji xerox global services 80 anson road #37-00 fuji xerox towers singapore 079907 phone: +65 6239 3997 email: fxgsmarketing@fujixerox.com contact: Juntetsu Nobui, General Manager, Regional Business Development Office

website: www.fujixerox.com/eng/solution/globalservices/ W ho ’ S W ho o F FSi

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recruitment

risk & compliance management

randstad

arcsight llc, an hp company

Today’s technology environment is fast-changing and dynamic.

Everyday, the skills needed to drive IT developments within the banking and financial services sector are transformed and new skills are always on the horizon. It’s these specialised skills that contribute to your company’s bottom line growth – and this is where we specialise.

With IT consultants dedicated to recruitment for the banking & financial services sector, we have the resources and expertise to provide talent when your business needs it. By knowing your industry, culture, workplace situation and technology needs, we will always deliver the best IT people to help shape your business future.

Whatever your recruitment requirements – permanent or contract – our consultants have the major technology verticals covered: • Applications development & integration • Infrastructure services (including helpdesk & technical support) • Testing services • Strategy and architecture • Program office • Data management • ERP • Project management • Business analysis

ArcSight, an HP company, is a leading global provider of security and compliance management solutions that intelligently identify and mitigate cyber threat and risk for businesses and government agencies. ArcSight helps protect enterprises and government agencies by providing complete visibility and critical insights into their IT infrastructure across all users, networks, datacenters and applications.

about randstad Randstad is a Fortune 500 Company and one of the world’s leading recruitment and HR services providers, with a network of offices spanning 44 countries and Asia Pacific operations across Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Japan, India, Australia and New Zealand.

products Our key product, the ArcSight ETRM platform, is a centralised enterprise monitoring platform that enables businesses and government agencies to proactively safeguard digital assets; comply with corporate and regulatory policy; and control internal and external risks.

services ArcSight Global Services help customers quickly turn their enterprise threat and risk management investments into tangible results from the smallest implementations to the most complex application and infrastructure environments.

customers We have more than 1,800 customers around the globe including the world’s leading corporations and worldwide governments.

partners ArcSight also has more than 100 security alliance partnerships to ensure interoperability, with over 230 security products and a worldwide reseller network of strategic MSSP and reseller partners.

randstad asia pacific headquarters 50 raffles place #17-02 singapore land tower singapore 048623

arcsight llc hp sales Building 450 alexandra road singapore 119950

phone: +65 6510 3664 email: blaise.habgood@randstad.com.sg contact: Blaise Habgood, Strategic Account Director website: www.randstad.com

phone: +65 6572 3605 email: arcsight-info-apac@hp.com contact: Jo-Anne Sia website: www.arcsight.com

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risk & compliance management

risk & compliance management

rsa security

nitt technologies

EMC Corporation (www.emc.com), the world’s leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions, offers a rich portfolio of products and services for managing enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (eGRC) across IT, finance, operations and legal domains. RSA, The Security Division of EMC (www.rsa.com), delivers a foundational element in this portfolio – the RSA Archer eGRC Suite. This set of automated, integrated solutions built on a common technology platform is chosen by one in two of the Fortune 100.

Organisations are approaching eGRC programs to gain an enterprise view of risk and compliance across IT, finance, operations and legal domains as follows: • Policy management • Risk management • Compliance management • Vendor management • Audit management • Business continuity management • Incident management • Threat management RSA Archer eGRC Solutions allow organisations to manage enterprise risks, demonstrate compliance, automate business processes, and gain visibility into corporate risk and security controls to: • Manage the lifecycle of corporate policies and their exceptions • Visualise and communicate risk at all levels of the business • Comply with regulations in the most efficient way possible • Enable risk-based, business-aligned internal audit • Centralise business continuity and disaster recovery planning • Manage threats, and resolve cyber and physical incidents

NIIT Technologies is a leading IT solutions organisation, offering services in application development and maintenance, managed services, cloud computing and business process outsourcing.

The global financial crisis has fundamentally changed the markets view of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). The emergence of risk management and analytics have become strategic weapons for those companies moving from risk mitigation to risk capitalisation.

At NIIT Technologies we are helping our customers capitalise on risk management in order to achieve: • Visibility through a consolidated risk management approach across your organisation • Transparency in all areas of the business operations • Transparency to see risk against multiple scenarios and see the sources of enterprise risk in a holistic view • A risk culture and accountability throughout the organisation • Centralisation of the underlying data, improving risk calculation engines and visibility of key risk indicators

emc international sarl (singapore Branch) 6 temasek Boulevard suntec tower 4, #31-01 singapore 038986 phone: +65 6333 6200 fax: +65 6733 2400 website: www.rsa.com

solution offerings • Operational risk • Technology risk • Compliance management • Security Incident Management Solution (SIMS)

Benefits • Time to market advantage • Cost of ownership advantage • Greater visibility • Easy to use, flexible solution

niit technologies phone: +65 6848 8336 email: sales.asia@niit-tech.com.sg website: www.niit-tech.com W ho ’ S W ho o F FS i

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security

security

rsa security

sophos

RSA is the premier provider of security, risk and compliance management solutions for business acceleration. These challenges include managing organisational risk, safeguarding mobile access and collaboration, proving compliance, and securing virtual and cloud environments. Combining business-critical controls in identity assurance, encryption and key management, SIEM, data loss prevention, and Fraud Protection with industry-leading eGRC capabilities and robust consulting services, RSA brings visibility and trust to millions of user identities, the transactions that they perform, and the data that is generated.

RSA’s industry leading solutions are designed to work together to create a systematic approach to managing security, risk and compliance – eliminating the hundreds of security and compliance silos that exists in most organisations today. Our technology solutions for physical, virtual and cloud computing environments include: • Authentication • Data loss prevention • Encryption, tokenisation, and key management • Fraud prevention • Enterprise governance, risk and compliance • Network monitoring forensics • Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) • Professional services and consulting The RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center (AFCC) is committed to the ongoing battle against cybercrime and provides intelligence on the latest fraud trends and global threats. In total, the AFCC has shut down over 300,000 online attacks worldwide.

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership.

Sophos Endpoint Security and Data Protection offers an integrated solution for anti-malware and data protection. A single agent delivers anti-virus and anti-spyware protection, client firewall, data loss prevention, content monitoring, management of removable storage devices and detects and blocks unauthorised software.

Sophos Email Security and Data Protection enables complete security and data protection across the entire email infrastructure, eliminating known and unknown threats including spam, phishing and malware, and preventing information leakage and compliance violations.

Sophos Web Security and Control make web protection simple by blocking web threats at the source and providing safe, productive access to the web resources and tools users need -all while enforcing acceptable use policies and providing essential safeguards against data loss.

Sophos Mobile Control provides comprehensive mobile device management, enabling the ability to simply and quickly secure, monitor, and control the configuration of these devices connecting to the corporate network, allowing similar levels of control and protection with company laptops and desktops.

Sophos SafeGuard Enterprise provides multi-layered endpoint data security combining encryption and data loss prevention. The centrally-managed solution secures data on desktops, laptops and removable media.

emc international sarl (singapore Branch) 6 temasek Boulevard suntec tower 4, #31-01 singapore 038986

sophos 137 telok ayer street #04-01 singapore 068602

phone: +65 6333 6200 fax: +65 6733 2400 website: www.rsa.com

phone: +65 6224 4168 email: salesasia@sophos.com website: www.sophos.com

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security

telecommunications

trustDefender

ntt singapore

TrustDefender is a leading innovator in integrated security and fraud risk management solutions. TrustDefender’s products increase the fraud detection and prevention capabilities for any online business, effectively providing a complete end-to-end solution to the two major scenarios that online businesses face: • Identity takeover – making sure confidential information is not compromised and stolen by cybercriminals • Making sure cybercriminals who have stolen credentials can’t do anything malicious with that information once they try to use it TrustDefender’s solutions integrate the end user and their computing device into the overall security chain and stops hidden malware that takes advantage of authenticated sessions from breaking into organisations, bank accounts and other online services and databases.

TrustDefender allows secure transactions even on computers infected by known or unknown malware. We also give organisations unprecedented visibility into the security health status of all computers, smartphones, tablets and other internet-connected devices connecting to their network and online services, while delivering visibility into types of malware threats directing the attacks. When a potential problem is identified with a transaction, the instant decisioning process applies and lets the organisation make decisions in real-time based on this previously untapped information. TrustDefender’s third-generation security suite offers next generation technology for integrated fraud risk management in real time.

NTT Singapore is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), one of the world’s largest telecommunication companies. NTT Com delivers high-quality voice, data and IP services to customers around the world. The company is renowned for its diverse information and communication services, expertise in managed networks, hosting and IP networking services as well as industry leadership in IPv6 technology.

NTT Com’s extensive global infrastructure includes Arcstar IP-VPN service that reaches more than 150 countries, a Tier 1 IP backbone connected with major ISPs worldwide, and secure data centres in Asia, North America and Europe.

NTT Communications Group has subsidiaries and offices in 74 cities in 29 countries/regions around the world, providing enterprise customers with international experience and local expertise through the convenience of a single point of contact. The company’s service quality and customer support have been recognised by various analyst firms and international awards.

NTT Singapore service overview: • Universal One: a cloud-optimised network service • Data centre services: world class facilities with hosting and managed services • Global managed IT services: one-stop management of all your IT assets • Internet services: backed by Tier 1 IP backbone for fast connectivity • Unified communications: integrated communications that enhance collaboration • Solutions integration: one-stop shop that gives you hassle-free management of multi-vendor solutions

trustDefender 15 whiting street artarmon nsw 2064 australia phone: +61 2 9011 6516 fax: +61 2 9425 0099 email: sales-apac@trustdefender.com contact: Ted Egan, CEO & Co-Founder website: www.trustdefender.com

ntt singapore 20 cecil street #11-01/08 equity plaza singapore 049705 phone: +65 6438 3101 email: enquiry@ntt.com.sg contact: Paul Lew, Executive Sales Director website: www.sg.ntt.com W ho ’ S W ho o F FSi

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w h o’ s w ho Di r ec t o ry

unifieD communications & messaging

virtualisation

Quest software

emerson

Quest Software simplifies and reduces the cost of managing IT for more than 100,000 customers worldwide. Our innovative solutions make solving the toughest IT management problems easier, enabling customers to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Quest Software provides solutions for: • Administration and automation: Reduce IT costs, enhance security and improve policy compliance. Automate repetitive tasks – such as deploying patches – and enable self-service to minimise burdens on IT • Data protection: Minimise system downtime, prevent data loss and ensure business continuity. Back up and recover data in physical, virtual and application environments • Development and optimisation: Simplify the development process, accelerate release cycles and increase code quality for database and SharePoint applications. Deliver automated testing, expert advice, and intuitive workflows, plus access to user communities full of best practices • Identity and access management: Reduce the complexity, cost and risk associated with managing user access. Automate provisioning, role management, password management, single sign-on and privileged account management. Plus, unify identities and ensure they support business objectives • Migration and consolidation: Efficiently move and restructure user accounts, data and systems – without impacting users or business productivity • Performance monitoring: Improve user satisfaction and ensure that applications meet the needs of the business. Continuously monitor service levels and quickly resolve performance bottlenecks.

emerson network power – a proven partner in Data center infrastructure transformation

Quest software asia pacific & Japan 9 temasek Boulevard #22-02 suntec tower 2 singapore 038989 phone: +65 6720 2601 email: APJenquiry@quest.com contact: Sriram Prasad – Marketing Director, APJ website: www.quest.com 118

Who ’S Wh o oF FSi

Hundreds of data centers worldwide rely on Emerson Network Power products, solutions and services to optimise their infrastructure management.

With the transformational power of the Trellis™ platform, extensive resources, experience and technologies, Emerson Network Power is uniquely positioned to help organisations bridge the gap between data center and IT infrastructure layers, driving new levels of high availability, operational excellence and agile, responsive service.

• Leader in data center infrastructure solutions • Pedigree of solving facilities and IT infrastructure challenges • Part of the Global 100 software developers • Selected by world-leading OEM technology vendors • History of innovation and investment in research and development • Holistic vision and expertise based on deep services capabilities Emerson Network Power is revolutionising data center management with the Trellis™ dynamic infrastructure optimisation platform. Unlike siloed monitoring or static planning solutions, the Trellis™ platform delivers real-time visibility into the performance and relationships of all the components in your IT infrastructure, from the data center to facilities.

Leveraging Emerson Network Power’s proven expertise in asset, power, cooling, infrastructure management and embedded firmware technologies, the Trellis™ platform ends compartmental decision-making so that you can optimise every aspect of your IT infrastructure operations.

The result is a new level of data center performance that makes it possible for you to achieve the high availability, operational efficiency and agility your business demands.

emerson email: ap.marketing@emerson.com website: www.emersonnetworkpower.com

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

virtualisation

virtualisation

Quest software

red hat asia pacific

Quest Software simplifies and reduces the cost of managing IT for more than 100,000 customers worldwide. Our innovative solutions make solving the toughest IT management problems easier, enabling customers to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Quest Software provides solutions for: • Administration and automation: Reduce IT costs, enhance security and improve policy compliance. Automate repetitive tasks – such as deploying patches – and enable self-service to minimise burdens on IT • Data protection: Minimise system downtime, prevent data loss and ensure business continuity. Back up and recover data in physical, virtual and application environments • Development and optimisation: Simplify the development process, accelerate release cycles and increase code quality for database and SharePoint applications. Deliver automated testing, expert advice, and intuitive workflows, plus access to user communities full of best practices • Identity and access management: Reduce the complexity, cost and risk associated with managing user access. Automate provisioning, role management, password management, single sign-on and privileged account management. Plus, unify identities and ensure they support business objectives • Migration and consolidation: Efficiently move and restructure user accounts, data and systems – without impacting users or business productivity • Performance monitoring: Improve user satisfaction and ensure that applications meet the needs of the business. Continuously monitor service levels and quickly resolve performance bottlenecks.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation is an end-to-end virtualisation solution that is designed to enable pervasive datacenter virtualisation, and significantly enhance capital and operational efficiency. It is the ideal platform on which to build an internal or private cloud of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Windows virtual machines.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation builds upon the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform that is trusted by thousands of organisations on millions of systems around the world for mission-critical workloads. It provides: • Record-breaking performance and scalability • Industry-leading security • Widest ecosystem of hardware and enterprise ISVs • Lowest total cost of ownership in its class

Quest software asia pacific & Japan 9 temasek Boulevard #22-02 suntec tower 2 singapore 038989 phone: +65 6720 2601 email: APJenquiry@quest.com contact: Sriram Prasad – Marketing Director, APJ website: www.quest.com

red hat enterprise virtualisation for servers Offers a complete solution for server virtualisation management. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation builds upon and extends the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, trusted by thousands of organisations on millions of systems for mission-critical workloads, to break down barriers to pervasive datacenter virtualisation.

red hat enterprise linux Offers a complete enterprise operating system with single-server virtualisation capabilities, including both Xen and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualisation technology, built in.

red hat enterprise virtualisation for Desktops Offers a complete solution for desktop virtualisation management. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation builds upon and extends the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform to provide cutting-edge features and performance for virtualisation of enterprise desktop operating systems.

red hat asia pacific pte ltd apac headquarters 8 shenton way #10-00 singapore 068811 phone: +65 6490 4200 website: www.redhat.com W ho ’ S W ho o F FS i

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