Who's Who of Financial Services Asia 2012/13

the

Who’s Who

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EXCLUSIVE CXO INTERVIEWS David Gledhill, DBS Susan Hwee, UOB David McQuillen, OCBC Stanley Chan, BAML Ashley Veasey, Standard Chartered Abdul Razak Mohd Nordin, Maybank Sumit Puri, Prudential Life Assurance + more

of financial services

MODUS OPERANDI CEOs from DBS, UBS and CIMB Singapore reveal the keys to success Revolutionary Road Insurance comes of age

13 Banking’s Silver Lining?

The potential of Cloud

the 2012/2013 definitive guide to technology and innovation

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

GeNeRAL MANAGeR, sALes John Todd

edIToRIAL dIReCToR

Contents

Patrice Gibbons

jouRNALIsT Matthew Sainsbury

CoNTRIBuToRs Vittorio D’Orazio Derry N. Finkeldey Michael Pollack Peter Redshaw

ART dIReCToR

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CoLuMN: sIM s. LIM, MANAGING dIReCToR ANd CouNTRy MANAGeR, dBs sINGAPoRe

Glen Myles

ACCouNT MANAGeRs Devan Arumugam Lily Liu

Who’s Who CooRdINAToR Vidya Gopinath

GeNeRAL eNQuIRIes info@fst.asia

PuBLIsheR FST Media (Singapore office) 20 Cross Street #02-07/08 China Square Central Singapore 048422 Tel: +65 3157 6020 www.fst.asia FST Media (Sydney office) Suite 602 Level 6, 30 Alfred Street Milsons Point NSW 2061 Phone: +61 2 9376 3200 Fax: +61 2 9376 3453

fuLL sPeed AheAd

In a market where seconds count, technology is creating an arms race in capital markets

Linking innovation with rapid change

Mark Maric

ReGIoNAL dIReCToR

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CoLuMN: ALLeN Lo, CouNTRy heAd ANd Ceo of WeALTh MANAGeMeNT, uBs hoNG KoNG

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exeCuTIVe RouNdTABLe

The industry’s foremost payments authorities discuss techniques and strategies to drive enterprise transformation

Harnessing world-class talent

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CoLuMN: MAK Lye MuN, CouNTRy heAd, CIMB GRouP sINGAPoRe ANd Ceo, CIMB BANK sINGAPoRe Quality key to service differentiation

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CoLuMN: BReTT KING, fouNdeR ANd ChIef exeCuTIVe offICeR, MoVeNBANK

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The Who’s Who of fINANCIAL seRVICes

They are Asia’s financial services chiefs shaping technology investment and business-enabled innovation across the region

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exeCuTIVe RouNdTABLe

Divisional Heads of technology, channels and consumer banking discuss the next frontier of mobile and web applications

Mobile – banking’s quantum leap

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BANKING’s sILVeR LINING?

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exeCuTIVe RouNdTABLe

Cloud computing has the potential to be the next true game changer in banking

The industry’s leading executives address evolving trends and disruptions in governance, risk and compliance

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The insurance sector is fast approaching a coming of age led by technology

A concise catalogue of Asia’s leading product, service and solution providers

ReVoLuTIoNARy RoAd

dIReCToRy LIsTINGs

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www.fst.asia

Where the Market Meets

Financial Services Technology Media where the market meets

Foreword It is my great pleasure to present you with the second annual edition of the industry-acclaimed publication, The Who’s Who of Financial Services Asia. This definitive guide continues its salute to the true believers of business-enabled innovation and delves into the minds of those leading the charge.

FST Media has interviewed the most influential chiefs from across the region to gain perspective on the trends and disruptions shaping the technology agenda. What has emerged is a clear insight into the growing importance of multi-channel integration; strategies for the effective use of social media; and the need for 24/7 engagement with customers via their medium of choice.

The consumerisation of technology continues to drive transformation across the financial services industry. In particular, the banking sector is on the cusp of a new era driven by customer-centric innovation. A desire to enhance the user experience and increase brand awareness is seeing customers emerge at the heart of key developments within the technology function including biometrics authentication, business analytics and ‘anytime anywhere’ banking via mobile devices.

The insurance sector is also fast approaching a coming of age, as leading players begin to utilise mobile technology and social media in a similar fashion to their banking counterparts. A key driver behind this change is the need for insurers to engage in a meaningful way with digital natives. As a new generation of customers emerge, insurers are adapting their services and offerings to meet the needs of this new market.

Cloud computing remains a contentious issue across the financial services sector with two clear schools of thought developing. While some leaders view Cloud as the next game changer, others suggest that the regulatory and security challenges specific to the sector will ensure a private model emerges as the most viable option. The development of this space will be one of the most interesting to watch.

On behalf of the FST Media team I would like to thank you, our readers, for your continued patronage. I also extend my gratitude to those executives who agreed to be interviewed for the publication. A special thank you is also extended to the analysts and contributors who shared their insights.

We hope you enjoy reading this esteemed publication as much as we have enjoyed compiling it.

Patrice Gibbons Editorial Director FST Media

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Linking innovation with rapid change by sim s. lim

innovation needs to be part of the organisation’s DNA, particularly if it is to stay relevant in the face of rapid changes as the technological effect ripples through Asia.

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In a competitive industry like ours, where many products are commoditised, banks must continually innovate to stay ahead of the pack. Jack Welch, former Chief Executive Officer of General Electric, put it best when he said: “When the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is near.” As a leading Asian bank, an innovative spirit is part of DBS’ entrepreneurial roots.

Leveraging technology in a wired-up region like Asia is key if we are to deliver superior customer service. A recent Google and Ipsos study shows the Asia Pacific region has the highest mobile internet penetration anywhere in the world. The study found that compared to their counterparts elsewhere, Asian consumers are more likely to use their mobile devices for both work and play. With the smartphone penetration rate in Singapore at 62 per cent, this is revolutionising how banks and other sectors interact with consumers.

The popularity of mobile banking is clearly apparent. Using the DBS mobile banking application, our customers easily view their banking and credit card accounts, transfer funds and pay bills. Recently, we also pioneered Singapore’s first mobile banking electronic securities application service, which allows our customers to subscribe to initial public offerings and other securities via their phones.

Customers can also use their mobile phones for lifestyle needs. We were the first bank in Singapore to introduce mobile coupons on our DBS Indulge and DBS Shopper apps, allowing customers to redeem e-coupons from their devices instantly. With the explosion of smartphone usage in Singapore, mobile banking will continue to grow.

In Singapore, DBS is the largest bank with the widest distribution network of more than 80 branches. We understand that the traditional bricks and mortar branch has to evolve to meet the changing needs and expectations of a new generation of techsavvy customers.

Recognising this, in 2010 DBS organised an online competition for young people to design their ideal bank branch. The idea was to hear

from our young customers with their fresh perspective. Eventually DBS worked with the two architecture undergraduate winners to redefine the conventional bank branch.

DBS Remix, a new concept branch that is almost paperless, is in the heart of Singapore’s shopping belt. Information and services are provided through a combination of high-tech touchscreens and other electronic channels for user-friendly banking. At night, the branch is transformed into a venue for young people to learn more about financial literacy in an engaging way.

With the increased sophistication in Asia, our corporate customers’ needs are also changing. In recent years Asia has overtaken the US as the main driver of global growth, and the region continues to be the hive of economic activity. With the continued shift in economic gravity from the West to the East, businesses in Asia are gearing up to catch the winds of growth. Banks need to have a wide Asian geographic footprint, depth of insights and an innovative spirit to support Asia’s burgeoning corporates.

We asked our customers what would help them spend less time on their banking needs and more time on running their businesses.

Many said that an improved online corporate internet banking platform would help. This was behind our efforts for IDEAL 3.0 – a new, improved corporate online banking platform.

The IDEAL 3.0 has an intuitive, user-friendly interface with a customisable dashboard that gives users an instant overview of what is important to them. It also comes equipped with tools to enable customers to schedule alerts and reports, as well as reconcile payments and manage trade activities easily.

Innovation needs to be part of the organisation’s DNA, particularly if it is to stay relevant in the face of rapid changes as the technological effect ripples through Asia.

As DBS continues growing with Asia, we are committed to thinking outside the box in order to deliver a consistently high standard of Asian service every time.

Sim S. Lim is the Managing Director and Country Manager at DBS Singapore.

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APC™ by Schneider Electric is the pioneer of modular data centre infrastructure and innovative cooling technology. Its products and solutions, including InfraStruxure™, are an integral part of the Schneider Electric IT portfolio.

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Harnessing world-class talent by allen lo

The shortage of talent will pose a significant threat to the growth of the industry unless there is a concerted effort to keep the pipeline flowing. To balance the demand with the supply of high-quality private bankers, it is essential that wealth managers invest in training, career development and continuous education.

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With the rapid growth of the wealth management industry in Asia, there is an increasing demand for well qualified professionals. According to a recent BCG Global Wealth Report, private wealth in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, has increased by 10.7 per cent to US$23.7trillion. Wealth in the region is expected to continue growing at a double-digit rate, reaching US$40.1 trillion by the end of 2016.

These gains should be driven largely by sustained strong Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in China and India, and stronger overall stock-market performance.

Continuing wealth creation in the region, the monetisation of non-financial assets into financial assets, the generational transfer of wealth, and the increased need for holistic professional advice as clients become more sophisticated, will continue to drive growth.

All parts of the financial services industry now operate in an environment significantly different to that which prevailed pre-crisis.

New capital requirements, product regulation, selling and suitability norms and more robust adviser certification will reward players who are responsive, while those which continue to play by the old rules will be left by the wayside.

Clients will also demand ever higher technical and market knowledge. All of these factors will require large new investments in education, compliance and technology. Those providers with relative adaptability, scale and resources will be the likely winners on the reconfigured playing field.

However, high quality client advisers remain in short supply. We estimate that across wealth managers, there are currently around 4000 client-facing private bankers in Hong Kong and Singapore. Over the next five years, there will be a talent shortage in the industry of about 2500 private bankers.

Some firms have built up a high cost base, which may not be sustainable. However, if the industry does not seek to recruit beyond only experienced private bankers, the pool runs the risk of stagnating. The supply of talent will fall short of what is demanded by this growing industry.

Ultimately wealth management is a peoplecentric business. High net worth clients want to deal with experienced advisers who understand their needs and who have an in-depth understanding of the financial markets. In short, they want an adviser capable of providing solutions that match their appetite for performance and risk.

Client advisors will need to notch up years of experience and go through several market cycles before they have the depth and breadth required for the job. In response to this discrepancy between available supply and growing demand, UBS has launched the Wealth Management Associate Program. The program’s central aim is to groom mid-career hires and develop them into client advisors.

The shortage of talent will pose a significant threat to the growth of the industry unless there is a concerted effort to keep the pipeline flowing. To balance the demand with the supply of high-quality private bankers, it is essential that wealth managers invest in training, career development and continuous education to ensure that front-line advisers are abreast of the latest products and trends.

However, the middle and back office also requires constant maintenance and upgrading to ensure that clients are properly served.

Attention is needed across the support value chain, from products and services specialists to operations and finance.

Training and development is an integral part of the firm’s culture, and the opening of the Business University at Command House in 2007 is a clear testament signalling UBS’s ongoing and long-term commitment to our employees, our clients and industry leading standards for education and training in Singapore and throughout APAC. The UBS Business University trains employees in a range of business-critical skills that encompass financial education, leadership, personal effectiveness, as well as risk and compliance. A cross-functional team ensures global and regional alignment, delivering the offering locally wherever possible.

Allen Lo is the Country Head and CEO of Wealth Management, UBS Hong Kong.

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Quality key to service differentiation

by Mak Lye Mun

we have sought to challenge the status quo and turn our two-branch limitation into a strategic advantage. we did this by going back to basics, focusing on the fundamentals of customer targeting and re-inventing the customer experience.

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Media coverage often creates the impression that banking is a complex business that has less to do with customers and more to do with shareholder returns, conflicts of interest and global crises. These stories distort the important contribution that bankers, and banks, make as financial intermediaries between providers of capital and their users.

At its core, banking is a service industry that must still satisfy the needs of its customers. Whether that need is in relation to investments, savings, loans, the sale of complex derivatives, credit card transactions, corporate loans or swaps to name a few areas, banks still need to be committed to delivering superior execution and value to their customers.

I believe that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) did not change this service ethos, but in fact has placed the need for good service into sharper focus. Banks have struggled with the challenge of managing increasing complexity in risk management and operations, while having to deliver profits to shareholders. The inability to manage complex organisations and risks has seen the end of institutions such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Even the venerable JP Morgan admits to having been caught out in its risk management practices.

CIMB’s modest scale of operations in Singapore means that we have had to embrace this idea of customer service quality as a main point of difference from other financial institutions with their greater advantages in economies of scale and scope.

We put this basic idea to the test in the highly competitive retail banking sector in Singapore, dominated by local banks with large branch and ATM networks, as well as American and European players increasingly growing their retail presence. Here is where we have sought to challenge the status quo and turn our two-branch limitation into a strategic advantage. We did this by going back to basics, focusing on the fundamentals of customer targeting and re-inventing the customer experience.

Honing in on our strategy to target the mass affluent clients, we decided to capitalise on the fact that retail banking has

become less and less dependent on a brick-and-mortar based service offering, and more and more on a trusted, secure, mobile and lifestyle-centric, value-based service offering.

Our approach has focused on reducing or even eliminating the need for our customers to visit a branch. We have integrated our cost savings from a two-branch constraint into our products and services and we have now earned ourselves the reputation of offering one of the highest deposits interest rates in town. Unlike most banks that reward only new relationships and fresh funds, we value and reward our existing customers for banking with us.

With the recent launch of CIMB Clicks internet banking in Singapore, we aim to capture the imagination of our customers to take advantage of our mobile and internet banking – further reducing the need to visit a branch. If our customers do need to visit a branch, we have provided convenient locations in the CBD and Orchard belt, as well as banking hours that match their lifestyles and routines – not when we choose to do business.

Finally, we have leveraged our ASEAN presence to offer unique cross-border privileges like zero service fee for overseas ATM withdrawals at any of our 3790 ATMs across ASEAN. It is all about the commitment to satisfy customer needs. CIMB has had to find innovative solutions that gave us the flexibility to adjust to differing needs, market conditions, regulatory environments and customer objectives.

I am reminded of a Business Week interview with the late Steve Jobs. When talking of Pixar, he remembered that Pixar had made tough calls to stop production at some point on every one of its movies to fix a problem with a storyline or character.

“Quality is more important than quantity, and in the end it’s a better financial decision anyway.”

Mak Lye Mun is the Country Head, CIMB Group Singapore and CEO, CIMB Bank Singapore.

C o - SponSo r e d a r t i C le

Collaboration Provides Key Foundation for Asia-Pacific Growth Effective collaboration is the lifeblood of any business. Whether it’s internal team discussions, management planning or client meetings, it represents an important part of daily activity.

We have found, such desktop video conferencing systems like iMeet a good platform for people who are not able to travel to meet with their team members.”

For international firm Chartis Insurance, communication through collaboration is vital in ensuring its 5000-strong Asia-Pacific workforce delivers first-rate service to clients throughout the region.

Every month, PGi brings over 15 million people together in nearly 4 million virtual meetings. As an award winning global provider of cloud-based audio, web and video conferencing solutions, PGi helps the smallest and largest businesses around the world, including 75% of the Fortune 100™ connect, be more productive and stay mobile.

“Many teams meet on a weekly basis with some needing to communicate even more often about specific projects or issues,” says Chartis APAC Head of Procurement, Regional Vice President Hung Ling-Tsong.

Hung Ling-Tsong

Company: Chartis, a world leader in insurance with more than 5000 employees in the Asia Pacific region

Traditionally, teams within Chartis relied on a blend of face-to-face meetings and audio conferences to stay in touch. While this worked well, the company was keen to improve collaboration further through the use of new technologies.

Solution: iMeet – Desktop video Objective To improve the quality of communication between team members across the Asia-Pacific region Approach Gradually include, in addition to audio conferencing sessions, iMeet for users with such requirements Improvements • More efficient meetings • Greater bonding between team members Business benefits Better client servicing through more effective internal communications

About PGi

Collaboration Products GlobalMeet • Audio and web conferencing brought together for easy, cost-effective meetings. iMeet • Cloud-based video conferencing solution that lets you meet face-to-face with up to 15 people online – anytime, anywhere.

Ling-Tsong says that, while audio conferencing was relatively effective, it lacked a certain quality because participants could not see each other or easily share documents and presentations.

About six months ago Chartis undertook a pilot of online video collaboration service iMeet. Teams spread across the region used the service to conduct regular meetings and share details of projects and challenges.

“Having everyone being able to see each other creates that special bonding a team needs to work efficiently together,” he says.

“Our collaboration now feels like it is more effective,” he says. “As everyone knows, communication is more than just about voice – facial expression conveys a lot more.

Australia 1800 081 728 auinfo@pgi.com

Hong Kong +352 2299 9022 hkinfo@pgi.com

South Korea +82 2 6003 0300 krinfo@pgi.com

Malaysia +60 3 2772 2888 myinfo@pgi.com

New Zealand +64 9374 1444 nzinfo.pgi.com

Singapore +65 6419 5999 sginfo@pgi.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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Mobile – banking’s quantum leap by brett king

some might argue that nothing replaces a face-toface relationship. that assumes that a digital experience is inferior to face-to-face, and while that may have been true in the past, that’s not going to be the case in the future... welcome to the total disruption of retail banking.

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Banking has often been considered a very traditional business. Monte dei Paschi di Siena is the oldest surviving bank in the world today, some 750 years old. When you walk into Banca Monte dei Paschi’s oldest branch (established 1472), not a lot has changed. The humble cheque has its roots in the second century as a bill of exchange used on the ‘Silk Road’. Perhaps that is why it’s difficult for many to recognise that the very tenets of retail banking are undergoing a massive shift.

In November 1993, the Stanford Federal Credit Union became the first financial institution in the world to offer online banking. By 2001, most financial institutions in the developed world offered a website and internet banking. However, those humble beginnings have now become something many could not have imagined.

Already in most developed economies half of the population uses internet banking regularly. Cheque usage is plummeting in those economies where they are still used, and many economies in Europe have already done away with them entirely. Cash usage in retail is in decline in most developed economies, with Australia recording the largest reduction of cash usage among contemporaries in just the last four years.

Then, along came mobile.

In 2007, Apple introduced the first iPhone.

What phenomenal changes this stimulated! In the future, the destruction of the physicality of banking from a world of branches, cheques, cards and cash will be largely attributed to the emergence of the iPhone. The ‘smart phone’ with applications (apps) supported by an App Store has been the trigger for a whole evolution of interactions on the move.

What comes next is the mobile wallet and a distributed, pervasive, engaged banking architecture. A device that enables payments via the phone and daily banking interactions will, for most, eliminate the need for the ‘bank’, but not for banking products and services. Branches will become optional, not mandatory. For some we’re already at that point.

Very soon one third of Americans will have used mobile banking services. At current

growth rates, within three years in most developed economies 50–60 per cent of the population will conduct their primary day-to-day banking through a mobile phone or tablet.

Think of it this way… by 2016, the average customer will be using their phone for mobile banking or payments once a day, say 20–30 times a month on average. They’ll be using a tablet or internet banking on a PC or some other screen seven to 10 times a month. They’ll be visiting an ATM three times a month. That makes around 400 digital interactions with a bank brand via technology in a year. For most of the retail banking consumer base in Asia, this will translate to perhaps one visit to a branch annually – but for most they won’t visit a branch at all.

For the remainder of customers, the average will be two to three times a year.

There will be some exceptions, but the majority of consumer behaviour will have shifted dramatically.

If you are a bank and you are relying on that one visit or even three visits a year to provide great service and build a relationship with your customer – you are in deep trouble. Your digitally enabled competitor has 400 times the relationship power you have. Inevitably, banks will start to de-emphasise branches, and we’ll see capabilities akin to Amazon’s personalisation bringing the majority of new revenue through digital. Soon customers will be coming to your brand via their PC, via a tablet browser or app, via various apps on their mobile smart phone, or possibly even via their Xbox or TV screen.

Some might argue that nothing replaces a face-to-face relationship. That assumes that a digital experience is inferior to face-to-face, and while that may have been true in the past, that’s not going to be the case in the future.

Today’s technology is increasingly human friendly, massively personalised, contextual and compelling. A branch can’t compete on those terms. Welcome to the total disruption of retail banking.

Brett King is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Movenbank.

C o - SponSo r e d a r t i C le

The Future of Payments Overcoming the Challenges to Capitalise on the Opportunities

By Rajan S. Narayan

It is human nature to look back at the past fondly – to think about how life was much simpler, how the weather was much nicer, how everything cost less and how the world was a kinder, gentler place.

Today, some people say that life is too complex and moves too fast, the weather is increasingly erratic, costs go up all the time and the business world can be brutal. The reality is, of course, somewhere in between these two extremes.

However, in payments, when the past is compared to the present, the landscape has changed dramatically. Today we have new ways to pay – credit, debit, prepaid and virtual cards to name a few, new technologies to make the payments with – contactless cards, person to person payments via mobile phones and social networks for example, and new payment players – from PayPal and UnionPay to Square and Apple. Not only has the payments landscape changed more in the last 3 years than in the previous 30, but it seems that the pace of change is increasing.

We can be sure of two things – change will come and it will be fairly unpredictable – you won’t know what the change is until it is nearly upon you and when it does arrive you’ll need to move fast. This challenge – supporting a streamlined, agile, fast-moving business – is exactly what Information Technology is designed to do.

So, does your payments backbone – the one that your organization relies on provide you with business agility? Does it help you launch new products in days rather than months? Does it provide you with flexibility to comply with regulatory and scheme mandates in a timely manner? Does it scale to meet your needs, handling increasing transaction volumes easily? Does it help you stop fraud before it affects your customers? Does it support your business ambitions cost effectively?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, and with experience on 5 continents we have found that the answer usually is no, then you should consider updating your payments infrastructure. The challenge comes in updating an infrastructure that interacts with so many areas of your business and touches so many customers on a daily basis. Here too, we can help – we have developed a range of project approaches that virtually eliminate the risks usually associated with migration projects, including downtime, dynamic data handling, maintaining service levels and delivering high levels of customer satisifaction.

The criteria you use when choosing your payments infrastructure are vital, and should include the following: 1. Fully functional – it must support all of today’s payment methods and technologies, across all channels, straight out of the box.

2. Extremely flexible – it must enable you to combine the features of your products in any way you want and launch innovative products fast, with template and parameter-driven configurations rather than software code changes.

3. Modular yet integrated – it must provide an end-to-end payments solution through the use of separately deployable modules that are designed to operate together seamlessly.

4. Easy to integrate – it must provide a wide range of tools and interfaces to facilitate the rapid integration into your existing infrastructure.

5. Choice of deployment options – it must provide choice, by supporting a wide range of industry standard platforms.

6. Scalable and available – it must support organizations of all sizes, right up to the very largest, and it must deliver always-on availability.

7. Totally secure – it must use a multi-layered, integrated security solution.

Our solution, SmartVista, delivers all this and more. Customers in 30 countries use SmartVista to help them launch new products, dramatically reduce their total cost of ownership and above all SmartVista helps them deliver what their customers want – when and where they want it.

For more information on how we can help you transform your payments business and capitalize on the opportunities please contact: Rajan S. Narayan, Managing Director, BPC Asia Pacific info-ap@bpcbt.com +65 6423 0313 10 Hoe Chaing Road, #14-01 Keppel Towers, Singapore, 089315

SmartVista – The complete end-to-end solution for e-payments Authorization Switching • Card Management • Card Production • ATM Management • Merchant Management Billing Solutions • Internet Banking • M-commerce • Fraud Prevention • Loyalty Programs www.bpcbt.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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b a n k ing // a n a lys is

Banking’s

Silver

Lining?

Cloud computing has the potential to be the next true game changer in banking. however its success will rely on the industry’s ability to overcome the barriers of security, regulation, culture and vendor immaturity, says Peter Redshaw in this exclusive report.

Cloud computing remains a top strategic technology for financial services CIOs. Although one third of banks use some form of Cloud computing, it has mostly been limited to tactical, noncore applications and infrastructure in private Clouds, with continuing major challenges for transformative Cloud in this industry.

Banks that have spent decades building private IT empires internally are now suddenly faced with the revolutionary and still formative concept of Cloud computing for new and better ways to handle business functions. Early candidates for Cloud adoption have tended to centre around

non-core areas and proofs of concept.

Adoption is strongest for internally managed, non-core Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, such as email, file-sharing, notes management and other horizontal applications.

Increasingly, however, the cost and margin pressures on the industry mean the Cloud is set to go mainstream – moving to the heart of business transaction origination and processing. Cloud can provide the opportunity to not just incrementally improve efficiency or effectiveness, but to also radically transform it by making feasible new business models that previously were not feasable. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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status of Cloud

Gartner defines Cloud computing as “a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ to external customers using internet technologies.” It has five defining attributes: Its basis is service, not technology It has scalable and elastic properties It is multi-tenanted It is metered by usage It is delivered over the internet A recent Gartner survey shows how very little Cloud had penetrated core processing by the end of 2010 and, yet, how rapidly Banks and Investment Services (BIS) firms expect it to grow by 2015. The questions posed included: When do you estimate your organisation will support more than half of your transactions on a Cloud infrastructure?

When do you estimate your organisation will support more than half of your transactions by applications leased using a SaaS model?

Note that the report’s findings are merely saying that by 2015 more than 37 per cent of users will move to some form of Cloud – it is saying instead that these BIS firms intend to do more than half of their core processing of transactions on Cloud hardware (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and Cloud applications (SaaS). That is a radical

transformation, if it happens. It depends on a set of major barriers being overcome well before 2015 and this outcome is far from certain.

Major Challenges

Security Security must be very tight, with encryption likely for data in transit and in storage.

Highly confidential data that cannot go cross-border may have to be tokenised (using pointers to data rather than the data itself). This raises a concern with users that their ability to run analytics and searches on that data will be compromised. Vendors are adding extra security to their Cloud solutions, but users would prefer a single security solution, rather than multiple versions across their operations.

Regulation Few supervisory bodies in the industry have framed regulations that are specific for Cloud computing – across all geographies, they rely on evolving interpretations of existing regulations for offshoring, data confidentiality and operational risk. These interpretations are often made on a caseby-case basis, which leaves many grey areas and an uncertain future. The prevailing uncertainty means that legal teams must be

Infrastructure and application spending planned by CIOs Per cent 60 50 45

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37

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Data Sovereignty Regulators seem to think that keeping data in-country is lower risk and means it is subject to local legislation. For example many in the industry believe it is hard to find data standards for Cloud,or local providers that can guarantee data sovereignty.

Intermediaries The lack of Cloud services brokers that are specific to this industry means that it is difficult for BIS firms to consolidate their Cloud operations because there is little bundling of financial services in the market.

Having spent the past decade trying to consolidate and rationalise their vendor relationships and technologies, the risk is that this area will fragment all over again leaving firms back at square one.

Vendor Immaturity Industry executives consider Cloud computing technology to be immature in many areas, and services, especially those specific to financial services, which are even further behind.

Culture There is a general cultural resistance to Cloud computing at many BIS firms. For example, business units at BIS firms typically have very demanding recovery times – this means that many BIS firms feel they will still have to maintain their own Business Continuity Management (BCM)/Disaster Recovery (DR) sites and, that this will, in turn, destroy the business case for moving to the Cloud.

The fact that most vendors cannot provide liability insurance for the Cloud reinforces this view.

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25

20

20 15 10 5 0 2011-2015 Cloud infrastructure Source: Gartner, 2012

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brought in at an early stage, and this raises Cloud entry costs considerably.

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2016-2020 SaaS

Never

Alternatives There are existing alternatives to Cloud computing such as the many forms of more conventional outsourcing, including the emergence of industry utilities that will focus on standardisation and automation. These options may be attractive to small BIS firms that feel private Cloud is not good for them (insufficient economies of scale) and that public Cloud is impossible (too risky).

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Major Opportunities

If Cloud computing is deployed in a manner that focuses on business value, not just cost reduction of existing operations, it can transform the banking industry.

Creative Destruction Cloud banking uses strategic, industryspecific services that can grow or transform a bank’s business. What makes it distinct from Cloud computing (tactical, cross-industry services that can run a bank’s business) is its ability to drive ‘creative destruction’.

Cloud banking can provide the freedom to try completely new services and processes, maybe even running them in parallel.

Successful new services can then displace the existing dominant process (for design, distribution or transacting) in a disruptive way, rather than just incrementally improving them. This echoes one of the comments we frequently hear from smaller BIS firms, namely, their desire to eliminate the bankowned data centre.

Cloud Ecosystem Cloud-based insourcing and white labelling may be an opportunity for bigger BIS firms.

There is a corresponding chance for smaller BIS firms to fight back against the ‘one-stop shop’ operated by the universal banking model.

Rather than having to develop everything in-house or buy expensive packages, the metered usage and economies of access that comes from a Cloud-based ecosystem of suppliers could enable them to compete more evenly. As Central Processing Unit (CPU) and storage gets more and more commoditised, it makes less sense to own this asset on a permanent basis in a volatile market.

Innovation Cloud computing, especially as it becomes more verticalised and industry-specific, should enable BIS firms to have quicker access to innovative processes and disruptive technologies. This will be accelerated if open-development platforms for banking take hold and attract a large community of small or independent software developers.

Banking application stores could eventually replace the core applications installed at bank premises.

Storage Matrix BIS firms should have access to a matrix of storage options, rather than a one-size-fitsall model. A two-dimensional matrix where one axis represents the confidentiality of the data (from low to high) and the other axis represents speed of retrieval (from slow to fast) will clarify where storage can be low-cost and offshore versus where it needs to be premium cost and proximity-located.

Shared Utilities If data cannot go offshore, but that is where all the existing Cloud providers are based, then there will be an opportunity for a collective of BIS firms to build a national utility. This has been done before, of course, in areas like cheque clearing, though not in the Cloud. The key to success here will be imposing open and common standards that limit the customisation of processes.

Recommendations Do not put new, immature or missioncritical applications in the public Cloud.

There is little business process improvement once an application is in the Cloud. Industry standards, such as Information FrameWork (IFW) and Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), are not yet present in the public Cloud.

CIOs must get a clearly articulated risk/compliance policy document from legal counsel, risk and compliance executives. This document should reflect internal and external Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of Cloud usage. Cloud implementations should reflect this policy.

Avoid putting tightly integrated systems with many custom interfaces on the Cloud.

Establish a governance model that accommodates non-IT-procured Cloud solutions.

Avoid vendor lock-in. Preserve competition among vendors and ensure that vendor offerings adequately address the ongoing needs of the industry environment.

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Peter Redshaw is Managing Vice President in Gartner’s Industry Advisory Services team.

if Cloud computing is deployed in a manner that focuses on business value, not just cost reduction of existing operations, it can transform the banking industry.

CiO priOrities – Where dOes ClOud rank?

1. Analytics and Business Intelligence 2. Mobile technologies 3. Cloud computing (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) 4. Customer Relationship Management applications (CRM) 5. Legacy application modernisation, upgrade or replacement 6. Service Oriented Architecture (including information services) 7. Virtualisation desktop, server and storage 8. Collaboration technologies (e.g. workflow management, team collaboration) 9. Business Process Management tools 10. Security technologies (access control, authentication, etc) Source: Gartner, 2012

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Emerging Trends in the asia Pacific Region five key strategies banks need to employ to capitalise on growth opportunities. By Vittorio D’Orazio

Technology has an important role to play in addressing the tremendous changes that banks will face as a consequence of new regulations, tough market conditions and the entry of new competitors.

After several years of constrained spending, the banking market has started to resume its positioning across the industries with a leading growth rate that is expected to stabilise as a growth sector for the upcoming years, according to Gartner’s forecast. Overall, there will still be areas of restricted IT budgets, including risky projects with low or uncertain Return on Investment (ROI) and projects that are not aligned with the banking strategy.

However, the general focus will be on the front-end and operational spending. The reduction in overhead and the transformation of the fixed costs into variable costs will lead the initiatives in this sector. For this reason, Cloud services and other on-demand services will look extremely attractive to banks, if security concerns are properly managed. On the other hand, some other key trends will continue to dominate this industry globally, such as regulatory compliance, back-office replacement and increased automation, especially on the front end.

Technology has an important role to play in addressing the tremendous changes that banks will face as a consequence of new regulations, tough market conditions and the entry of new competitors. In fact, all of those challenges will require a better alignment between business and IT strategies on the foundation of new business models that can be enabled only by technology.

Asia Pacific IT Spending, Banking & Securities Sector, 2012–2015 (US$)

Sum of End User Spending (US$M) Banking & Securities Growth % Source: Gartner, 2012

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2012

2013

2014

2015

$55.177

$59.935

$64.648

$69.579

7.93%

8.62%

7.86%

7.63%

The changing role and growing influence of customers – including their access to and use of technology – is also putting increasing pressure on financial services providers to communicate with and compete for clients.

Banks and investment firms must focus on better serving customers and prospects, who may have better access to financial data and information than the actual providers do.

Emerging trends

1. Social web and Cloud-based services By 2015, new external social web and Cloud-based services will generate 25 per cent of consumer-driven banking products and services. Consumers worldwide are increasingly spending their time on social networks, far more than the time they spend on bank websites. As they look for greater competition amongst financial services providers, simpler access and a higher level of personalisation, they will increase the volume of banking interactions that they perform indirectly via Cloud services-based exchanges, portals and social websites, rather than on the corporate website. In response, banks are increasingly making rewards, offers and transactions available via social media. Traditional banks risk being disintermediated by social media websites that are increasingly looking for additional revenue streams beyond advertising.

2. Mobile banking By 2015, 60 per cent of banks will offer mobile-based banking services to business customers. Smartphones and media tablets make mobile business banking more accessible to business customers. Corporate customers often have more complex transactions and are more risk averse

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regarding exposure of account data and transactions via devices not fixed to internal networks. Banks have begun to offer mobile business banking services; however, typically it is only for account information services at this stage.

3. Personal Financial Management (PFM) By 2013, 65 per cent of banks will replace their transaction oriented online banking view with Personal Financial Management (PFM) interfaces.

Online banking solutions typically provide a transaction-centric interface to customer accounts. Several large banks globally have updated their online banking sites to include PFM functionality, while others have upgraded their online banking so that the initial log-on experience is a graphical summary view of accounts and transactions when the customer logs in. While most of these offerings are currently US-based, Gartner expects PFM to expand to other markets during the next several years. PFM interfaces can be deployed as in-house solutions or from a private Cloud.

4. Commercial lending applications By 2015, failure to overhaul commercial lending applications will cost banks US$200 billion or more per year. Globally, banks are managing US$12 trillion of commercial loans with risky manual processes, spreadsheets and monolithic applications.

Commercial lending has operated like this for many years, but two looming challenges make application overhaul urgent. Firstly, regulations previously viewed as applicable only to retail lending are increasingly being applied to commercial lending. Secondly, while established economies are struggling with low growth, emerging economies are struggling with high growth. While many banks have put more post-recession focus on commercial lending in hopes of better growth and margins, it will prove to be their downfall unless they change their processes and technology. Banks that fail to overhaul their commercial lending operations risk costs of US$300 billion or more per year because of undermining the viability of their banks, lost revenue opportunities and lower profitability.

5. Securities exchanges By 2014, at least two major securities exchanges will offer separate ‘slow-latency’ trading venues with short holds on orders.

Increases in market volatility and highfrequency trading continue to reduce retail trader trust in market fairness and viability.

In response, exchanges will introduce ‘slowlatency’ trading venues where investors can place limit orders that have a compulsory hold on the order of more than one-tenth and less than one full second prior to attempting a match. This will create a separate market that will not be suitable for high-frequency trading strategies, but will enhance retail investor trust by reducing perceptions of a tilted playing field – where professional traders have an inherent advantage.

*

Vittorio D’Orazio is a Research Director in Gartner’s Vertical Industries team covering financial services, including banking, securities, insurance and investment services.

CiO business PriOrities 1. Increasing enterprise growth 2. Attracting and retaining customers 3. Reducing enterprise costs 4. Creating new products and services (innovation) 5. Improving efficiency 6. Creating or improving customer channels 7. Improving profitability (margins) 8. Implementing finance and controls 9. Improve Governance, Compliance, Risk and Security (GCRS) 10. Improving marketing and sales effectiveness

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Do More with Efficient IT Information technology has undergone a massive transformation in the last decade.

One result of this sea change is IT has become so enmeshed with the business that the line between business and IT strategy is vanishing fast. Increasingly, executives are looking to technology to anticipate growth, increase agility, and enable the innovation of new processes and services that deliver exceptional efficiencies. Given how dependant today’s enterprises are on IT, it is clear that the answer to raising efficiency across the entire organisation lies in increasing efficiency throughout the entire IT infrastructure.

Achieving Efficient IT, however, isn’t only about squeezing the most out of technology assets. It’s also about staffing, budget allocation, maintenance, and management processes. By addressing the people, processes, and technology that drive IT efficiency, enterprises can put the right amount of computing power at the fingertips of every user when and where they need it. This enables end-users to achieve their own specific aims and, in concert, those of the enterprise – all while saving on capital and operational costs and having more budget dollars for innovation initiatives.

Target: Efficient IT Such an organisation-wide transformation can be brought about by embracing core technological elements. Reaching from the desktop to the data centre, these work together to enhance IT agility and operational efficiency, freeing workers to focus on innovation and growth. They are:

Virtualisation Virtualisation, in which resources are unified in a shared pool, boosts efficiency by reducing the number of silos and touchpoints in the IT infrastructure. While the data centre is a popular starting point for virtualisation, it can be applied across the entire infrastructure. Benefits include reduced complexity, streamlined management processes, swift service deployment, enhanced agility, higher asset utilisation, and improved operating performance.

Intelligent Data Management Data has become increasingly valuable as both a business accelerator and a competitive differentiator. This value can be tapped only when it is put in the right place at the right time for the right cost. Many enterprises, however, store data in a loosely organised and haphazard manner by simply adding storage devices when existing ones run out of capacity. This is untenable in the long term – enterprises simply can’t justify the huge capital and operational expenditures required to keep pace with storage demands.

Mobility Today’s increasingly mobile workers require anytime, anywhere access to enterprise data and applications from a wide range of personal and corporate devices: notebooks, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, etc. Supporting all these devices can put a strain on IT resources as each user has to be provided with a single digital identity; data, applications and services have to be delivered reliably and consistently; and remote connections need to be secured.

An Efficient IT strategy enables enterprises to unleash workforce productivity, drive innovation, and quickly reach strategic objectives:

Empower end users Unleash productivity

Run IT more efficiently Drive innovation

Effectively partner with the organization Achieve strategic objectives

Mobility

Consumerization

Virtualization

Cloud

Data management

Enable productivity anytime, anywhere

Support any device

Centralize and scale

A practical path to cloud and IT as a service

Address the data deluge

Consumerisation With a technology-savvy workforce demanding support for personal devices, the time is ripe for enterprises to facilitate the move toward the consumerisation of IT. Such consumerisation requires stepped-up requirements to protect, monitor, back up, and provide remote access. In turn, this calls for IT organisations to protect the security of the network while enabling seamless access for remote workers, with the broader goal being the insulation of the enterprise from new threats while unleashing end-user productivity with a comprehensive array of device types and operating systems, applications, and software.

To help enterprises of all sizes and across the whole spectrum of industry adopt these core elements and achieve Efficient IT, Dell offers open and scalable solutions designed to boost efficiency, enhance productivity, and improve control while eliminating waste.

“The Dell solutions embody the five transformational technologies mentioned above, which are the cornerstone of the Dell approach to Efficient IT. This approach, which addresses

Cloud computing

not just technology but also the people and processes engaged

In cloud computing, IT resources are virtually pooled and delivered as services shared by many applications. Users provision these services from the pool, consume them, and then return them to the pool, where they can be used by other applications. This on-demand model allows enterprises to use computing resources more efficiently than traditional computing infrastructures. IT management is streamlined, costs are reduced, and the organisational becomes more responsive to market dynamics.

in it, eliminates wasteful expenditures and duplicate processes to increase IT agility. It also extends the life of existing technology by enhancing flexibility and minimising management overhead, resulting in an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model that scales easily in response to emerging opportunities as they arise.�

Turning Strategy into Reality

For further information please contact

Together, these core elements form an Efficient IT strategy, one that enables enterprises to change the fundamental cost structure of the IT model to focus more technology resources on strategic pursuits than ever before.

Implementing these transformational technologies is no walk in the park, though. As an example, having a heterogeneous infrastructure, a mishmash of processes and disjointed applications can make it difficult for an enterprise to unlock the full value of virtualisation. Similarly, in order to be able to manage their data intelligently, enterprises need to first build efficiency into every point throughout the entire storage network. Without the proper skills, resources and solutions, this task can be a very arduous one.

Lee Kin Thong, South Asia & Korea Marketing Email: kin_thong_lee@dell.com

Using these Dell Efficient IT solutions, enterprises can leverage IT resources already in place and cost-effectively evolve their existing infrastructure into an information fabric that is open, capable, affordable, flexible and responsive.

This result, in turn, enhances productivity across an increasingly social, mobile workforce collaborating to advance innovation and business growth.

How Dell Solutions Benefit Customers Carnival Cruise Lines Carnival Cruise Lines reduced its server footprint by 60 percent and increased performance by 38 percent with Dell open virtualisation solutions.

AccuWeather AccuWeather reduced storage administration time by 80 percent using a Dell EqualLogic PS Series Internet SCSI storage area network. Plus, the company is saving five figures a year by eliminating calls to external storage experts.

Dell Dell deployed Dell PowerEdge servers to run unified communications applications and avoid the replacement of aging voice mail systems. The company also saved more than US$6 million in hardware acquisition and maintenance costs.

Niagara College In a desktop virtualisation deployment, Niagara College students can use their own technology and access the software learning resources they need anytime, from anywhere.

Salesforce.com By migrating its databases to Dell cloud hardware, salesforce.com achieved cost-effective scalability with twice the performance and 10 times less cost than the previous systems.

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As the consumerisation of technology drives transformation across the financial services industry, the insurance sector is fast approaching a coming of age.

By Derry N. Finkeldey

Consumerisation will drive insurers to ramp up, if not fundamentally reform, their efforts to engage with customers and channel partners alike. Hot areas for technology investments will include the front office, as insurers digitise their distribution and customer service processes to improve efficiency and meet customer expectations for a greater online and mobile experience. Many insurers around the world will also continue to invest in

new policy systems and/or modernising existing systems in mature markets to replace rigid and outdated legacy systems. Gartner expects to see dramatic transformation in the industry and its approach to IT over the next five years. Insurers that do not address this will fail.

The underlying reason for this transformative change is a nexus of Cloud, social networking, mobility and information, which has already revolutionised how

Revolutionary

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This nexus of Cloud, social networking, mobility and the strategic use of information will define a new era of computing and new opportunities for business, and the impact is no less on the insurance industry. Gartner predicts these new forces will make traditional strategies and architectures obsolete. technology is bought and used by consumers, and which is now the dominant force in the enterprise sector. Gartner predicts that by 2015, 70 per cent of existing IT outsourcing contracts will be re-negotiated, of which 80 per cent will result in adoption of Cloud-based services.

This nexus of Cloud, social networking, mobility and the strategic use of information will define a new era of computing and new opportunities for business, and the impact is no less on the insurance industry.

Gartner predicts these new forces will make traditional strategies and architectures obsolete.

Top five predictions for insurers Business and IT leaders of Life, and Property and Casualty (P&C) insurers, need to bridge the gap between legacy modernisation and innovation as they are forced to adapt to new technologies and changing customer behaviour.

By year-end 2013, the percentage of the IT budget of insurers allocated to Cloud computing will grow from less than five per cent to 25 per cent.

Cloud computing and virtualisation are ranked as the top two priorities for insurance CIOs based on Gartner’s annual CIO Survey.

Gartner estimates that less than five per cent of all insurance IT applications are running in the Cloud today. This will change considerably over the next five years. Thirty-eight per cent of the surveyed insurers expect to run more

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than half of their transactions on a Cloud infrastructure before the end of 2015.

By year-end 2014, 25 per cent of faceto-face sales and service interactions by insurance agents will migrate to video, phone and electronic channels.

Many consumers have already shifted buying preferences for simple, commodity products (such as automobile insurance) from agent/ broker channels to direct channels, such as the web and the call centre. Many P&C and life insurance product lines, including life insurance and commercial P&C insurance, continue to be sold and serviced ‘face-toface’, with the seller and the buyer in the same physical location. This model requires a large geographic footprint of facilities and salespeople, which makes it expensive to

The insurance industry is faced with an opportunity to transform significant aspects of its operations via technology, particularly in the areas of distribution and customer interaction, which can benefit from applications based in Cloud and context-aware computing, social media and mobile technology.

The impact of new forces

Cloud: Cloud is revolutionising IT delivery (and the competitive landscape) and, in turn, enterprise business models. Although nascent, Cloud services are growing much faster than overall IT spending. Gartner expects public Cloud will eventually become the dominant technology delivery model, even for the insurance industry, and insurers making technology decisions today need to consider how these decisions will fit in the context of a longer-term roadmap towards a Cloud-based computing paradigm.

While issues of data sovereignty and security are still paramount, Gartner believes these issues will be adequately addressed in the medium term as vendor offerings mature and as we see more providers

operate. Complex and high-value product lines will continue to need advisory services, and consumers will still want to talk to someone to ask last-minute questions. These interactions can happen through the call centre or through new electronic channels via video on demand, shared screens and videoconferencing from a home PC/ smartphone with a company representative/ agent.

By year-end 2015, personal lines P&C insurers that do not offer online and mobile transaction capabilities will lose 25 per cent of their current market share.

Insurance consumers in many countries are already going online to purchase products (for example, automobile insurance).

Many consider these products to be commodities. The rate of online buying of insurance is expected to rise in mature countries and emerge around the globe,

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setting up data centres outside the US, as is evident in the Australian market, for example.

Mobile: Mobility is generating a lot of news in the insurance press, particularly around iPad apps for agents. Two factors are driving mobility adoption: pressure from consumerisation, as employees and customers increasingly use smartphones and tablets; and business strategy, as enterprises realise the agility and efficiency improvements that mobility can bring. There is a distinct shift from internal and partner applications to consumer-facing services. Anecdotally, we observe that demand is just as strong in Asia Pacific as it is in North America and Western Europe, and many already highly mobile emerging markets are leapfrogging the desktop and laptop legacy. We see strong growth in property and casualty and life insurance in particular, although the influence of consumerism will be pervasive.

Social: The most common reason to date for insurers to engage in social media has been brand promotion. The biggest deterrent

even in countries where internet use is low.

In these geographies, mobile devices will take precedence with consumers using smartphones to buy and service their insurance policies. As insurers introduce and improve their online and mobile e-service capabilities, they are facilitating the ability of prospective customers to more easily switch from their existing insurers. With little perceived differentiation in the insurance products that are being sold, price and convenience will be the primary factors driving consumer purchases.

By year-end 2014, at least one social network provider will become an insurance sales channel.

Providers of social media websites are increasingly looking for additional revenue streams beyond advertising. Offering financial services is one of the areas being explored by social media providers to

Forces shaping insurance Timely data Improved business decisions Product and process innovation

Contextualised and targeted services

Mobile – Anytime, Anywhere

Mobile illustrations and quotes Mobile self service Mobile claims Mobile assessment Alerts, triage for catastrophe services

Scalable Elastic Device Agnostic Information – Complex and real time

Structured and unstructured risk data Business performance

Source: Gartner, 2012

strengthen client relationships. Examples are the social payments start-up Twitpay, the virtual currency Facebook Credits or the price comparison service Google Advisor.

Many life and P&C insurers are active on social media websites, but the vast majority fail to attract any significant user attention, or to effectively motivate consumers to take action and buy insurance. The entry of social media providers into the insurance market would be a major disruptive factor for the insurance industry.

By year-end 2014, only half of global insurers’ legacy modernisation programs will generate the originally expected measurable organisational value.

Gartner estimates that more than two-thirds of global life and P&C insurers still rely on legacy systems to a significant degree to manage their core insurance business processes. Some organisations run more

Social – transparency through relationship

Brand awareness and marketing promotion Customer service Crowd sourcing/product development Customer segment data Fraud detection

than 50 per cent of their core insurance applications, such as policy administration or claims management, on systems that date back to the 1970s or 1980s. Life and P&C insurers are increasingly investing in legacy modernisation, as observed from the large volume of inquiries Gartner has received during the last two years. These projects are generally very complex, timeconsuming and risky. In addition to project planning and coordination challenges, many insurers underestimate the change management efforts and fail to anticipate the level of resistance among their employees.

Organisations often don’t calculate costs and benefits beyond a range of three to five years, or fail to project the total cost of ownership of their projects into the future. Insurance executives will take a stronger leadership role and start to devote much more resources to the risk management aspects of legacy modernisation projects.

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The combined forces of mobile/context/social and the Cloud are providing insurers with the prospect of more data than they have ever had before.

is concern about risking non-compliance with industry regulations through the use of social media, especially in relation to sales communications regulations and data storage requirements. However, opportunity for benefit exists in other applications beyond brand marketing and customer service, such as crowdsourcing for product development, social analytic applications for fraud detection and so forth, although managing reputational risk, arising from social media and using it to combat it, will continue to be an important strategy.

Information: Insurers want data but so much is coming their way courtesy of the nexus that they don’t know what to do with it. Gartner research shows that many insurers are still struggling to achieve a 360-degree view of their customers, and part of the issue they are grappling with is the completeness or the accuracy of the data they have on customers across their various repositories. The combined forces of mobile/context/social and the Cloud are providing insurers with the prospect of more data than they have ever had before.

Another component of this is speed – the ability to use the data more quickly and

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in a timely manner. The complexity of customer data in many sources is driving data integration, Master Data Management (MDM) initiatives and business intelligence and analytics.

These forces are tightly interrelated in a virtuous cycle: mobile computing becomes prevalent, extending the power of social networking to provide context. Together, they create a need for scalable systems in the Cloud, independent of any specific mobile device. The resulting profusion of new information can be used by insurers to make better decisions and create sticky products and a better customer experience.

Digitalisation is quickly becoming a predominant business strategy. Digitalisation has been associated strongly with digitisation of the sales and claims processes, but insurers need to take a holistic, enterprise-wide approach to digitalisation, and evolve their entire business model to support the core principles associated with digital strategy.

A big driver here too is electronic forms and electronic signature for all processes, new business, claims and service.

Core systems replacement continues to be a leading topic among P&C and life insurers in 2012. This also ties to the focus on the front office − many insurers are investing in core systems because their legacy systems cannot support the customer experience they need to deliver.

Insurance-specific Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is starting to gain real traction, particularly with small- and mid-size organisations that can benefit from the economies of scale provided by a BPO provider, and, over the longer term, Gartner believes that this will becomes a discussion about BPO and, ultimately, Cloud services.

Many insurers are starting with functions such as document processing or aspects of marketing, but are steadily showing increased interest and uptake of core processes such as policy administration and claims management.

*

Derry N. Finkeldey is a Principal Analyst in Gartner’s Industry Market Strategies team covering the insurance industry and IT spending by industry in Asia Pacific.

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Full speed ahead t

he fallout from the Global Financial Crisis and rapid advances in trading technologies have resulted in the financial markets industry currently confronting its greatest period of upheaval in 20 years. The endless drive for best execution and rapid advances in trading technology now mean that an order can hit a market matching engine in a couple of hundred microseconds; or millionths of a second. Exchanges are now moving towards matching orders in billionths of a second.

This need for speed has kicked off an IT arms race for lower latency order execution that is changing the face of the industry.

Technology executives are being forced to do more with less. In a period of record low trading volumes, financial institutions must still invest in the development of faster and smarter data analytics tools and Smart Order Routing Systems (SORs) in order to remain competitive.

sOr sophistication and High Frequency trading

Many financial institutions are turning to open-source technology when building customised SORs and data analytics systems to lower costs and development times.

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Nevertheless, development is advancing at such a rapid rate that traders sometimes do not have time to optimise algorithms on a system before it is superseded.

“Technology has become cheaper to deploy over the years but the lifetime of systems has also gone down,” says Alex Bennett, Global Head of eCommerce Products at ANZ Global Capital Markets. “There’s a need to continually upgrade systems, especially at the lower latency end of the market.”

Greater sophistication of SORs and information analysis has led to the emergence of a strategy known as High Frequency Trading (HFT). HFT uses complex algorithms to determine the best time and volume in which to trade. Positions are often held for only a matter of seconds, with perhaps just a few cents profit made with each trade.

However, the sheer volume of trades done by these systems (often tens of thousands per day) quickly turns cents into thousands of dollars; they have become the workhorses of many sell-side trading rooms.

Although not all market participants are necessarily seeking low latency execution, the very fact that it is available to them is becoming appealing in itself and a sellable point of differentiation.

In a market where seconds count, technology is creating an arms race that is changing the face of the industry.

By Michael Pollack

embracing HFt

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competition

This increased liquidity has lowered venue infrastructure costs and removed the monopolistic control that market venue providers once had, allowing Multilateral Trading Facilities (MTFs) such as Chi-X to compete directly.

When Chi-X Europe launched in 2007, it captured 20 per cent of the London Stock Exchange’s traded volume in its first 12 months of operation – largely attributed to HFT activity. Chi-East venues in Singapore and Hong Kong have also enjoyed strong growth from their dark pools – markets where large volume can be traded anonymously without fear of price movement. Somewhat ironically, the growth of dark pool trading around the world has been through institutional investors seeking to avoid HFT algorithm interference.

However, the separately-owned Chi-X Australia’s debut in the ‘lit’ market has been somewhat less spectacular, with the new kid on the block yet to secure more than two per cent of the Asutralian Stock Exchange’s (ASX) volume. Chi-X Australia’s fee structure and Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) regulations have been blamed for the poor volume.

Nevertheless, the entry of Chi-X forced the ASX to bring forward the launch of its $32 million co-location facility known as the Australian Liquidity Centre (ALC).

Exchanges around the world are catering to the increased demand for low-latency with the provision of such co-location data centres.

Located in close proximity to the exchanges, the centres store dedicated servers for market participants to speed

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up order entry. With a signal able to travel along a fibre optic cable at 30 metres per nanosecond (a billionth of a second) and trades now executed in the flash of an eye, being physically closer to exchange matching engines is critical.

The ASX boasts that an order sent from the ALC will reach its engine in 240 microseconds.

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEx) and Singapore Exchange (SGX) also have co-location centres, with the former boasting its 1,200 rack facility has the highest capacity of any exchange in Asia Pacific.

“We aim to create an environment where brokers, technology suppliers, information vendors and network service providers can gain synergies and efficiencies by working together in an efficient ecosystem,” says Charles Li, Chief Executive of HKEx.

asia pacific state of play

Research firm Ovum predicts financial markets IT investment in Asia Pacific to hit US$18 billion by 2015, which places the region at the forefront of global IT spending.

However, this increase in investment is something of a false dawn as IT spending in Asia Pacific financial markets has been trailing that of the mature markets in Europe and the US for a number of years.

Accordingly, investment in catch-up infrastructure will represent much of the APAC spend.

“Things that are extremely capital intensive, like building data centres and networks – large pieces of infrastructure that are extremely expensive – would certainly drive a large portion of that,” according to Ben Radclyffe, Head of Electronic Trading at Deutsche Bank.

HFT has created enormous upheaval in capital markets around the globe, accounting for over 60 per cent of equity market trading volume in the US. Asia Pacific is yet to feel the full impact as HFT requires high liquidity to operate optimally, making the bourses of Europe and the US more attractive.

HFT in Asia Pacific is expected to represent 60 per cent of total equity market trading volume by 2017. HFT growth in the region has also been stifled by China and India, the most liquid markets in the region, being the most unwelcoming to foreign investors, although the latter has adopted regulations for Smart Order Routing. SGX has made significant investment in low-latency infrastructure but is hampered by a dearth of highly liquid shares. In 2011, SGX launched Reach, which it claimed at the time was the fastest order matching engine in the world.

Progress is still slow, however. Since the launch of Reach, SGX President, Muthukrishnan Ramaswami, has acknowledged that the HFT trading in equity stocks on his exchange is, in fact, close to zero. Nevertheless, one of the world’s largest HFT firms, Getco, is now trading on the SGX. It is expected that the HFT’s contribution to market liquidity, as well as the increased revenue it provides to exchanges, will eventually turn the tide in its favour throughout Asia.

The regulatory environment across Asia pacific has been largely unfavourable to HFT. Restrictions on short-selling across the region have hampered algorithm trading in equities, forcing investors into the futures market. In Hong Kong, the tax regime is also unfavourable to high-frequency traders, with a 0.1 per cent levy on all trades. This has resulted in growth of HFT activity in the options market.

Nevertheless, all major Asian bourses now have co-location facilities to accommodate low-latency order routing.

Dark pool developments

Uncertain liquidity in lit markets, and an aversion to low-latency trading, is driving predominantly buy-side institutional investors, who need to trade large volume with minimal information leakage and market impact costs, into off-market arrangements known as dark pools.

Dark pool trading essentially incorporates the same type of order system used by brokers in the ‘lit’ market, however on the exchange

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a n a lys is // ca pi ta l m a r k e t s

speed-to-market is king but smarter, more highly-tuned algorithms are also vital drivers of profitability. There is a push towards self-learning algorithms that scour markets for trading opportunities too complex for human comprehension.

side, dark pool alternatives have emerged in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.

The ASX has introduced the Centrepoint facility, which allows brokers to cross trades at the midpoint of the prevailing bid/offer spread in the market as happens in a dark pool. Meanwhile SGX has partnered with Chi-X Global to form Chi-East, a dark pool facility available in Singapore and Hong Kong. However, the impact of dark pools on broader market integrity is yet to be seen.

“There are some concerns that driving more and more volume away from the lit market into the dark market could have an impact on market microstructure,” says Radclyffe.

market fragmentation

Lower liquidity across APAC also means that the region has yet to experience the extensive fragmentation of its markets that has occurred in Europe and the US. The traditional model of sell side investment banks offering liquidity to buy side fund managers has been disrupted in the western hemisphere by small companies offering innovative trading solutions and MFT venues; essentially the facilities that the buy side once sought from the sell side.

“In Asia, exchanges are being forced to upgrade their systems to compete and cope with competition, leading to increased technology requirements for participants in a difficult economic environment,” says Jenny Evans, Head of IT at Credit Suisse Australia.

lower latency

HFT might be the torchbearer for low latency trading but speed-to-market remains critical for all market participants. Demand for co-location facilities is forecast to increase in

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2012/13 as all market participants, not just high-frequency traders, take advantage of low latency technology.

Growth of HFT activity in asset classes outside of equities will also increase demand for accommodation in co-location facilities.

Algorithm trading now accounts for 60 per cent of global volume in the foreign exchange market. More complex derivative products will be developed in 2012/13 to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities between multi-exchange markets.

Rather than transmitting orders to servers in a liquidity centre, brokers are beginning to physically locate their black boxes (units containing automated algorithms) within the centres to reduce execution times.

Speed-to-market is king but smarter, more highly-tuned algorithms are also vital drivers of profitability. There is a push towards self-learning algorithms that scour markets for trading opportunities too complex for human comprehension.

FpGa in focus

Powerful chips designed for 3D graphics applications are now being modified for order systems and Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware that avoids PC protocols is chief among them.

Until now, most low latency solutions have been programmed using traditional software, but PC protocols limit the speed at which algorithms can run. FPGA involves the programming of ‘logic blocks’ of information onto a chip, which is loaded into customised hardware, thereby avoiding the restrictions of a PC. FPGA is being developed by a number of institutions to lower latency on pre-order risk checks and process Big Data analytics.

Further down the track it is expected that FPGA technology will lead to 3D printers in trading rooms creating highly tailored hardware. “We’re just a couple of generations from deploying bespoke hardware,” says ANZ’s Bennett. “You go to a whole new level when you create, not just the software stack, but also the hardware stack where you can print your own circuits.”

Opportunities in ‘Big Data’

Capital markets firms are being forced to get a handle on Big Data to meet growing regulatory demands and uncover market opportunities. As data output grows exponentially, requirements in this area are likely to surge in 2012/13.

“We’ve got a combination of market data and newswire information, analyst reports, client stock information and so forth,” says Deutsche Bank’s Radclyffe. “It’s currently very difficult to tie that information together in a meaningful way. There are systems that attempt to do it but there’s no holy grail on that front currently. I would expect that to kick in.”

Currently open-source software Hadoop is the top choice among developers working with Big Data as costs are minimal and it avoids vendor contracts – potentially restrictive in such a rapidly changing environment. Open-source technology also allows Hadoop, which was derived from Google MapReduce, to split the processing of large data sets across multiple servers.

There will be a trend in 2012/13 to replace expensive legacy systems with cost-effective open source software of this kind.

Understanding the cloud

Investment in Cloud computing is expected to increase across 2012/13 as cost pressures force firms to reduce infrastructure spending.

Although mission critical data and latency sensitive information is unlikely to move the Cloud, back office functions, for example, are already on many private Clouds.

“As soon as we solve problems like security, latency and uptime I think private Cloud has a lot to offer,” says ANZ’s Bennett.

“Right now I see a lot of barriers to high performance that we need for institutional trading. Uptime of 99.99 per cent is not enough for a trading business.”

Consequently, any move to a public Cloud is unlikely in 2012/13, with any venture likely to be led by smaller institutions that have made little or no investment in private Cloud.

*

ro u n dta b l e // pay m e n t s

Driving Enterprise Payments Transformation Top row (left to right): George Pilakis, Head of Payments Transformation, ANZ; Simon Babbage, Head of Product – Global Payments and Cash Management, HSBC; Ralph Dangelmaier, President Global Markets & Services, ACI Worldwide; Marj Demmer, General Manager, Cards & Payments, ANZ; Brett Watson, General Manager Business Banking Technology, NAB; Chris Campbell, Head of Payments Policy and Strategy, Westpac; Mark McCulloch, Head of Business Development – Diversified, Transaction Banking Solutions, CBA; Jeremy Wilmot, President Asia Pacific, ACI Worldwide. Bottom row (left to right): Paul Richards, General Manager Payments Transformation, NAB; Paul Franklin, Head of Payment System Controls, CBA; Cyrus Daruwala, Managing Director, Asia Pacific, IDC Financial Insights; Colin Sultana, Head of Acquiring & Payments & Channel, Credit Union; James Farrell, Managing Director, Pacific, ACI Worldwide; Asha Cugati, Head of Banks & Public Sector AU & NZ, Global Transaction Services, Citi; Mike Baldwin, Head of Innovation and Implementation, Global Transactional Services, Westpac.

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

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pay m e n t s // ro u n dta b le

Cyrus daruwala, IdC FInanCIal InsIghts: Our discussion focuses on cards, payments and cash management, with particular reference to people in their 20s to mid-30s. These include a group known as ‘kippers’ − kids in parents’ pockets eroding retirement savings. The 20s is when people really begin spending.

They’ve just started getting iPads, tweeting and exchanging photos; they’ve got expensive tastes. These are the customers who are going to bank their next salary, and their next big salary, into your bank. They aren’t the people who you want lining up at a branch, nor are they the people you want filling in papers or very cumbersome forms, albeit online. They are the people who we are trying to assess from a mobile banking point of view. How do you cater to them?

I know ANZ has goMoney, and CBA has the recently launched Kaching, both Peer-to-Peer (P2P) payment propositions. Whilst these propositions have won accolades they still only address one segment of the

person-to-person payment. They do not address the entire breadth of the payments infrastructure.

For example, nobody has started addressing closedloop debit cards and co-branded cards. Near Field Communication (NFC), a very large and expensive undertaking that you may have toyed with or are about to toy with, didn’t work in the US. For the first three years it was a loss-making proposition because merchants were unwilling to put on the sleeve.

What is your take on mobile payments? Are you experimenting with some out of the ordinary mobile payment schemes that you can share with us?

ChrIs Campbell, westpaC: Certainly we are looking at mobile payments and where they fit in.

We are seeing more and more NFC terminals roll out across the market and we are in the process of introducing NFC cards. That is going to be important. It is hard to say exactly what is going w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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to be the winner in mobile payments at this stage.

But you have to be looking at this space because that is where customers are and it needs to be considered across all segments.

NFC becomes more challenging when you are talking about the mobile device. There are different owners involved, and there are different security issues to be considered. It is less mature compared to the NFC card space.

GeorGe pilakis, anZ: Our organisation is aware of these opportunities in the marketplace, and not just from an Australian perspective, but globally. At the moment I am focusing more on the transaction’s performance. That is, rather than concentrating on the enablement of a product through a different mechanism, I am looking at how you can process that particular transaction once you capture it.

Another issue is security. While it may be easy to implement in some other form, it is the security that can be very complex and requires relationship management.

Cyrus daruwala, idC FinanCial insiGhts: What engine do you have for your transaction processing?

GeorGe pilakis, anZ: The issue is whether you have “The issue is whether you have multiple transaction engines. Going forward you have to decide whether to continue with the federated model or whether to standardise.”

multiple transaction engines. Going forward you have to decide whether to continue with the federated model or whether to standardise. Is there a one-size-fits-all option? Do you need to be more specific or specialised?

When you look at your customer demographics they all have different requirements and when you look at different geographies on top of that there are further requirements again. Asian countries are different to Australia and New Zealand.

GeorGe Pilakis, anz

Cyrus daruwala, idC FinanCial insiGhts: Ralph, security will keep coming up. How do you ease the pain?

ralph danGelmaier, aCi worldwide: Where do we start? There are so many angles on security. We are seeing a lot of innovation around ‘consumer rules’: allowing consumers to put their own rules around the card. But especially with this generation, you want to put certain limits around how they use these mobile transactions. For example, ‘no transactions over X amount, no transactions that are international, no transactions via websites’. The new generation of mobile wallets have the ability to apply those kinds of rules. The question is: where are consumers going to go? Are they going to go with the wallet at a Google site or a PayPal site, or are they going to

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go to the bank? Or are they going to go somewhere else altogether? People need to think about that in terms of security because rules are going to be pushed more towards the consumer. I am not sure when, but I think it is an interesting dynamic going on in the marketplace right now.

Cyrus daruwala, idC FinanCial insiGhts: Colin, what do you do in mobile?

Colin sultana, Credit union: We are at the inception stage, considering what we are looking at in the mobile space. That is part of why we’ve embarked on our own switching project, bringing it in-house.

Innovation is going to move quickly and on top of compliance and all the other changes, we don’t have the infrastructure in-house to manage that. It makes it very difficult. While we are in the implementation phase of that this year we are starting to look at what we’re going to focus on in the mobile space, and that is looking at both P2P and NFC-style payments for consumers. marj demmer, anZ: All the major players are working on NFC at the moment and looking at wallet.

I wouldn’t call it innovation – it is a form of evolution.

When you look at contactless cards, terminalisation is very high in Australia. Everyone now issues contactless cards and typically we see that once someone’s done a couple of contactless transactions they really ramp it up and learn what to look for at the point of sale.

We are seeing very strong growth, particularly in the under-$100 space. It is difficult to say at the moment how much it’s displacing cash but there’s definitely customer demand there. Everyone’s working on it and it’s a matter of when, not if.

mike baldwin, westpaC: Whenever there is new technology evolving it is unclear what is going to take hold. Everybody is doing some sort of experimentation or pilot because they don’t want to make a huge investment only to see it fall over. So we are piloting, we have a mobile application for receivables. It doesn’t involve one of the readers, though. There are some readers that aren’t EMV-compliant; how are we going to deal with those kinds of things? We’re testing them, seeing what the merchants want to work with as well.

jeremy wilmot, aCi worldwide: Clearly the dynamics of mobile payments are very different for emerging markets. For mature markets like Singapore, Australia and Japan it is a matter of looking for a greater

pay m e n t s // ro u n dta b le

share of an existing wallet and cross-selling existing products to that particular wallet.

Emerging markets, on the other hand, are looking at banking the unbanked and how to cope with this huge explosion of electronic payments. Mobile payments are central here because when you are looking at banking the unbanked in India, you don’t want a bank account – you really don’t have an interest in giving 10,000 rupees to someone else for a bank account. What you are looking for are real value-add services. That comes in P2P transactions and through mobile payments.

ACI recently conducted a study on mobile payment and banking adoption around the world. This study asked 14 countries, “Have you made a mobile payment in a shop or P2P in the past six months?” We found that mobile payment usage was 66 per cent in China and 64 per cent in India, while Australia was at 21 per cent adoption rate. Smart Communications in the Philippines has been doing P2P for more than 10 years.

Does this show that mobile is a mainstream technology?

For the banks in India, the answer is 100 per cent yes – it’s not even a question.

simon babbage, HsbC: You have to consider the challenges involved in different markets. We are involved in both emerging and mature markets worldwide. We find that it is easier to do these sorts of things in places like India and China because they are green, as opposed to Australia or the UK where you have got an existing behaviour set and an existing way of doing things.

The mistake we always tend to make is we’ve got to retrofit our EFTPOS devices, which is expensive and cumbersome, and you have got to get the merchant to agree to do it. Then you have got the regulatory overlay. So you have Google or Facebook, who are largely unregulated, interacting with a payment system which is largely driven by the banks. We have never been more regulated and it’s only getting worse not better. That is one of the biggest challenges. We are up against Facebook who, for now, can do pretty much whatever they like within the laws of libel. Meanwhile, there are certain things we just cannot do; there are certain people we can’t deal with no matter what.

In Australia, we have a population set which is used to doing things a certain way, and has been highly adoptive of technologies. But everything has to be retrofitted and it’s hard to build a payback argument on a retrofit.

simon babbage, HsbC: We have just launched a mobile app for our HSBC Net platform. That enables people to do things that they would do on HSBC Net. They can use their iPad or they can use their smart phone to authorise payments or do those sorts of transactions. There is nothing particularly new or special about it, but it is proving to be popular. We all carry around BlackBerrys now so if I want to authorise the payments that have been put through in Sydney today it’s easier to do it. In terms of the consumer space, there are differing applications in the differing countries we’re in round the world. asHa Cugati, Citi: Citi is in a similar space. We are augmenting CitiDirect, which is our online banking platform for business, by making it accessible on mobile devices. But just to touch on the consumer space in terms of the way we look at mobile payments for consumers, the opportunity we see in the developed markets is more around the ability to capture additional information about the consumer. Where do they shop?

How do they shop? When do they shop? Where are they going to be? Let’s predict their behaviour, and then that obviously ties into our relationships with the merchants.

Cyrus daruwala, idC FinanCial insigHts: Has anybody tried to harness pure SMS to link to your customer relationship management to open up workflow?

Jeremy wilmot, aCi worldwide: The only place I have seen it is in Singapore Airlines check-in. Recently I’ve been getting SMSs saying, “If you want to check in, reply YXV4,” and you are checked in on SMS. I have never received anything from a bank as yet that initiated a workflow. asHa Cugati, Citi: I believe that M-Pesa in Kenya is entirely SMS. If you look at emerging versus developed markets, the most successful market in the developing world is Kenya with the P2P payments there.

“The opportunity we see in the developed markets is more around the ability to capture additional information about the consumer... Let’s predict their behaviour and then that obviously ties into our relationships with the merchants.”

AshA CugAti, Citi

paul Franklin, Cba: The portability of mobile phone numbers is a particular issue for onetime passwords.

Being able to tie the identity back to the device as well as the phone number is an issue for a lot of potential security applications.

Cyrus daruwala, idC FinanCial insigHts: We need interoperability between various banks.

Cyrus daruwala, idC FinanCial insigHts: Are you doing anything in the mobile channel, specifically around cash management?

paul riCHards, nab: There has to be an emergence of a common infrastructure. UK FasterPay is a great w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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example of where there is a multilateral switch. We are all speaking the same language so we can level that playing field. Bank Singapore is doing the same with G3. I think Australia will watch very closely how that goes and the Reserve Bank innovation agenda will perhaps leverage the architecture being built around the world, or some variation of it – something that makes it level for all the participants, whether it is the four majors, the balance of the Tier 1 participants, or even the Tier 2 participants.

Look at what happened with the credit card industry in the 90s. I don’t remember when MasterCard gave up on its own format and everybody went with ISO 8583, but all of a sudden it became that much easier to manage terminals. It became that much easier to manage your issuing and your scheme compliance every year. If we want to make interbank payments real time and easy the same kind of thing needs to happen to drive the innovation agenda.

“What really needs to happen to achieve change in payment messaging is to have a very clear industry agenda that stretches over a long period of time.”

Paul Franklin, CBa

GeorGe pilakis, anZ: If you look at any of the banks globally there is still a lot of complexity. Payments represents a lot of legacy, like it or not, so we have to weave through that to process a payment – not just capture a payment, but to process it. There is a lot of replication, a lot of complexity, a lot of risk. In order to take advantage of these opportunities we need to be efficient to the extent that we can actually process through new types of capturing mechanisms. This is a common theme for banks as a franchise.

As banks we can’t cherry-pick the bits we like. We have competitors coming in showing people really interesting payments opportunities, whereas banks need to make everything work end-to-end. To go forward, it’s really hard to change what is already so interconnected and complicated. You make one change, it has a ripple effect. paul Franklin, Cba: A lot of the discussion about payments innovation, particularly associated with the Reserve Bank’s innovation review, is that nothing has changed yet. That view may not reflect many areas of good progress.

To innovate in payment formats it is not enough to be able to add a new payment message, you also have to be able to process the new message in the back office and in the product systems. When we introduced real time gross settlement 13 years ago we had a much richer payment message, with so much information that the only way we could tell our customers was to send them a letter or a fax with the payment details. That is not an attractive proposition for many purposes. What really needs to happen to achieve change in payment

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messaging is to have a very clear industry agenda that stretches over a long period of time, so when we’re all renovating or replacing important systems we can have a reasonable expectation about the sort of payment messages we are going to be using, potentially years into the future.

Cyrus daruwala, idC FinanCial insiGhts: Mike, you are about to start looking at your core transformation, the amalgamation of various operating systems. Is payments considered to be one of your strategic initiatives?

mike baldwin, westpaC: We have been on that journey for five years now. Payments is certainly a core part of it and we have been investing quite a bit there. We started with the high value payments. It is really about enabling more flexibility in terms of how we make our payments and the data and information around those – the value that we can provide to different partners, that sort of thing.

Chris Campbell, westpaC: It is common knowledge that we have put our payments production systems on the same platform across the bank now.

We haven’t started putting our customer accounts on a common platform. We will get to it, though, but our philosophy has been to focus on what our customer interactions are rather than the back-end piece. We think our core banking systems are actually pretty strong now. There is not a burning need to change them from a customer perspective when we put the customer at the heart of everything we do. ralph danGelmaier, aCi worldwide: A journey could take you three, or five, or seven, or even 10 years, but you have got to embark on that journey somewhere.

We go into the biggest banks in the world and they will have anywhere from three to 25 authorisation systems – and they will have anywhere from two to 20 real time – settlement systems. They don’t realise that they can consolidate those into a few systems.

There is a lot of cost that could be reinvested in working around exactly what you said: how do you make money and how do you get more from the customer?

Cyrus daruwala, idC FinanCial insiGhts: Where do you start, and how do you start?

ralph danGelmaier, aCi worldwide: First of all, you have to figure out where you are. We see a lot of customers who don’t really realise what systems they have. Then it’s a matter of asking, where do I want

pay m e n t s // ro u n dta b le

to be? Two weeks ago I was in California and I spent three days between Apple, PayPal, Visa and Google.

They are coming at this thing with billions of dollars.

They’re going to fight over the consumer. They want the consumer. Wells took a very interesting approach, saying, “I have the customer from that transaction point of view.” Being able to integrate everything in and say, “come to me,” I think is a very innovative approach when you say, “I want that customer.” So some people are saying, “I’m going to fight with Google,” others, “I’m going to partner with Google.” I don’t know what people think about that here.

ralph dangelmaier, aCi WorldWide: Do Apple and Google think they need the banks? My honest opinion is no.

Cyrus daruWala, idC FinanCial insights: In Japan for instance – when the earthquake struck – a lot of payment, ATM and card data was corrupted and lost.

In this instance it wasn’t the payment intermediaries or the telecom companies that were reprimanded – the banks were. So that sends a clear signal, regardless of the partnerships or the alliances you create, that the liability of any payment transaction lies with the acquirer or the issuer.

ralph dangelmaier, aCi WorldWide: You also have companies that have all the games and all the apps you can download. There are a number of really popular games that are played on phones and Android that are only paid with Facebook cash. They won’t accept any other payment. That is an interesting model for the merchant bank area. simon babbage, hsbC: Facebook cash only has a value if I can use it, so when that system builds up so much Facebook cash that I can’t spend on Facebook then the value of that Facebook cash becomes less. So it all sounds wonderful but what they actually are doing is creating their own liquidity crisis because no-one can spend that money. The only way they can spend that money then is to have it somehow move out of the system. If they want to move it out of the system then they have to behave like a bank. That is where the regulatory purse comes in. ralph dangelmaier, aCi WorldWide: That is what is happening, though. It is small, but you are right.

Facebook has P2P lending and it is becoming quite popular. I recently read that P2P lending on Facebook with no credit checks has the lowest default rate of any form of lending. Because no one wants to get a bad

Facebook rating that everyone knows about. So the peer pressure is incredible. I don’t think any of us at this table are going to load up on Facebook cash or do P2P lending, but I think the next generation is going to start using that. I don’t think they are aware of the risk or aware of the things we are talking about, though.

Cyrus daruWala, idC FinanCial insights: James, you see a fair bit of innovation in New Zealand, at least from a payments perspective. Debit has been fully adopted, merchants are being savvier, and consumers are spending a lot on cards.

James Farrell, aCi WorldWide: Here in Australia and New Zealand, there is a lot of activity, and there are a lot of people doing things, but there is not a lot that actually makes it to market. I think it probably goes to some of the comments about regulators. In New Zealand over the last 15 years there has been a giant shift to debit, even for the smallest payments. However, they have their own challenges. For instance, the cost of acquiring a debit payment is so low, there is no value in acquiring the payment. As a result there is no money to fund a business case to renovate the NZ payments network. Ironically, the innovative approach taken many years ago, is now working against them.

Here at ACI, we sit in a unique position where we have more than 30 customers across Australia and New Zealand and those customers are banks, processors and merchants. We get to see the full payments value chain. The conversations have definitely been changing over the past few years; there’s a big shift towards the merchant and the way the merchants are able to control aspects of payments. As we move forward this will undoubtedly have some bearing.

Continuing the conversation on Google, Apple and PayPal, I’d be really interested to find out more about what people expect to do when they arrive here in force, are the banks going to partner with them or be competitive? How is that relationship going to work?

How is that going to be manifested in the products that the banks are going to come up with?

“Do Apple and Google think they need the banks? My honest opinion is no.”

Ralph DangelmaieR, aCi WoRlDWiDe

brett Watson, nab: It is interesting because they are all in slightly different parts of the value chain; you can’t have a one-answer-fits-all. In some places we will likely cooperate and in other places we’ll compete and compete quite aggressively. For example, do we create our own digital wallet or partner with say Google or VISA? Or both? You can see some opportunities to collaborate here. In terms of social networking, we’re beginning to use these tools more, but would we really want to collaborate fully with a Facebook for example? w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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I don’t know. I think that is part of our challenge right now. We are spending a lot of money renovating our core payments infrastructure. The amount of money you have left over for innovation, when you’re doing programs of that size, is small. So you have got to really pick your bets. That is the challenge. There is just so much change going on, which one is best to have a go at? We will collaborate with some of them, I have no doubt about that. At an industry level, we will have to.

With others, we will want to compete.

mike baldwin, westpac: The simple answer to that is probably also the answer to your earlier question of how do you start. The answer to both of those questions is another question: what do you want to achieve? In some cases you are trying to achieve flexibility and the ability to respond more nimbly to regulation, to provide more capabilities for your customers.

With the new entrants, I look at what we are trying to achieve. Why are we really in the payments business in the first place? We earn revenue from transactions, but not much. It’s about high value deposits that stay around for a long time, right? So we’re partnering with some of the new entrants if, in the end, we can attract more customers for more transactional deposits.

“The business case for innovation hits the banking industry when the non-traditional competitors come in with functionality that banks can’t match…To date we are not seeing a whole lot of that.” chris campbell, westpac

chris campbell, westpac: Banks make most of their money from the balances, assets and liabilities.

So the business case for innovation hits the banking industry when the non-traditional competitors come in with functionality that banks can’t match. That’s when the rubber really hits the road.

To date we are not seeing a whole lot of that. The banking industry generally has evolved well into the online space, mainly with cards products and functionality. You look at the deposit balances of a major non-traditional online competitor in Australia and I think their last published customer liabilities was about $150 million. You compare that to the amounts in at-call deposits in banks. That’s less than 10 basis points of the total. But it’s growing fast. So the question is what impact will that extra functionality have and does the banking industry need to respond to that? cyrus daruwala, idc Financial insights: When you embark on innovation, should you have a team called ‘payments’ or ‘core transformation’? Inevitably a component of that would be aligning yourself with your telecom provider of choice. They are actually able to cover quite a bit of your communication costs – data costs, storage, network, telecommunication costs. They are quite significant costs. They may have the customer touch point. They may have some ideas on how to

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entice more customers, have more retail outlets. I don’t think we’re at a point – at least having seen what I’ve seen in six or seven months – where telecoms are the competition any more.

ralph dangelmaier, aci worldwide: I was in Brazil at the end of last year and saw that telcos were trying to collect money and disburse it. They are directly competing with the banks, there is no question about it. We are also working on a project with a large telco in Europe which is adopting the model of making payments phone-to-phone within the system and bypassing banks. simon babbage, hsbc: At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’d say you have to factor in the attractiveness of that customer set to big banks. In countries like India and China, these customers are not profitable. They may well be profitable to the telcos because they have already got a phone and it is just another service that flips through that existing extant fixed-cost base. At a point in time, as people become richer, they will come into the cross-hairs of traditional banks. What the traditional banks will be able to offer them in terms of banking will be significantly higher. So the question for us is whether there is value in the payments that they make today? Can we make the right returns from being involved in that, or are we happy to let those customers evolve to a point where they can get a card and then charge them 2.5 per cent? ralph dangelmaier, aci worldwide: What you are really saying is it’s critical to know what customer you want and the services you need. There is a lot more pressure to figure that out because you’re right, you may not want those customers because of X, Y or Z reason. simon babbage, hsbc: Some of these players are actually doing us a favour by nurturing or incubating these people. asha cugati, citi: The piece you still need to remember in the transaction flow is the merchant. If you look at the mobile opportunity in emerging markets, it’s the merchant that’s important. That’s where consumers pull out their money generally. They go to the shop and they pay three or five per cent extra on purchases when paying by mobile, or they maybe just take out the cash for three or five per cent cost, because the merchant has a relationship with the telco they are able to deliver the cash. As a bank you want to continue to maintain that relationship with the merchant to make sure you are capturing the primary revenue in the transaction.

pay m e n t s // ro u n dta b le

I think you are right; you don’t necessarily want every single customer. Where you play is as important as where you choose not to play. We all know that. But at the same time there is a number of players in that mix who you need to be able to serve.

marj demmer, anZ: Also at risk in a more developed country like Australia is the customer engagement. At the moment some of these brands are simply interested in engaging with the customer but if those customers love the portal and do all their banking through say, Apple, the value banks are providing in the background get less as well. So my question in terms of competition or cooperation is: once you lose that relationship how do you get it back?

mark mcculloch, cba: Traditionally we capture our bank customers at a young age and the challenge is to retain and upsell them through the journey as they evolve. It is all about forecasting what the value is of those kippers who are adopting the new technology now.

Where are they going to be in 10, 15, 20 years time? cyrus daruwala, Idc FInancIal InsIghts: I’ve seen a number of banks moving into the enterprise payments game. Standard Chartered Bank, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank have been pushing in there and Citi is there too. Why haven’t banks gone to a large retailer and said, “hereinafter all of your payments and receivables and payables are managed for you. You run the store, I’ll run the finance for you.”

asha cugatI, cItI: CitiGroup has three drivers behind what we do in the enterprise payments space: globalisation, standardisation, and digitisation. But if you look at the standardisation, what we do is being driven by our multinational corporates, which is really our sweet spot. They are creating regional shared service centres and when we need to be able to plug into them. What they build in New York they want to be able to build exactly the same solution with us in Singapore, for example. So we have to standardise what we do. We are getting more and more integrated with different products with treasury teams, so I think that this is potentially the future state although nobody has voiced it as yet. But certainly, if you were to look at other industries and the fact that companies do outsource a large number of less valuable processes, then presumably we could be moving in that direction.

cyrus daruwala, Idc FInancIal InsIghts: The only example I’ve seen of a very tightly integrated financial supply chain is Yum! Brands in China: the

company that owns Taco Bell and KFC. When HSBC went to the management, they said, “You’ve got about 100 suppliers. You’ve got about 300 other payees. We will take all of that and give you a dashboard view of your payables, receivables, and your cash balances.” All it amounted to was a very simple integration of realtime views of the group’s treasury. But it’s surprising how incredibly lucrative that market in that population is and how few people do it.

mark mcculloch, cba: What you will find is that the banks in this market have traditionally played at either end, in the receivables and payables piece. But again, a lot of it has been restricted by the legacy systems that all the banks are running. So as the core banking platforms evolve and there is that replacement occurring, there is going to be more agility to be able to offer those types of solutions. cyrus daruwala, Idc FInancIal InsIghts: Of course, if you couldn’t view the risk, you would expose yourself and that would be a regulatory breach and a financial risk. What about you, Simon, are you seeing some of that come your way?

sImon babbage, hsbc: We do it in differing industries; Citi is the same. We run a large security services business around the world. Effectively we are running back offices for fund managers. There have been attempts to do outsourced treasury activities. I know JP Morgan set one up in Dublin, Ireland with mixed success. There are certain activities in my experience that customers have been reluctant to outsource and interaction with suppliers and customers has been pretty sacrosanct. They still see it as core to what they do. Some of them have also made pretty significant investments in their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that they are not willing to let go of yet. So it may be a phenomenon in the next decade where these ERP systems need to be refreshed and they’re faced with a large bill so they start coming to us and giving us more to do.

“We capture our bank customers at a young age and the challenge is to retain and upsell them through the journey as they evolve. It is all about forecasting what the value is of those kippers who are adopting the new technology now.” mark mcculloch, cba

mIke baldwIn, westpac: It is just a matter of degree.

A lot of banks will effectively outsource or insource a company’s payables or receivables. But you can’t get 100 per cent of it. There are going to be rejects and there are going to be things that you have to manually reconcile.

They are not outsourcing the people part of it; they are outsourcing the automated part. I think all the banks do a pretty good job of that today. It enables our customers to focus on their core business and not worry about whether the money is in the bank or not.

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who’s who They Are AsiA’s eliTe, shAping Technology invesTmenT And innovATion Across The region. here, They shAre Their insighTs And prioriTies for The yeAr AheAd. edited By patrice giBBons & matthew sainsBury

QA &

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dav i d g l e d h il l // w h o’ s w h o Q& a

David Gledhill Managing Director anD heaD of group technology & operations, DBs FsT Media: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months? gledhill: There are three objectives that head our agenda. First, we are focused on building a robust platform. By that I mean infrastructure robustness, security, resilience and speed-to-market. The second priority is to become even more nimble. If you examine the way the landscape is changing, we see the agile companies are often the ones that seize the opportunities. This requires vast amounts of work in the back-end infrastructure, integration layers, messaging and all the associated

innovations you need to make your architecture nimble. The third is driving innovation and encouraging our people to ‘go, explore’.

FsT Media: How do you adjust your customer centric systems to engage with the different cultures across Asia? gledhill: That manifests itself in a variety of ways. Again it comes back to the point of being nimble, and the core objective of this banking platform is to allow maximum flexibility in tailoring new products while still keeping that within the core infrastructure.

The really distinct piece is the ability to customise the online or mobile experience for customers in different markets while sharing the same back-end system. A retail customer in Taiwan has a very different expectation of what online front-ends look like compared to one in India or Singapore. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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w h o’ S w h o Q& a // dav i d G l e d h il l

FST Media: What were some of the challenges in developing your advanced mobile applications?

Gledhill: We actually have 10 applications (apps) and counting, including a mobile banking app as well as a shares trading and other lifestyle apps for DBS card members.

What we did was set some core architectural guidelines and principles about how the universe of apps is going to co-exist, and then we let the business ‘go explore’. We said we are not going to keep some central technology function that is going to hold all the strings to this thing, we are going to let people go and explore. What this generated was an innovation culture around mobile capabilities. If I look at DBS, between Hong Kong and Singapore, there are some wildly different things being experimented with to see what excites our customers and creates greater value for them. What I will say is that we have only scratched the surface, and most of what has been done so far is to provide what you could already do on the internet.

FST Media: What do you see as the key differences in how younger generations are looking to engage with banks?

Gledhill: What we tend to see with youth is that they have very little time and very little interest in coming into a branch. They want everything on time, in real-time, and all the time. Obviously as we see the penetration and acceptance of mobile technology and the like, that is where we achieve the biggest traction with youth. What is interesting to us is that our hot segment, which is wealth, is engaging through electronic platforms extremely quickly and is expanding at an incredible rate.

The previous notion of, “I’m a private banking client and I want to talk to an Relationship Manager and I don’t want to have anything electronic,” is long since gone.

FST Media: DBS has reportedly reduced queuing time in branches by 20 per cent. What technology solutions were implemented to achieve this outcome?

Gledhill: Many factors helped move the needle on queues, not just new technology,

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we believe there are two huge seismic shifts happening simultaneously.

The first is the information revolution... The second is a revolution in the payments space brought about by mobile commerce.

but in many cases the smarter use of existing technology, and a very strong focus on re-engineering. The real trick was to set a very clear outcome based measure of what we wanted to achieve, make that measure very visible and tracked monthly at the CEO level, and then pull every lever available. We also put significant investment into establishing a very strong process improvement team, used lean process reviews, changed technology flows, did a lot of work around e-forms and enabled a lot of banking capabilities on our internet platform that could previously only be done in branches. It was just a relentless focus on every single process that happens in a branch, coupled with a very high stretch target and a shared goal across our consumer, technology and operations functions, which aligned us all with a common purpose. In fact we achieved far more than a 20 per cent improvement and we still have many other initiatives in the pipeline.

FST Media: What do you consider to be the next game changer in retail banking technology?

Gledhill: We believe there are two huge seismic shifts happening simultaneously.

The first is the information revolution. This encompasses the smart use of structured and unstructured information to drive the organisation. This will affect the way we serve, know and listen to our customers. It is very exciting and we are doing a vast amount of

experimentation and investment in that space.

The second is a revolution in the payments space brought about by mobile commerce.

So far we have only seen the start of this and most mobile banking offerings revolve around providing traditional internet banking capabilities on the mobile platform.

This is about to change in a big way. There are many players focused on this, including banks, telecommunications providers, and platform/payment providers such as Google, Apple, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and American Express. Everyone is racing to capture the next generation of payment capability and it will look very different when compared to today’s model. This is an area of opportunity for banks but there is also a high risk of disintermediation of banks from their customers in the payment space. The goal of many of the players is the information, the analytics along with the marketing potential that comes with that. It is still very unclear who the winners will be.

FST Media: What impact do you expect DBS’ new Asia Hub to have on company culture and innovation?

Gledhill: When we moved into our DBS Asia Hub, which is our operations and technology centre, we took the opportunity to further define who we are and what we do. We were all about refocusing the company around customer experience, so we branded the DBS Asia Hub as the place where we create customer value. The focus of the design and physical architecture of DBS Asia Hub is to instil this theme into the behaviour of each person that walks into the building.

It has had a fundamental effect on changing the belief of the staff and what they think they do for the organisation. We have focused on creating a workspace with many more areas for collaboration.

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

Gledhill: What I hope to be remembered for is the fact that we have made enough of the right calls to really lay the foundations for the bank for the next 15–20 years.

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w H o’ S w H o Q& a // SuSa n H w e e

Susan Hwee managing director, group technology & operations, united overseas Bank (uoB)

FST Media: How is UOB’s five-year IT plan progressing?

Hwee: We are in the final phase of creating an integrated regional operating and technology platform. UOB has already established an IT shared services centre in Singapore to support our four banking subsidiaries in Asia, as well as 12 other branches around the world. We are now focused on the final phase of re-aligning our back-office operations for consistency in service, efficiency and application of risk management practices.

To ensure this consistency across our entire regional franchise, changes in mindsets, skills and governance of the organisation have been key. We have planned it so that the changes in the way our processes are run – and also the way our people think – are sustainable.

FST Media: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months?

Hwee: There are two key priorities: first is to improve the experience for our customers 44

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wherever they bank with us in the region. The the second is to improve processes and cost efficiencies for the UOB Group.

We want our customers to have a consistent experience at every touch point, from the most basic activity such as making a withdrawal at any of our UOB ATMs across Asia, to how they transfer money online.

Our regional network and our proven ability to provide seamless access to Asian markets is important in helping our Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) customers achieve their regionalisation ambitions. The concept sounds simple, but the journey to get there is not simple at all.

You need to have the right technology, processes, people and a deep understanding of the regulatory landscape in each market in order to deliver a seamless banking experience to customers.

As margins are highly competitive, the focus on efficiency must be relentless.

Processes have to be simplified and streamlined without compromising on risks.

We have achieved great results in many areas.

An example is card processing, where we have seen unit cost reduction of more than 50 per cent as a result of centralising the function.

FST Media: How is UOB managing the demand that Big Data analytics is placing on IT infrastructure?

Hwee: We recognise the tremendous potential of mining customer transactional data for insights into banking and spending trends, and we have used that information to create products and services that have made us the market leader in credit cards, home loans and the SME segment in Singapore.

Data analytics can also be used to enhance customer profitability, determine transactional behaviours for predictive scoring, assess risks, as well as detect money laundering and fraud. Data analytics technology forms an important and significant part of our IT investment. The focus is not just technology, but it is the art of designing an IT infrastructure that can achieve data consistency whilst having the flexibility to accommodate the demand for specialised engines in data analysis.

FST Media: Where are you seeing new opportunities emerge to engage with customers via social media?

Hwee: Social media can be a very effective channel to engage customers and various other stakeholders. However, it also requires a lot of time and commitment from an organisation to grow this channel into a profitable and useful one. No financial institution has cracked the social media code yet. It is an important channel that we need to stay engaged in, but it remains to be seen if a breakthrough can be achieved in the use of social media for effective stakeholder engagement and communications.

FST Media: Non-traditional competitors such as Google and Apple are bringing new competition to the banking space. Where can banks gain an advantage?

Hwee: The business of banking has been, and will continue to be, one that is anchored on trust and relationships. UOB’s strong local market presence, knowledge, Asian heritage and long-standing relationships with customers gives us the competitive edge over non-traditional competitors.

However, we have also embraced the new virtual world with our internet and mobile banking services. A key focus for us is mobility and connectivity. To offer simplicity to our customers on the move, we have completely redesigned our banking services offered on the smart device – from the look and feel of the applications to the kind of services we offer. For example, our customers are the first in Singapore to be able to withdraw cash without an ATM card. All they have to do is use a downloaded application on their mobile phone. The concept has resonated very well with our customers based on the feedback we have seen so far.

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

Hwee: Grooming a new generation of technology and operations talent not only makes a difference to UOB, but sets new benchmarks for the industry at large.

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C o - SponSo r e d a r t i C le

A Paradigm Shift in the Banking Industry The financial sector in recent times has seen an increased spending across geographies, making an environment most conducive for the Financial Software developers to flourish and bring in the best of technologies and advanced modules to ease out the traditional methods of banking. Despite the turmoil that the Global Financial markets have witnessed, financial firms are looking to invest in IT infrastructure for stricter monitoring and tracking of processes and systems.

A recent report by PwC reveals that India is poised to become the third largest domestic banking sector by 2050, after China and US. Banking and financial services sector is already experiencing unprecedented growth backed by technology that has been brought into this sector.

The advent of technology has also brought about a momentous shift and is continuing to add to the growth of banking institutions. Given the ever increasing demand for solutions in banking technology, Nucleus Software has always been at the forefront of innovation and customizing technology for its clients’ future needs. With advanced business products such as FinnOne™, Cash@Will™ & BankOnet™, Nucleus have been instrumental in establishing a connect with the customers by means of delivering what they expect.

Nowadays, when banks are wrestling with business customers and regulatory demands, the earnestness to adapt to the systems that are more comprehensive was of prime importance. Sophistication of technology and its successful implementation would derive the essence of banking. Thus, to have the most trusted and advanced software that helps overcome the macroeconomic and regulatory challenges, was the need of the hour. Understanding the necessity, Nucleus incepted with most well-read knowledge of the financial market. The awareness of the market helped Nucleus pioneer with the most innovative software solutions that are now implemented by the financial institutions globally.

offerings were accepted worldwide. In a bid to meet the growing expectations of today’s customer, Nucleus thrives to consistently develop products that are tuned to their needs.

Against the backdrop of uncertainty, introducing the flagship product FinnOne™ was a major milestone. Bearing the customer focus in mind by exceeding their expectations and at the same time be prudent in following the regulations and the guidelines, introduction of FinnOne™ was a winning flag added to the glory. Today, FinnOne™ with strong client base yearns to increase the market share substantially in the coming years in the global markets of Asia and Middle East.

FinnOne™ was recognized as the ‘World’s No. 1 Selling Lending Software Product’ for the fourth consecutive year and ranked fourth in global sales across all banking products by IBS Publishing, UK (for year 2011). Nucleus has successfully added some of the leading brands to its client’s portfolio globally and is proud to be associated with world’s renowned banks and financial institutions as their partners.

Nucleus is recognised for its substantial contribution towards not just meeting the demands of its clients but smoothly surpassing their expectations.

Recognising the shift from product centric approach of banks to customers, Nucleus’ mantra remains “Realising the customer’s needs, both spoken and unspoken and addressing them with persisting excellence to build long lasting relationships”. By this, we aim to abide by our mantra and thrive to bring the products that would not just increase the efficiency drastically but also accelerate the growth of clients.

Efficacious in bringing together a host of services and offerings that are designed to support a wide range of spectrum in any banking institution, gaining trust of the stakeholders came in easy for Nucleus. Successfully establishing over 150 customers across the globe, Nucleus’

For further information please contact: Deep Singhania Head – Asia Pacific deep.singhania@nucleussoftware.com

www.nucleussoftware.com

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // DAv i D M c Q u il l e n

David McQuillen senior Vice President, head of GrouP customer exPerience, ocBc

strategy. So we are working towards making understanding and managing wealth easier for our clients and to make basic banking transactions across channels as simple and effortless as possible. We are very focused on enhancing the purchase experience. We are also busy improving the bank’s customer experience research and design competency.

FsT MeDiA: As FRANK’s Gen-Y customers age, how do you anticipate transitioning them into core OCBC product offerings?

with Gen-Y customers as they socialised and shopped. What did you learn about engagement from this project?

McQuillen: We did this, rather than send a survey or do focus groups, because nothing is as powerful as face-to-face conversations with your customers where they live, work and play; this is what creates the empathy necessary for true innovation. By doing this, we found that if we could make banking simple, stylish and meaningful, we could create a bank that Gen-Y could love. We also learned specific things, such as how important it is for these customers to have control over their money, which led to the creation of our FRANK account – a single account for both saving and spending.

FsT MeDiA: What are your customer experience priorities for the next 12–18 months?

McQuillen: Our customer experience priorities are driven by our business

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FsT MeDiA: What do you consider will be the next game changer in retail banking technology?

McQuillen: The game changer is not in

branding as FRANK by OCBC, so that our ‘Franklins’ (what we call our customers) are never too far from OCBC. As the FRANK product offering is rather limited, once there’s a need for a mortgage or investments for example, the comprehensive products offered

by OCBC will be a natural fit.

technology – it is in mindset. As bankers, we need to stop thinking about ourselves as an industry that processes transactions and start thinking of ourselves as an industry that helps customers to make better financial decisions. The online personal financial management tools that have emerged over the past few years are a manifestation of this mindset change.

FsT MeDiA: You use some unusual design methods to create new customer experiences.

Can you tell us about these?

FsT MeDiA: What are the key challenges when aligning customer experience with broader company strategies?

McQuillen: We have a team of professional designers within OCBC, which is normal for say a consumer goods business, but is something quite rare for a bank. This team relies heavily on direct customer research to inform our design ideas. This research includes all of the stakeholders across the bank who might be involved in a project1 from marketing, to product, legal, and operations. If the project team won’t participate in the customer research, we won’t do the project. Our designers then work on very low-fidelity prototypes of design concepts. This could be hand drawn sketches of how a mobile phone application might work, infographics of how a new investment product works or role playing in a full scale branch made out of cardboard boxes.

McQuillen: The customer experience

McQuillen: We deliberately kept the

FsT MeDiA: OCBC sent a team to spend time

tablet, or calling the bank, you want an experience that is easy to get through, useful in helping you manage your money and enjoyable. How that manifests itself at each channel will be different, but the goal is still the same.

FsT MeDiA: What differences are you seeing in the experience that customers are seeking across the various banking channels?

should never be out of line with business strategy, if it is, then you are working on the wrong things. Where a disconnect can happen, though, is when business wants to sell one thing, but customers want to buy another. The biggest challenge for anyone working in customer experience at a strategic level is overcoming the perception among bankers that positive customer experiences are a ‘nice to have’, when in fact they are essential to business success. At OCBC, we go out of our way to make sure that the work we do ties to our key strategic thrusts in the bank. We also ensure that every customer experience project drives an improvement in a key business metric. When I can say that we improved unit trust sales by 150 per cent by improving the customer experience, that gets attention.

McQuillen: I see more similarities in

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

what customers are looking for rather than differences. Whether you are in a branch, at your computer, on your phone, on your

beautiful.

McQuillen: Making banking more

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C o - SponSo r e d a r t i C le

Instant Issuance – Instant Advantage.

Instantly Improve Your Card Program

By Monica Lim, Director, Financial Instant Issuance, Datacard Group

Consumers’ use of cash and cheques is significantly declining as they continue to embrace a range of card-based payment options. Acquiring new consumers and deposits, as a source for both capital and reserves, has become very critical for financial institutions to sustain liquidity and profitability.

There has been an emerging trend towards instantly issuing and personalising financial payment cards at the branch or retail location, providing an alternative to the traditional central issuance distribution model.

Instantly issuing payment cards in branch is a technology investment that is designed to meet the needs of today’s consumers. By offering instant issuance, consumers receive high-quality, personalised, ready-to-use permanent cards at the opening of an account – instead of having to wait days or weeks while their cards are produced and mailed – making immediate purchases simple and convenient. Additionally, customers who have misplaced their cards or fallen victim to theft do not have to wait days or weeks to receive a replacement card.

Proven instant issuance success Banks, retailers and other financial card issuers have relied on Datacard Group to make instant card issuance fast, affordable and secure. We understand the customer demands, portability needs and security risks surrounding an instant issuance program – and our broad solutions portfolio reflects this knowledge.

At the heart of Datatcard Group’s instant issuance offering is the Datacard® CardWizard® issuance software providing proven, quality performance and reliability. We have deployed CardWizard software to more than 700 customers and thousands of locations worldwide.

Instant card issuance and activation is part of the Datacard Group’s Secure Issuance Anywhere™ infrastructure which includes scalable, flexible hardware, software, supplies, consultation and project management for any card issuance

or personalisation environment. The company’s expertise and intellectual property create an unmatched resource for financial institutions looking to implement a card issuance program that aligns with their business strategy and drives revenue and profitability.

Benefits of instant issuance Contributes to your bottom line through: • Increased Card Activation and Usage • Increased “Top-of-Wallet” Status • Increased Profitability • Increased Security • Enhanced Cross-selling Opportunities • Reduced Card Issuance Costs • Differentiation in the Marketplace Enhances the cardholder experience with: • Immediate Activation of Debit and Credit Cards • Customer-Selected PIN at the Branch Location • Increased Consumer Education • Convenient Emergency Card Replacement • Enhanced Card Issuance Security • Reduces Risk of Mail Fraud

For further information please contact: Monica Lim Director, Instant Issuance asiapacific@datacard.com

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // v i k r A m su d

Vikram Sud

FsT mediA: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months?

sud: Citi’s top priority, whether in IT or in the Regional head, opeRations and technology, asia pacific, citigRoup businesses, is our clients. Over the next 12–18 months, we aim to further enhance Citi’s digital capabilities and smart banking branch features. We have been working hard to deliver an enhanced client experience across the world leveraging Citi’s global franchise and capability. Examples include real-time crossborder transfers, global view of accounts and market data via mobile devices.

We are replacing many of our legacy systems with a new, integrated multi-channel retail banking and cards platform. This is helping us drive a more consistent global operating model and provide a seamless customer experience across all channels.

FsT mediA: To what extent has Citi’s Innovation Lab led to enhancing client engagement with its technology facilities? sud: The Citi Innovation Lab comprises FsT mediA:

What do you see as the top trends in technology at the moment?

sud: What is really going to impact our industry are the trends in mobile, social media, data analytics, biometrics and the internet. The financial services industry is still looking for big success in mobile payments and biometric authentication. Achieving this would transform the way we bank.

FsT mediA: What do you regard as the next significant step in the evolution of banking on mobile devices? sud: The mobile has become such an integral part of most customers’ lives for communication, news, entertainment and now retail banking. Customers will expect to be able to do more of their banking on their mobile and to do it with speed. While it would be possible to expand current offerings such as merchant payments, peer-to-peer transfers, eChat and video chat with relationship managers, the challenge would be to provide these capabilities in a safe and secure manner.

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a client experience centre and a client collaboration centre for institutional clients.

In the Innovation Lab, Citi’s latest transaction banking solutions are demonstrated and clients can test drive them through live demonstrations with situation analysis and discussions with product experts.

Since its opening, the Lab – which is fully interactive and globally linked – has achieved its aim of allowing Citi to connect with clients, global colleagues and experts for discussions and collaboration on solutions.

The Lab allows us to spend quality time with key decision-makers and learn about needs they may not have been able to express as yet. This allows us to innovate on the edge.

FsT mediA: What potential do you see for

FsT mediA: How is technology changing your customers’ retail banking habits and how have you responded to the increasing demand for real-time interaction with banks? sud: Yes, customers’ retail banking habits have changed in line with the rapid growth in the use of smartphones and online channels.

Customers expect instant response and almost instant fulfilment.

In response, Citi has enhanced our online and digital capabilities and this continues to be a key priority. Citi’s mobile banking provides instant banking services such as instant alerts, authentication and approval for credit limit increases.

What’s more interesting are the locationbased and personalised offers that we are able to provide on our mobile banking application (app). The ultimate aim is to be able to deliver everything that Citi offers in the branch through our digital channels.

FsT mediA: How do you encourage technological innovation from within the organisation? sud: At Citi, we have a culture of innovation.

We are passionate about improving our clients’ lives through innovation; hence we are always encouraging and recognising ideas and innovations within Citi.

For example, recently we challenged our people globally to come up with innovations that would reflect the future of banking. To help frame the challenge better, we defined the areas that have been identified as important to Citi’s competitiveness.

This facilitated collaboration across businesses and geographies allowing teams to build on each other’s ideas and expertise to develop new products, services and processes.

Cloud computing in the banking industry; and how far away is an enterprise public Cloud?

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

sud: Personally, I do not see the public

sud: I would be happiest if I was

Cloud creating any significant impact in the banking industry. There are many concerns that need to be fully addressed by the vendors and the industry in full consultation with the regulators.

remembered for building the best team – one that works well together, plays well together, enjoys their challenges and builds new leaders. It is the leaders and the people that differentiate Citi.

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C o - SponSo r e d a r t i C le

Re-Hosting Mainframe Applications on Intel® Xeon® Processor-Based Servers Many financial services organisations rely on mainframes to support core business operations, yet the cost and complexity of these monolithic systems can become roadblocks to innovation in today’s increasingly fast-paced business environment.

Such was the case for HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks. When heavy workloads from a new suite of loan applications created performance and reliability issues for the HSBC mainframe in Mexico City, the company had a choice to make: either upgrade the mainframe or migrate existing workloads onto an alternative platform.

After a thorough review of alternatives and consultation with Intel, HSBC Mexico chose to re-host the applications on Intel Xeon processor-based servers running Linux. The resulting migration met or exceeded all of HSBC’s goals. Performance and uptime were improved, delivering a better experience to customers and branch office personnel.

Mainframe workloads were reduced by 2,000 MIPS and monthly service charges by 70 per cent. The migration also improved business flexibility, making it easier to scale and adapt applications as business requirements continue to grow.

Two factors were particularly important to the success of the HSBC mainframe migration.

• The latest two, four, and eight-socket Intel Xeon processor-based servers provide major advances in scalability and reliability for mission-critical workloads, while retaining the high value and interoperability of standardsbased computing platforms. HSBC had considerable flexibility in designing its solution, and was able to meet all requirements using a small number of powerful, cost-effective servers.

• HSBC took advantage of experienced vendors and a proven methodology to accelerate the migration and reduce risk (Figure 1). The company followed a step-by-step approach to setting goals,

assessing the current environment, and designing, testing, rolling-out, and integrating its new solution. The result was a smooth migration with predictable costs, timelines, and benefits.

Although every mainframe migration is unique, the basic principles required for success are well established.

Conclusion Migrating modern workloads from a mainframe to Intel Xeon processor-based servers can deliver fundamental advantages, including better performance and scalability, improved business and IT agility, and lower capital and operating costs. HSBC has realised all of these advantages in re-hosting its suite of mission-critical loan applications.

Online customers and branch office personnel are enjoying a better experience, and the company can now scale and adapt its missioncritical loan applications more easily and without disrupting its production environment.

in mainframe environments. A successful migration requires detailed planning, commitment, a team effort by multiple business and technical teams, and direct support from senior management.

A proven migration methodology, such as the one used by HSBC, can help IT organisations deliver desired benefits quickly, while minimising cost and risk.

This methodology is documented in a whitepaper that other financial services organisation can use to plan and implement a high-value, low-risk mainframe migration.

For a whitepaper of this methodology please contact fsi-apac@intel.com To learn more about Intel Xeon processors, please visit http://www.intel.com/xeon To learn more about Intel in Financial Services, please visit http://www.intel.com/apac-fsi

Since the migration, HSBC has experienced no downtime and monthly service fees have been reduced by 70 per cent, delivering annual savings of approximately US $4 million.

Today’s Intel Xeon processor-based servers deliver the scalable performance and advanced reliability needed to support a broad range of workloads currently running

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 © 2012 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved

Workshop

Methodology Approach

Solutions Overview

Business & Financial Overview

1

Assessment

Evaluate & Analyse

Plan Definition

Solution Design

2

Migration

Proof of Concept

Solution Test

System Optimisation

3

Deployment

Infrastructure Deployment

Application Roll-Out

Operations & Monitoring

4

Figure 1. A migration methodology based on documented best practices helps to reduce cost and risk and accelerate time to benefits. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

49

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // Ash l e y V e Ase y

capability. Over the next 12–18 months, our aim is to continue to look at new ways we can engage with and deliver the best possible experience for the customers. A few focus areas include: • Implementing globally integrated, resilient, simple and standardised front and back-end systems that drive automation • Innovating in internet and mobile banking to complement our existing channels and, in some markets, to overcome the distribution gap that regulatory constraints impose

FsT MediA: As the first multi-national bank in the world to implement an Apple iOS platform as a strategic move, what benefits are you seeing for customers?

VeAsey: It is all about customer service.

Ashley Veasey Chief information offiCer, hong Kong, standard Chartered BanK FsT MediA: With China overtaking the US as the world’s largest smartphone market, how do you see your mobile banking offering evolving for customers?

VeAsey: Mobile is revolutionising the way we bank and it is key to commanding customer relationships, in mature or emerging economies. Ubiquitous connectivity, networked devices, social media, Near Field Communications (NFC) and mobile payments are some of the powerful forces shaping the banking eco-system today.

Breeze is Standard Chartered’s suite of banking and lifestyle applications (apps) – including Breeze Banking, Breeze Home, Breeze Good Life and Breeze Trade. Breeze 52

who ’s wh o of fs i

Home is just one example of where our mobile offering is heading. It is the first homebuying app in Asia, home-grown and available in Hong Kong. This free app uses locationbased services and augmented reality, and has information on more than 100,000 properties for sale in Hong Kong, including valuations, transactions and property ratings. Bringing together a rich supply of home-buying information in one app is typical of where we see the market moving.

We put our customers at the heart of everything we do in our technology function, and we prioritise our ongoing investments to ensure we deliver service innovations that make our customers lives that little bit easier.

FsT MediA: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months?

VeAsey: The critical challenge for all technology leaders is how to convert technological possibility into market-leading

Being able to improve the efficiency with which we can securely process transactions is an advantage for our customers and something we will continue to strive for as we leverage the iOS platform. Additionally, the iPad interface provides new ways of interacting and engaging with our customers that were never before possible.

We’ve launched an app called Trade Port which enables our wholesale and Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Banking Relationship Managers (RMs) to be always connected to the bank’s network. Trade Port allows RMs to securely view client portfolios, approve or reject credit and limit excesses, handle transaction referrals, spot transactional blockages, view overdue trade loans and access real-time transactional status from their iPhones. The app enables RMs to achieve a quicker turnaround time for transaction processing – a definite business advantage where even a few hours make a huge difference for our clients.

In Singapore, our RMs have access to the Consumer Banking Invest Pro app which features a set of investment information for funds, bonds and equity linked notes.

The fund selector provides information based on risk ratings, fund house, currency, asset class and other parameters. Factsheets, prospectus and product highlight sheets can be viewed and emailed immediately to our clients – making it faster and

C o - SponSo r e d a r t i C le

Engaging Customers in Fighting Cybercrime Can Pay a Double Dividend Today, most anti-fraud measures are invisible to a financial account holder. The battle against cybercrime is fought behind the scenes and the majority of potential thefts are thwarted before damage can be done. However, a surprising figure within a recent U.S. survey of several hundred financial institutions indicated that, when cybercriminals do succeed, 82 per cent of the time it is the legitimate account holder who brings the loss to the institution’s attention.

“Clearly the financial community is getting better at warding off cybercriminals,” according to Robert Soden the Managing Director of Authentify, Ltd. “Yet they are under-utilizing the resource that typically can flag fraudulent activity with 100 per cent accuracy – the legitimate account holder.”

The proliferation of mobile telephony, smart phones and devices such as tablets has made it possible to more proactively engage the user in the war on fraud. Today, a bank can securely push account activity and transaction review and approval requests out to the account holder in real-time typically via a second channel, or out-of-band authentication – to these devices.

These technologies enable the legitimate account owner to review and approve – or perhaps more importantly, cancel and raise a fraud alert to transactions that are about to execute against their accounts.

Fraud launched against a consumer or business account can take many forms. ATM Skimming, malware initiated account hijacks, man-it-the-middle exploits, accounts hijacked via data breach and likely new variations are being developed by the cyber criminals.

Banks need more appetite for engaging the end user in the up-front defense of their accounts. Fortunately, firms like Authentify have developed technologies to engage an account holder in the battle in ways that are convenient, user-friendly and offer demonstrable ROI. Authentify introduced phone-based out-of-band authentication to the market in 2001 and smart device app-based authentication in 2011. “In the decade or so in which we have been offering our out-of-band services to financial institutions, our customers have found there is an upside to both engaging the end user in battle against crime and having a secure second channel of communication with them,” according to Soden. “The relationship achieves an overall higher level of trust. A higher level of trust permits the institution to make more valuable offers to their account holders, and the account holders are more likely to accept.”

This offers a strong benefit for the security professionals, if an institution does make special offers to their more strongly authenticated users it’s possible to tie a return on investment to the security and authentication process.

Something that most security practitioners admit is very elusive.

The out-of-band or out-of-channel process contributes to both cutting fraud losses and revenue generation. This is a double security dividend for the institution.

Robert P. Soden Managing Director (International/Asia Pacific) Authentify Ltd

2CHK™ – an App for Financial Transaction Security Authentify has recently introduced the 2CHK™ service to extend the capabilities of its existing phone-based out-of-band authentication products. The heart of 2CHK™ is a small app that can be downloaded to a mobile device or a user’s desktop. 2CHK™ establishes a secure second communication channel to a banking platform’s back office and securely transmits transaction details to a display in the app. The end user is in control of the final approval of transaction details as they will be executed by the bank.

The continuous display and multiple form factors permit the end user to easily and securely verify all transactions against accounts with any financial institution employing the 2CHK™ service.

2CHK™ affords strong protection against malware that manipulates transactions in progress, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, or fraud in which account login credentials have been compromised via phishing or other means.

Authentify 12/F, Capitol Centre, Tower II 28 Jardine’s Crescent Causeway Bay, Hong Kong Web: www.authentify.com

w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

53

w h o’ S w h o Q& a // aSh l e y V e aSe y

easier for our RMs to make investment recommendations and provide our clients with more information.

The bond selector gives access to a selection of globally traded bonds based on issuers, currencies, coupons, maturities, ratings and other parameters. The selector further empowers our RMs with live quotes, accrued interest and yield calculations.

The way we interact and engage with our customers is changing with the Needs Based Conversation app designed for the iPad. This app supports our priority and international banking RMs in helping their clients to identify and uncover their investment priorities through a highly structured conversation.

The Needs Based Conversation app interacts seamlessly with our customer relationship management system to ensure any requests and appointments are tracked for follow-up purposes. This delivers unparalleled customer service for our clients with larger investment portfolios.

FST Media: What do you expect will be the next ‘killer app’ to transform the mobile banking experience?

VeaSey: It really is about having killer capabilities rather than a killer app. Banks need to transform from being utilitarian function based to a service organisation that offers a great lifestyle experience.

Connecting, engaging and building trust is more important now than ever. The industry as a whole needs to start thinking less like banks and more like Apple, Amazon, Google or Facebook – great lifestyle experience companies in their own right. Banks have to pay more attention to how banking fits into different life contexts – what banking can let people do while having an enjoyable experience interacting with their bank.

FST Media: Do you see social media as a worthwhile channel for Standard Chartered and, if so, how can it best be utilised?

VeaSey: As an international bank operating in 70 countries, the fact that social media is largely unrestricted by national boundaries means it is a perfect channel through which to 54

who ’s wh o of fs i

The industry as a whole needs to start thinking less like banks and more like Apple, Amazon, Google or facebook – great lifestyle experience companies in their own right.

communicate with our global customer base and external audiences. Standard Chartered uses select global and country-specific social media channels to help build brand awareness. Some of our most popular topics include our sponsorships (of Liverpool FC and nine marathons across the globe) and our sustainability activities.

Social media is also a part of our efforts to offer our customers and potential customers a superior experience. For example, members of our India team are picking up customer service issues within 15 minutes of one being posted in a public forum and resolving these issues offline.

Also in India, we have a Food Explorer Facebook page which provides dining offers and deals to customers – the community are largely ‘foodies’. Our UAE team has driven interest in our online banking services and our brand through local campaigns and incentives on both Facebook and Twitter.

We also actively engage with bloggers to inform them of new apps, products and services. For example, when we launched our Breeze Home app in Hong Kong, we gave a presentation on trends in mobile banking and invited bloggers to test drive the app.

Recruitment is another area where social media offers big opportunities. We are recruiting the next World’s Coolest Interns to work with our mobile banking team in China by crowdsourcing. We are also developing the use of LinkedIn for recruitment purposes and are planning to integrate our LinkedIn page with our corporate website.

FST Media: How do you encourage technological innovation from within the organisation?

VeaSey: We drive innovation to differentiate our services and to ensure the bank is building a sustainable advantage. This is a priority. Innovation tends to be organic within the bank. ‘Ideation’ can spawn in any of our markets, and we provide seed funding to bring those ideas to market. Centralised innovation doesn’t really work and tends to be somewhat forced. We let the best ideas generate on the ground and nurture those through to a working product. For every idea that blossoms, several will need to be retired quickly. Balance is key to a good innovation culture. And once an idea does come to life, we quickly assess its value elsewhere in our footprint and deploy it fast. The network works very well here at Standard Chartered.

But the basics must always be in place first.

It’s like a layer cake – we need to have the fundamentals such as secure and reliable transaction processing systems in place before starting to add channel layers. We prioritise these basics before adding on new, innovative services.

One thing we must not forget in this industry is that we are a bank, not a retailer or a technology company. We manage our customers’ money and so we do everything to earn and retain our customers’ trust.

While we are exploring new technologies, before we roll out any new service or new feature, whether online, on ATMs, iPhones or iPads, we absolutely make sure security and reliability are paramount in all that we offer.

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

VeaSey: Every technology leader in financial services has a profound opportunity to influence what the banking space will look like a few years down the track. Our people are our greatest source of sustainable competitive advantage, especially in a fastchanging industry. More than anything, the business of banking technology is all about people and seeing our people succeed is the most gratifying feeling.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // m i c h A e l l e u ng

FsT mediA: You have said these are difficult times for the banking industry, as it is forced to adapt quickly to change. How do you develop a successful technology roadmap in such a rapidly evolving environment?

leung: There is no easy answer, but it is often said that opportunities are presented to those who are prepared. So putting agility and growth into the design of systems upfront does help to prepare the bank for rapidly changing markets. From a technology standpoint, an important factor is to achieve a proper balance between the adoption of advanced technology and control of associated risk.

Cloud computing, for instance, is one such technology that warrants a careful evaluation of the security and control challenges it poses. If any type of a technology roadmap can be charted, then it is one that is characterised by open, scalable and relatively mature (thus proven and lower cost) technologies that can be readily deployed and maintained.

FsT mediA: What are the biggest challenges in integrating technology systems between Hong Kong and mainland China?

Michael Leung

FsT mediA: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months?

senior Vice President and chief information officer, china construction Bank (asia)

leung: Since changing over from Bank of America to China Construction Bank (CCB) five years ago, CCB (Asia) has remained operating largely independently.

Understandably, one of the top IT priorities is to attain a higher level of integration with the CCB Group as a whole, particularly in the areas of core banking system, enterprise data warehouse and corporate technology infrastructure. Other priorities include a sophisticated decision sciences system, an advanced multi-channel e-banking platform and a bank wide process improvement project, among others. The ultimate aim is to accelerate and sustain the growth the bank has achieved in the past five years, despite the prevailing market adversity.

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leung: The technology systems in mainland China are often extremely complex and disintegrated, largely due to the huge diversity and tremendous growth the country has experienced in the past decade.

The biggest challenges therefore come from devising a strategy for integration that is driven by vision but yet able to bear fruits every step of the way, and then working out a plan that is pragmatic and achievable given the various constraints mainland China might impose.

More often than not, the issues are not even about technology but culture – the differences in the ways in which people perceive what, why, when and how things should be done, particularly including technology adoption and resource deployment.

FsT mediA: What potential do you see for Cloud computing in retail banking, and how far off is an enterprise public Cloud?

M i c h a e L L e u n g // w h o’ S w h o Q& a

Leung: The momentum moving towards Cloud computing appears unstoppable, notwithstanding some of its yet unanswered questions. In retail banking the promise of Cloud computing lies internally for the bank and externally for its customers.

One of the most cited applications is sales agent management, where an individual agent is able to plan, practise, execute and report their contacts with customers to the bank wherever they have access to the open internet.

There are many more examples, from location independent workflow applications to campaign/program management services, all of which carry the hallmark of Cloud – shared use of resources over the internet. Similarly for customers, the Cloud computing concept and technology have enhanced the functionality of internet banking services, particularly for high-end segments and company clients.

FST Media: Which obstacles have hindered the implementation of mobile device banking in Hong Kong and China?

Leung: First and foremost is security.

Many retail banks are still looking for a secure, convenient and cost-effective dual factor authentication solution on the mobile channel, whereas banking regulators are mostly ambivalent of which way to go. To work around this problem, some banks in Hong Kong and China use OTP tokens from internet banking, which means customers have to carry an additional device with them.

Several banks in mainland China have even gone back to the simple but tried and tested scratch card approach. Most banks, however, chose to avoid the issue by using mobile devices for location-based marketing, anywhere/anytime customer service and non high-risk transactional functions such as registered funds transfer, registered bill payment and securities trading.

FST Media: CCB (Asia) has made a relatively modest investment in social media to date.

Do you see social media as a worthwhile retail banking channel and, if so, how can it be best utilised?

The social media domain may be the ultimate prize of e-banking development for retail banks. But at this point in time the banking industry lacks a legal and regulatory framework to govern the use of social media platforms, particularly in view of the provocative feature of that space.

Leung: The social media domain may be the ultimate prize of e-banking development for retail banks. But at this point in time the banking industry lacks a legal and regulatory framework to govern the use of social media platforms, particularly in view of the provocative feature of that space.

For example, most banks have established their presence on Facebook and Twitter, and they have some e-banking managers taking care of what’s going on there, but mostly the banks shy away from initiating any major activity and participating in the discussion.

FST Media: CCB (Asia) has an eAlert service allowing customers to set and receive customised notifications for a range of activities relating to their accounts. How are your customers typically using the facility?

Leung: eAlert has been a very effective means to bring the bank and its customers closer together because it builds the understanding and trust between them.

Not only can customers choose to receive eAlerts (for instance, SMS, Whatapps or email) related to their financial activities such as scheduled funds transfer, Point of Sale (POS)purchase and ATM withdrawal, they can also opt for lifestyle events like birthdays,

wedding anniversaries, graduations and vacations. This information allows the bank to know a lot more about their customers and potentially offer services tailored to them for that event. eAlert service has been very much welcomed by customers, as evident by the ever-growing number of them registering since its introduction six years ago.

FST Media: You have said the three key components of a bank are technology, processes and people. How are the latter two elements affected as a greater emphasis is placed on technology?

Leung: Technology is perhaps the most crucial and instrumental factor, especially for retail banks. The bank could not operate without technology, full stop. Technology, processes and people are in a ‘three-in-one’ kind of relationship, in which one relies closely and heavily on the others. The unfortunate reality is, however, that it’s not a ‘buy-one-get-two-free’, that is, one can pay to get technology. But processes and people don’t often come together and, for that reason, you have to work even harder to get the other two in place. In my position as a CIO, I have to spend twice as much time on processes and people, including those within and outside of the bank.

FST Media: What skills do you value most highly when recruiting IT executives into your team?

Leung: Communication and people skills. Technical knowledge is a necessary qualification, but they must be effective at expressing their original ideas and thoughts.

They must be able to motivate and lead others to achieve common goals. As an IT executive, one must also be good at managing the expectations of business users, for resources are always limited and technology is changing.

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

Leung: Doing the right things and doing things right.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // A b d u l R A z A k Mo h d NoR diN

Cinemas, where 70 per cent of their online sales are paid for using M2U internet and mobile banking.

FsT MediA: Are bank customers ready for faceless interactions?

Mohd NoRdiN: Definitely. There is strong

Abdul Razak Mohd Nordin

FsT MediA: How is Maybank building customers loyalty in an environment where many customers now have limited face-toface contact with their bank?

head of Virtual Banking, MayBank

Mohd NoRdiN: Maybank’s online banking

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platform Maybank2u.com (M2U) does not restrict itself to transactional banking online, but taps into customers’ lifestyle demands.

We have begun to use social marketing to encourage customer engagement with us; for example, we offer M2U exclusive deals with well-known brands like Groupon, Tune Hotels, MPH Bookstores and Superbuy.

We have created an online community known as M2U Community to encourage user-generated content, sharing stories and blogs.

We have also built alliances with lifestyle partners for cinema bookings via mobile apps. This effectively strengthens customer loyalty, as proven by the partnership with our local cinema franchise, Golden Screen

evidence that customers are turning more to faceless interaction via digital banking. As a proof of that, 25 per cent of our customers are active users of M2U and M2U Mobile.

M2U is the leading internet banking portal in Malaysia, with a significant first mover advantage over its competitors.

M2U alone accounts for more than 50 per cent of the total number of transactions of the bank as a whole, compared to transactions made via self-service terminals and over the counter. This is a testimony that our customers are already comfortable with faceless transactions for their banking and payment needs.

Maybank2u.com has long-embraced technology – since the year 2000 – and is today the market leader, commanding 50 per cent of the country’s internet banking market share (comScore).

For the past two consecutive years, Malaysians have voted Maybank2u.com as their favourite online banking product.

FsT MediA: Is there a role for branch banking in today’s world of online and mobile transactions?

Mohd NoRdiN: Branch banking will always have a role to play. We place equal importance on branch and digital banking. In fact, we see them as complementing each other for our successful growth. Digital banking is mainly for customer convenience, especially for those on the go.

Branch services will always have a place, especially for face-to-face engagements like advisory services and to serve customer segments that are not internet/technology savvy such as senior citizens and our business customers.

FsT MediA: The internet has revolutionised traditional banking. What do you see as the next wave?

a b du l r a z a k Mo h d n or din // w h o’ S w h o Q& a

Mohd nordin: Mobile banking will play a key role in transforming the banking landscape to cater for borderless banking and payments. We have gone beyond banking towards catering for lifestyle activities, having already implemented a full suite of mobile applications.

These mobile applications (apps) include SMS banking, web based and apps-based banking, flash SMS, and Near Field Communications (NFC).

We are now working on Windows based possibilities. We foresee that mobile applications will overtake internet-based applications in time due to mobility and versatility.

FST Media: How are you developing new channels and increasing the bank’s reach to customers; and are you looking at any new innovations in customer experience?

Mohd nordin: It is important to make constant improvement by introducing innovation, developing new channels and making enhancements in current delivery channels.

Developing new channels such as web chat is a convenient mode for customers to communicate online. The development of USSD Banking (flash SMS) will cater for non-M2U and unbanked segments where you do not even need an internet account.

We have tried artificial intelligence and may introduce augmented reality applications in bringing a new approach to customer experience.

FST Media: What will Maybank’s key investments in mobile services focus on – mobile payments, peer-to-peer remittances and mobile money transfer, mobile banking services, or NFC?

Mohd nordin: Maybank will deploy all available mobile touch points with tailored services to be the market leader. Services are designed according to the capability of mobile phones such as Android and iPhones.

Initiatives are also in place to enhance NFC related applications, as we expect

Mobile banking will play a key role in transforming the banking landscape to cater for borderless banking and payments… we foresee that mobile applications will overtake internet-based applications in time due to mobility and versatility.

upcoming mobile devices to be equipped with NFC capabilities.

We are also working hard on mobile payments that use SIM overlay and are independent of telco providers.

FST Media: Do you regard social networking also a new channel opportunity for Maybank?

Mohd nordin: We did see this coming and are happy to say that we are already using social marketing and continuing in building up our M2U community for customers – for example through Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

This was the primary reason we tied up with Groupon on exclusive deals for M2U users.

FST Media: Many customers in Asia are concerned about the security of mobile banking transactions. How are you addressing this issue?

Mohd nordin:Customers worrying about the security of mobile banking transactions is a common issue. It is our responsibility to reassure users on the security measures provided to protect them while banking via mobile platforms.

We are continually educating and creating awareness among our customers about this

issue, even though we maintain a high level of security. This is an ongoing effort to ensure our security system is the best in its class, and we are making substantial investments annually in this area.

FST Media: Compliance requirements from the regulators are becoming stricter in light of new bank services such as mobile transactions. Do you believe technology is able to cope with these increasing demands or does customer and staff behaviour need to be modified?

Mohd nordin: One of the functions of regulators is to protect the interests of customers, while banks must provide the maximum technology security. It is important for us to comply with the guidelines set by regulators, and we are using technology to set up our own internal compliance, risk management, fraud monitoring and management systems.

Of course, we also take continual steps to encourage customers and employees to keep up with changing trends and advance with technology.

FST Media: What is Maybank’s approach to process improvement and ensuring that projects are managed on time and to budget?

Mohd nordin: In order to ensure a smooth workflow in the process of completing a project, we have established a project management process, a Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process and service level agreements. We also ensure relevant staff are provided professional certification in project management.

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

Mohd nordin:My background is business, and it is business that drives the IT initiatives. My wish list is to support the country’s agenda in promoting a cashless society and creating convenience for our customers and the public at large, wherever we operate.

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w h o’ S w h o Q& a // k a r e n B e l l

to make them more effective, particularly where the business is largely built around ‘smart’ technology like algorithmic trading.

FST Media: What is your process for testing cutting-edge technologies to check their viability in the banking sector?

Karen Bell Managing Director, global heaD group technology & operations regional ManageMent, Deutsche bank ag FST Media: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months?

Bell: Our top priorities are to provide integrated technology that is best in class in innovation, scalability and stability. More specifically, our priorities are: • Highly stable, scalable and secure production systems to support the bank’s activities • Business agility through industrialised development processes to provide delivery certainty • Strong governance so we meet our 60

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regulatory and fiduciary responsibilities and ensure technology investment is aligned with business priorities • Position our technology organisation to proactively exploit technology trends and anticipated market opportunities, such as Big Data and virtualisation/Cloud computing.

FST Media: How do you see the role of IT in investment banking changing in the AsiaPacific region?

Bell: As investment banking in the region expands, we must build scalable models and leverage our strategic global technology offerings. We also need to recognise that local/regional technology solutions may better meet the needs of local markets and regulators, either as stand-alone platforms or as extensions of the global platforms. In Asia Pacific, we also need to work in close partnership with our businesses to find ways

Bell: First, we research what is available in the market by a number of ways such as: • Holding technology sessions with key partners to discuss new technologies and strategies and to exchange knowledge • Arranging Silicon Valley trips to meet with progressive companies to learn about technology innovations • Co-operating with universities and partners to drive forward innovations and prototype the use of new technologies • Participating in various consortiums to drive industry change – for example The Green Grid (TGG).

Within our technology group, there are teams that have responsibility for cuttingedge technologies and their appropriate application in our organisation. At an enterprise level, our engineering team has full technology leadership responsibility and accountability for the bank’s Enterprise Compute strategy. This involves research, selection, design, standards, engineering, integration, pre-production testing and technology roadmap certification of all aspects of the bank’s enterprise IT infrastructure solutions and the strategic evolution of our data centre capabilities.

At the application and end user levels, there are similar teams looking at productivity and collaboration technologies, as well as technologies to improve performance. Of course, new technologies can be identified anywhere in the technology group – but they need to go through an internal process before deployment. A good example of this is our Q110 branch, where we test innovations such as allowing clients to have an interactive exploration of their life plan via the Microsoft Surface platform and iPad. FST Media: Deutsche recently undertook a Cloud computing overhaul to develop an infrastructure-as-a-service platform. What benefits have been realised so far?

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Improve Network Capacity and Collaboration • Improved collaboration among people, processes, and systems through reliable and responsive inter-connectivity among network management systems and applications • Web-based management for local and remote access via a web-browser

Download our DCIM Brochure at www.panduit.com/pimapad1, Visit us at www.panduit.com/software, email us at pimsoftware@panduit.com

w h o’ S w h o Q& a // k a r e n B e l l

Bell: Deutsche Bank has been successfully using internal Cloud computing concepts for several years to optimise its internal IT infrastructure. We have made progress in server virtualisation for application hosting, as well as provisioning virtual desktop environments. This approach has resulted in cost savings and improved usage, better technology compliance, more predictable disaster recovery and stronger controls. These shared services are already providing the foundation of our internal ‘DB Cloud’. Building on this, we are now enhancing our self-service portals, our policy-based automation system and optimisation methods.

We are also examining opportunities in the external Cloud space. However, we are currently unable to proceed for our key services due to a number of factors, including issues around data security and protection.

Due to the different risk profiles of data across the bank and the complex regulatory environment, there will not be a ‘one-size-fitsall’ Cloud solution. However, we will continually analyse technical developments that will allow us to expand the adoption of Cloud solutions within acceptable risk parameters.

FST Media: Where can IT help realise better efficiencies for Deutsche as the global economic climate puts pressure on banks to limit costs?

Bell: IT is an essential function to drive greater revenues as well as to reduce cost.

By working closely with our business and infrastructure partners, our aim is to enable them to be more efficient through deploying cutting-edge technologies to deliver top and bottom line benefits for the Bank. IT is an integral part of the business strategy of the Bank, and we connect everyone to each other and to our customers. It is critical that we demonstrate strong investment governance through these challenging times to ensure we are focusing our IT spend on the opportunities that will make a material difference to performance.

FST Media: How is Deutsche addressing the challenge of adapting social media strategies to meet the vast array of cultures that you service?

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Due to the different risk profiles of data across the bank and the complex regulatory environment, there will not be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ Cloud solution.

Bell: It’s clear that social platforms are relevant for connecting people and sharing information. However, it’s less clear how to use these platforms at work. We’ve tried several pilots that had mixed results, but only recently have we created a bank-wide social capability. This new capability will make it possible for 100,000+ staff in more than 70 countries to leverage people and content across the bank. By giving everyone a way to publish content and opinions, it gives each individual more control over their reputation and career.

FST Media: How do you foster creativity and innovation within your team?

Bell: I encourage them to think of innovation as taking what we do today and making it better – either on a very small scale or on a large scale. We have an open framework so everyone can contribute ideas and provide feedback on how we can improve by using innovation and design thinking networks to facilitate this exchange of ideas. We encourage strong collaboration with clients, undertake interviews to generate ideas and develop prototypes with intense end user testing. We also benchmark ourselves to other industries to see how they solve parallel problems – we don’t just limit our ideas to what has been done in the banking sector.

We are currently piloting a new crowdsourcing and open innovation platform in our retail technology group. Management currently uses it to post challenges openly to staff and receive feedback on alternative solutions. Given our size and geographic

spread, this can be a very effective tool for fostering creativity and innovation within our teams, as well as with collaborators outside the bank.

FST Media: How is Deutsche Bank’s global trading platform evolving to maintain its market leading position?

Bell: We need to ensure that we have stateof-the-art global platforms, and we must understand what is valuable to our businesses and our customers to ensure this functionality is incorporated and leveraged across multiple businesses and geographies. We must also identify opportunities to increase our compute power and speed to market to provide the best offerings and to differentiate us from our competitors. To maintain market-leading positions, clearly you need to have a worldclass business execution capability. However, to be truly best in class you also need to invest in IT solutions for downstream internal users such as risk, operations and finance.

FST Media: What role will Bring-Your-OwnDevices (BYOD) play in Deutsche Bank going forward?

Bell: Whatever devices we use in the bank, we must safeguard our assets and customer information at all times. We therefore only allow devices to connect to the bank’s systems that are secure and do not expose us to unauthorised access.

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

Bell: I want to leave behind an environment that is better than the one I inherited – internally within the bank and externally in the broader financial services industry. I’d like the businesses that I work with to see technology and operations as a partner in their business that is equally committed to enabling sustainable business growth and delivering best in class solutions to achieve their goals. I would like our people to believe that Deutsche Bank offers a great platform from which they can learn, develop and become future leaders.

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CO - S pOnSO r e D A r t I Cle

Customer Success – Standard Chartered Bank China Standard Chartered Bank turns to Micro Focus to meet Chinese regulatory requirements for its retail loan system Mainframe Cobol Application migration to alternative platforms with minimal change

Challenge

When Standard Chartered Bank set up a new branch office in China, compliance regulations meant that it had to host customer data in China. The problem was that the system was hosted on an expensive mainframe environment.

Solution

Mainframe application migration tools: • Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition • Micro Focus Studio Enterprise Edition

Opportunities present challenges

The Chinese market is an important one for growing businesses and Standard Chartered Bank took the decision to set up a new branch office in China. One of the bank’s core applications, its Retail Loan System (RLS), resided on a mainframe in Hong Kong. However compliance with Chinese government regulations required the bank to host all Chinese customer data on the mainland. This substantial undertaking had to be completed within a very short timeframe to meet the targets of the Chinese regulatory body.

An innovative solution

Rather than incur the expense and inconvenience of replicating a new mainframe environment in China, Standard Chartered looked for a solution that would enable it to deploy the application on a lower cost platform than the mainframe. This was a significant undertaking and involved moving over 3,000 COBOL programs and 800 screens from the IBM mainframe and onto Linux. The bank found the answer in technology from Micro Focus designed to migrate applications from the mainframe onto alternative platforms with minimal change.

“The selection of Micro Focus tools and technology was central to the success of the project,” explains Ramesh Narayanaswamy, Head of Retail Technology Solutions Delivery at Standard Chartered Bank. “It meant we could make the platform change without having to make major changes to the application source code and design, and only minimal change to existing programs.”

presented a number of challenges. “Initially we thought it could be plug and play, but parts of system were old legacy COBOL and there were a lot of COBOL statements that had to be reengineered.”

Finding people with the right skills presented further challenges. As Gopal says, “We had a group of people with mainframe expertise, and a separate group of people who know the Linux world. Finding people with a crossover skillset was impossible and we faced a steep learning curve to acquire these skills ourselves. The Micro Focus solutions architect allocated to our project was invaluable in helping us speed up the process.

Impressive performance improvements – today and in the future

The project has returned performance improvements across the system. Batch performance is significantly faster as there are fewer countries sharing the resources. “When we moved to the Micro Focus stand alone system from the shared environment it ran extremely quickly and in fact gave use greater processing capacity than on the mainframe,” explains Gopal. “The new Intel-based Linux server also gave us an opportunity to reengineer some aspects of applications, which resulted in faster execution of batch jobs than on the mainframe.” Performance improvements were impressive.

One overnight batch job ran three hours faster and one batch job that previously took three hours could now be run in three minutes.

A model for future development

As well as enabling Standard Chartered Bank to meet the pressing challenges presented by the Chinese legislation, in a remarkably short timeframe, the other benefits delivered by the project have been widely recognized across the bank. The implementation has been a big enabler for Standard Chartered Bank. A number of other countries have seen the success of the project and want to repeat it by moving their data centers to reside locally. Aranth Gopal explains that the “approach we took with Micro Focus will be the model for this.

Especially as we have learnt so much while we carried out the first implementation. We will know what will take the time, where the pitfalls are likely to be and where to concentrate activity for the best return.”

Drawing on Micro Focus experience to overcome multiple challenges

The project was the first implementation of its kind for the bank, and there was no expertise or technical knowledge within the bank to draw on. As Project Manager for the Retail Solutions Delivery at Standard Chartered Bank, Aranth Gopal explains that the project

For more information, please visit www.microfocus.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // s tA nl e y C h A n

filtered and analysed results to the bankers, customised to individual needs. This creates a proprietary, yet powerful, banker decision support system with self learning capability.

It increases the enterprise capacity to serve clients and develop relationships, execute deals and manage risks.

It also takes the technology impact on productivity to the next level – from increasing efficiency to auto identifying business opportunities and making recommendations anytime, anywhere.

Fst MediA: What are your key priorities for the next 12–18 months?

ChAn: My priorities align tightly with the

Stanley Chan Director corporate & investment Banking technology, Bank of america merrill lynch (Baml)

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Fst MediA: What evolving technologies do you believe will have the greatest impact on investment banking?

ChAn: I will define investment banking here as the commercial, corporate and investment banking side of the business, not including the global markets. The combination of Client Relationship Management (CRM) and mobile technology will bring the greatest impact.

The increasingly complex economic environment and the massive amount of information processing to make and validate business decisions within the risk appetite of the company has been extremely challenging.

It is fundamentally critical for the different lines of business to share a common set of metrics for assessing clients in order to produce a holistic view in a timely manner.

The power of technology allows processing of client market data and internal business metrics in the most efficient way and delivers

Global Technology and Operations area of the organisation. We have been focusing on various global and regional programs to achieve the goals for our business partners in corporate and investment banking such as: • Enabling business strategies – maximising the adoption of our global sales platform for client analysis and performance measurement and enriching its client relationship management features with new profitability metrics, email platform integration and mobile capability • Improving our competitive cost position – rationalising the investment in technologies to optimise our operational cost efficiency, including the decommissioning and migration of applications and infrastructure • Reducing risk – enforcing the adoption of self-identified risk frameworks and increasing the transparency of regional risks by connecting them to global and produce proof points of control along the technologies. This will support client on boarding, deal initiation, deal execution and deal filing processes • Modernising the foundation – simplifying and integrating the infrastructure of our critical platforms to increase performance and stability, including our global document management, client pitch book production and self-service reporting platforms We also partner proactively with the business and are involved in idea generation and possibly the implementation of the new

C o - SponSo r e d a r t i C le

SAP for Banking: Innovations to Help Banks Run Better Today’s Drivers of Banking Innovation Leading banks are driving technology innovations that will change their industry for years to come. Tighter regulation, increased consolidation, better-educated customers, competition from non-traditional providers and a tough economic environment require systems that are more flexible and better integrated.

Recent innovations in the SAP for Banking portfolio of solutions – including new mobile-banking features – will help banks boost efficiency, bring products to market more quickly, and minimise risk.

There are also analytics to satisfy the latest regulations and transactional banking functionality to accommodate mergers and acquisitions.

Build a Unified, Well-Integrated Platform As banks update their outdated systems, many are moving away from point solutions and monolithic IT investments to solutions that are both modular and fully integrated. They are also working to align IT and business needs in support of enterprise transformation.

Today, you need solutions with functionality that is modular, reusable, and scalable. SAP offers a comprehensive portfolio of modular banking solutions on a single business process platform.

This platform, built on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), can facilitate adaptability and interoperability throughout your institution by encouraging the consistent adoption of applications that offer stable, ready-to-run enterprise services.

The SAP for Banking portfolio of solutions, together with our leading software for business support and analytics, help you optimise a broad array of processes. From transactional banking and finance and risk management to sales and service, you get the help you need to deliver superior service to customers and products that are tailored to their specific wants and needs. You can use our solutions to support all your core operations or leverage individual components to power individual parts of your business.

Helping Banks Run Better Recent innovations in our solutions, technology, and delivery further enable timely development and distribution of profitable, customercentric products and services for multiple channels and support the industry’s transformational journey in a difficult market climate.

Functions for in-memory computing – provided by the SAP HANA™ platform – let you leverage the power of real-time analytics for improved customer insight, rapid business decisions, and compliance with the latest regulations. New mobility features help you access new markets and connect you with customers anywhere, at any time.

Today, you need solutions with functionality that is modular, reusable, and scalable. SAP offers a comprehensive portfolio of modular banking solutions on a single business process platform.

Tools supporting new, highly flexible and standardised processes for transactional banking help to accommodate mergers and acquisitions by integrating the operational and account systems of subsidiaries onto a main IT platform. The banking innovations from SAP also help to shelter business operations from any interruptions during a migration, and costs become significantly lower by running on a unified platform. Tighter account integration improves efficiency and speeds the rollout of new product offerings.

Our technology helps you run and extend best-practice processes and analyse, explore, and predict new business trends using robust tools for information management – including support for data integration and quality. Our software supports active lifecycle management and is designed for change. Key business and operational benefits include: • Greater standardisation • Increased flexibility, speed and quality of process implementation • Reduced costs for reconciliation and compliance • Lower error rates • Enhanced responsiveness to changing business imperatives • Higher profitability per customer and a better net-interest margin • Greater customer satisfaction and loyalty • Higher cross-sell ratios, rate of offer acceptance per customer, and channel profitability Other innovations enable the trusted, real-time operational insight you need to minimise complexity and cost, enhance performance, and proactively manage risk and compliance across your institution.

For more information, visit www.sap.com/banking or join SAP for Banking blog at http://blogs.sap.com/banking/ Regional SAP Headquarter SAP Asia Pte Ltd 30 Pasir Panjang Road #03-32, Mapletree Business City Singapore 117440 Phone: +65 6664-6868 Email: info.asia@sap.com Web: www.sap.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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w h o’ S w h o Q& a // S Ta n l e y C h a n

BAC, a multi-year program that is a vital component of our customer-focused strategy.

It will align all of our resources towards serving our customers, removing obstacles internally so that team members can work better together and make us a more focused, streamlined company.

FST Media: How do you see internal technology evolving to better service business goals and processes?

Chan: In a large global organisation like BAML, effective use of technology internally is very important to its success. This is a very challenging goal indeed. But we are working towards our goal and have reached a key milestone.

The company has achieved remarkable success in the transition work and has been putting in a tremendous amount of effort to reduce and improve internal platforms, streamline processes and increase team communication and productivity.

We are also investing in enterprise tools for risk management and management of stability to support business operations. The new BAC project is no doubt going to have a significant impact on enterprise productivity.

In addition, we recently deployed crossplatform sales tools globally for internal bankers and sales staff across commercial banking, corporate banking, investment banking and capital markets to provide a single client view for business collaboration and synergy building.

As a result, business processes in managing the deal pipeline, client performance and banker performance have been streamlined.

This is an important milestone we have made towards the goal of a powerful enterprise CRM solution that maximises speed to market opportunities and speed to business decisions.

We have also been looking at mobile productivity tools for internal teams, including a recent successful rollout of a pilot tool for global bankers to track resource allocation to clients and manage tax exposure. There are many mobile client relationship management and client presentation solutions being researched and developed.

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innovation is about the passion to make a change to the ordinary. innovation does not guarantee a favourable result, but an organisation without innovation loses opportunity and limits its growth. innovation should take place at all levels and through both formal and informal channels with no limitation of its scale.

FST Media: How do you encourage technological innovation from within the organisation, and how do you determine which ideas will be pursued?

Chan: In my opinion, ideas for cost saving or process automation in an economic down cycle should be priorities. Innovation is about the passion to make a change to the ordinary. Innovation does not guarantee a favourable result, but an organisation without innovation loses opportunity and limits its growth.

Innovation should take place at all levels and through both formal and informal channels with no limitation of its scale.

Launching a formal innovation program may attract attention, but it is even more important to have active engagement to implant to the enterprise DNA.

FST Media: What key initiatives are you working on, and why are they significant?

Chan: We are working on the global CRM tool for commercial banking, corporate banking, investment banking and capital markets. We are partnering with the business to maximise the adoption of the

tool in the region. We are also building new features to enable efficient business performance review, client profitability analysis and cross-platform opportunities.

Through global reporting consolidation we are able to increase efficiency and bring new metrics to support business management in performing a 360 degree review of client strategy and multi-dimensional analysis.

Work has started on streamlining our global document processing solution and implementing additional controls to reduce risks during the client document production and deal filing process. We have also been researching mobile productivity tools and some business concepts on client analysis and client activity tracking.

In addition, we are reviewing our relationship management strategy to strengthen the global bonding with both the business and technology organisations.

This is significant to maintaining our global operation model.

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

Chan: Many technology organisations did an excellent job in supporting the business to improve the ‘three Es’ – economy, efficiency and effectiveness. This is no longer sufficient in today’s market. Technology is now an essential platform to keep the enterprise up to speed to navigate through the exponentially growing complexity of the business environment.

The traditional model where the business defines technology requirements sets constraints on the power of technology.

Business and technology should define common goals and strategies, and technology should be capable of identifying business opportunities.

This cultural shift is happening and should happen at all levels of a company at an accelerated rate. I have been involved in many technology and business transformation projects in the past decade and envisage more rapid changes in technology and the financial world in the next decade. I hope to be remembered as a leader of championing changes.

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The Digital Wallet Driving 21st Century Mobile and Online Financial Services Channels/Agents

Settlement Engine

Accounts Bank Debit/Credit Card m-Commerce

Billing Systems Telco prepaid Telco postpaid Third-party

Loyalty Systems Data Mining Reporting Systems BI Systems

Tx Switch

XML ISO8583 SOAP

Business Rules Channel/Agent Mgmt Internal Accounts Web Services

HTTPS SMPP CIMD2

Communications Networks & External Hosts

Advant Payments System

Mediation

The Digital Wallet has certainly captured the attention of the media, telecommunications operators, and financial services providers over the last few years – it seems as if there is a new product or service provider announcement every day!

There is an enormous opportunity for mobile and financial services operators in this market, but the key to success in mobile payments is aligning the agendas of the various stakeholders’ for their mutual benefit. For example, retailers want to drive footfall to their shops, banks want new channels for product sales and to reduce the cost of customer interaction, mobile operators need new revenue streams, and consumers want simple, reliable and secure methods manage funds and make payments. Collaboration between the stakeholders in the value chain is essential for consumer acceptance and success.

Many industry analysts are forecasting that consumers will interact with not just a single digital wallet, but a whole network of digital wallets, each providing specialised services. This is highly likely as different participants, such as proprietary smartphone wallets, bank and credit card wallets, mobile operator wallets, and other financial wallets proliferate. If a digital wallet is to truly replicate a physical wallet, then it must be portable between the systems being used to access it. Only collaboration between service providers, and technological flexibility of the underlying platforms, will ensure this degree portability.

TTI’s Advant Payments System (APS) is a wallet based mobile and online financial services enabling platform that is built around a high capacity transaction switch incorporating channel and consumer account management, and a flexible business rules engine. The APS includes a highly adaptable integration layer that enables it to be integrated with a broad range of external systems such as ATM’s, EFTPOS terminals, financial systems, web portals, Point of Sale systems, mobile phones, and telecommunications

Mobile Handset SMS/Java applet Smartphone PC/Web EFT/POS

ATM Distributors, sub-distributors Agents Merchants Banks, Financial Institutions Customers

Management & Reporting

infrastructure. The applications supported by the APS include: • Consumer digital wallet for money, loyalty points, tokens etc. in developed economies • Mobile money, providing basic account management services for the unbanked in developing economies • Electronic value distribution via a hierarchical distribution chain of agents • Gift card and prepaid debit card distribution and activation • International and domestic remittances • Bill payment • Rural and remote banking, providing services for the under-banked TTI has deployed the APS for market leading telecommunications and financial organisations enabling them to bring new and innovative services to their customers through responsive and agile marketing, and rapid adaption to new and evolving business processes. Collaboration will be a cornerstone in the evolution and acceptance of mobile and online financial services, and the inherent flexibility and highly adaptable integration capabilities of the APS means that it can interoperate with a broad range of other wallet and financial systems to provide the consumer with a seamless user experience.

TTI has a 15-year track record of successful development of high volume, mission critical, real-time transaction processing systems. The emphasis has been on the development of products and systems that supply features and functionality to allow our customers to deliver a strong value proposition to their customers and partners in their eco-system and their target markets.

TTI is recognised as a premier developer and provider of telecommunications and financial solutions globally since 1996, deploying applications including converged billing, electronic payments systems, and digital wallet systems. TTI has recently gained Advanced Partner status with IBM in recognition of our high level of technical skill and innovation, and market success.

TTI Contact Web: www.ttiadvant.com www.flexewallet.com Email: Info@ttiadvant.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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w h o’ S w h o Q& a // iSwa r a a n Su ppi a h

Iswaraan Suppiah head, Group information & operations, CimB Group

Suppiah: We commenced the execution of work on 1Platform concurrently in Singapore and Thailand and the cut over to the new system was smooth in both markets. It is still too early for the benefits to be apparent, and we are focusing mainly on getting our staff familiar with the new system. We now have improved capabilities, especially in terms of product bundling and pricing flexibility. A series of product launches are being planned leveraging our new capabilities. With this, we expect to see customer acquisition and revenue uptake benefits kick in. On the cost savings side, 1Platform’s more efficient processes mean less manpower. We have commenced supporting new business growth through redeployment and retraining instead of having to rely on recruitment.

FST Media: What innovations are being employed in the area of business information and process improvement?

Suppiah: We see business information as FST Media: How close are you to providing a single view for customers regardless of a customer’s number of services and location?

Suppiah: Our vision for a single view regardless of number of services and location encompasses the ability to bank across ASEAN – get a mortgage in Indonesia, manage funds in Singapore and Thailand, and invest in unit trusts in Malaysia with CIMB – and manage all of this through a single view, across all our channels. Apart from the technology capability to create such seamlessness, this means working through regulatory concerns and restrictions for cross border integration.

We have made good progress at the operational level within each country. We have a foundation to pull together the product holdings of a customer and the customer’s interaction history. This then provides for a more positive customer experience and more targeted offering of products and services by our relationship managers and branch sales staff.

FST Media: What business benefits will be realised from the regional rollout of CIMB’s 1Platform project?

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a competitive asset. Banks with the best customer insight will win because they have the ability to make customers feel their needs are understood and proactively met.

Our enterprise banking data warehouse relies on technology from IBM and SAS and is used for data mining, lead generation, risk management and regulatory reporting.

We also use analytics to improve efficiency and manage risks. Over the years, reliance by business units on the Bank Data Warehouse (BDW) has increased and we have, correspondingly, continued to upgrade our technology. We are now exploring capabilities to process Big Data.

Business process improvement is very much on the top of our 2012/2013 agenda.

A few years ago, we created a core team with business process specialists recruited from the manufacturing industry combined with our own domain specialists. The team identified processes that needed reworking and used ARIS from Software AG for Business Process Management (BPM).

Today, in line with the firm’s growth, our team has grown not only in size but also in expertise across the region. Our business process specialists are Six Sigma

certified and we actively use BPM at the enterprise level. Our Six Sigma Blackbelts are currently implementing a roadmap of initiatives with aggressive cost optimisation and customer experience improvement goals.

FST Media: How is innovation integrated as part of the CIMB culture?

Suppiah: Innovation has so many connotations. There are small and yet important ways in which technology can be used inventively and yet simply to overcome obstacles or improve efficiency. Since 2011, I have challenged my team with a quarterly exercise called Data-to-Dollars or D-2-D. This is not about using sophisticated analytics technology. We get to see ‘data’ in the course of work every day. We gather a group of talent together to ponder the data they encounter, and think up ways to enable revenue uplift, improve customer experience, reduce the incidence of errors or improve efficiency. As an example, D-2-D came up with an idea that is helping the business proactively counter customer attrition when locked-in mortgage interest rates become uncompetitive, with no investment in systems or new tools.

Innovation could also be a mindset where we encourage staff to think laterally and question the status quo. Then, there is disruptive innovation where technology can be a game changer. There is even innovation when you take what a competitor has already done and do it better. At CIMB, we encourage it all. We have a Blue Ocean Challenge event that Group Strategy runs regularly to encourage staff to submit business ideas for reward and recognition.

The best ideas are implemented.

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

Suppiah: I hope humility and humour define my style. As for achievements, I look back with satisfaction on our ability to support CIMB’s transformation from a leading Malaysian player to ASEAN’s universal bank.

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PERFECT SCANS WITH POWERFUL IMAGING SOLUTIONS

w h o’ S w h o Q& a // p o h b oon Si a n g

Poh Boon Siang Regional ManageR iT, aXa insuRance singapoRe

the next 12-18 months is to strengthen our disaster recovery and business continuity planning for our virtual platforms so that the recovery of our business can be achieved with ultimate flexibility.

FST Media: What challenges does the HSBC partnership create for IT integration?

Siang: Any IT integration has its own challenges. However, with careful planning and a strong commitment from both sides, we are confident that the IT integration will be completed successfully. The fact that HSBC Insurance and AXA Insurance have some similar systems would obviously facilitate the completion.

FST Media: With the ongoing integration of AXA General Insurance and Life Insurance as OneAXA, will there be a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) across the whole company?

Siang: With the integration of infrastructure-

FST Media: What IT trends are you keeping your eye on?

Siang: There has been a great deal of interest in Cloud technologies recently.

We are keeping our eye on the development and adoption rates of Cloud technology, and how it could fit into our overall IT roadmap. Another trend is the evolution of social media, including both web based and mobile based technologies. Today, social media has become an integral part of most people’s lives. The adoption of social media in brand engagement will help companies increase brand awareness and bring more traffic to their websites. I believe IT certainly has an important role to play in this evolution.

shared services, a SOE will indeed be implemented across the whole company.

SOE allows us to manage and predict the costs of deploying servers, desktops, laptops, thin clients and mobile devices, while delivering the agreed quality of service.

FST Media: In your opinion, what are the critical priorities in order to establish a workable SOE? Siang: Incorporating standardisation into an IT roadmap is critical to the success of establishing a workable SOE. If we include standardisation as one of the key deliverables in the planning stage of every IT project and business strategy, it will significantly reduce the problems created

by SOE at the later phase of the project or after it is completed.

FST Media: Will mobile computing play an

FST Media: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months?

important role in the future of AXA Insurance?

Siang: We have achieved a high degree of

Siang: We have seen significant changes

virtualisation and consolidation in the past few years. So one of our top priorities for

in the trend of mobile computing in recent years. Mobile devices such as smartphones,

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netbooks, ultrabooks and tablets play an important role in people’s daily lives. Mobile computing is one of the key influencers in our IT roadmap and business strategy. Apart from reaching out to external customers, we are also looking at ways to provide our internal customers with the ability to access critical business information quickly and accurately through mobile computing. This innovation will lead to improved decision making and increased productivity.

FST Media: How is technology maintaining AXA’s customer loyalty?

Siang: Long-term customers are fundamental to every successful business, and acquiring new customers can cost several times as much as retaining current ones. We have implemented a motor initiative to encourage customer retention by awarding customers with a certain profile an additional discount if they renewed their policies with AXA Insurance.

With the help of technologies, we automated the process of using customer profiling to determine whether customers are eligible for the discount.

FST Media: How do you foster a culture of innovation within your team?

Siang: I encourage my staff to adopt the ‘80-20 rule’ at work – spending 80 per cent on business-as-usual activities and the remaining 20 per cent on innovation and ideas. This helps my team as they can take a step back in the midst of their work and explore ideas on how to improve their routine tasks or projects. This margin is very important as the 20 per cent time often produces innovation that helps to improve their productivity on 80 per cent of their time.

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

Siang: I would like to be remembered for people-building success, rather than a legacy of launching a successful IT project or programme.

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Are You Sending Mixed Messages?

Unfortunately, You Probably Are.

By Scott Draeger, HP Exstream Customer Communication Strategist

At many points in the customer lifecycle, many banks and insurance companies confuse their customers. Surely, this cannot happen when leading enterprises obsessively monitor the performance of every customer interaction. Customer interactions are generally implemented and measured by narrowly focused project teams. These teams rarely connect to an enterprise-wide customer communication strategy. If you evaluated your communications projects as a portfolio, it is likely that you will find that many of your projects are working against each other.

Before the first sale to a new customer, your marketing campaigns attract prospects to your brand over the web, mobile devices, and mailboxes. Then, proposals, account opening, policy documents, and welcome kits convert your prospects into customers.

After the sale, customers are serviced and supported with statements, policy updates, compliance letters, and correspondence generated from call centres. Customer relationships are grown through up-selling, cross-selling, and loyalty programs. These communications are designed to collect revenues, grow share of wallet, and reduce customer churn.

From the perspective of your customer, you send a lot of mixed signals. Before the sale, the customer feels very important, interacting with well designed communications with high production values, funded by an acquisition-driven marketing department. After the sale, the operations team struggles to deliver communications operating to cost reduction metrics. As a result, post sale interactions in the call centre, web, and print communications have low production values.

Customers feel least important at one of your locations, where they fill out their details

Critical coordination of customer communication projects within the enterprise

multiple times to interact with an enterprise that knows their private financial information.

Unfortunately, channel-based project silos create these problems. They are also more costly to operate. Expenses creep into your organisation when well-intentioned project teams choose to buy or build singlepurpose tools that offer benefits tailored to the single project. Additionally these disconnected projects create barriers to sharing content, design assets, data, and ideas across an integrated portfolio of well managed communications.

Project focused communications make it nearly impossible to effectively execute on any type of holistic customer communications strategy. As a result, any strategy you set is limited in speed to the slowest project team in your portfolio. In the end, the capabilities of your entire Customer

Communications Management portfolio are limited by the performance of the least capable tools.

Taking a higher-level Customer Communications Management perspective can deliver a unified customer experience, eliminating confusion while managing costs.

Key elements of Customer Communications Management solutions enable integration with a variety of current and future data sources, enable content sharing across multiple projects, and allow content experts to easily author and update customer communications. A unified customer communication strategy can even share effort across channels. Effective Customer Communications Management can help you eliminate the confusion, improve your customer experiences, and reduce your operating costs.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // G u r m A il PA r m A r

We are continuing to invest in our mobile technology and plan to launch several new apps for each of our businesses in the near future.

FsT mediA: What major technologies have you seen introduced that have become critical for today’s financial services industry?

Gurmail Parmar Chief information offiCer, asia-PaCifiC, BnY mellon FsT mediA: Adoption rates for smartphones and other mobile technologies such as tablet devices are high across Asia.

What applications (apps) is BNY Mellon developing to address growth across this channel?

PArmAr: We all know that technology is an important competitive differentiator for any large financial services firm, no more so than in the mobile space. With the launch of BNY Mellon Connect Mobile, BNY Mellon clients can now access two of the company’s web-based product and service offerings that have been especially designed for the iPad. BNY Mellon Connect Mobile 72

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recently debuted with links to foreign exchange research from BNY Mellon Global Markets, as well as transactional capabilities on its Liquidity DIRECT cash investment tool for institutional investors, provided by the Liquidity Services Group.

Once the app is downloaded, availability is restricted to our institutional clients who have access to these two products and services and receive authentication from their sales representatives. Liquidity DIRECT Mobile allows clients to take the power of Liquidity DIRECT with them wherever they go. Clients can easily monitor and manage their cash investments via their iPad without being tied to their desktop.

We recently launched the TreasuryEdge app designed to provide timely information on the client’s cash accounts, with information related to decision making on cash flows, balance and investment levels.

PArmAr: Having cut my teeth in the early 1990s building securities processing mainframe applications, to delivering solutions operating in the mobile space today, the evolution through two decades of technology changes has certainly kept life interesting.

Some of the key industry protocols, systems and infrastructure that come to mind are STP Messaging (SWIFT, FIX), digital imaging and workflow solutions, central repositories (dematerialisation of securities), enterprise resource planning packages, data warehouse and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions.

Today there is a definite push for financial services applications to be made available on mobile devices, especially as we are seeing a convergence of personal and work devices, with a steady migration from the Blackberry to the iPhone. This was of course all underpinned with vast improvements in infrastructure technology; the leap to the internet, distributed and desktop computing, network performance and encryption, security, virtualisation solutions, as well as the Cloud.

FsT mediA: What key challenges have been addressed and overcome as part of the Bank of New York and Mellon Financial Corporation merger?

PArmAr: During my tenure with the firm I have been through four mergers and acquisitions. When you simply acquire a firm, it’s very clear what your decisions need to be. In a merger of equals, it’s a little more difficult as you are taking the best of both, with an immediate need to make the hard decisions.

A key challenge that ultimately underpinned our strategy was set immediately after the BNY Mellon merger

G u r M a il Pa r M a r // w h o’ S w h o Q& a

was announced. The executive team mandated that the integration program was to have no client impact. Within one month of the merger announcement, the technology organisation was able to propose to the businesses what platforms it should ultimately use.

Communication was the other key challenge: any changes and suggestions needed to be completely transparent to our staff and clients. We employed a series of social collaboration tools (an internal Facebook-type product) in order to do this.

It is the underpinning of what we do at BNY Mellon. So successful was the technology integration while keeping our businesses running and supporting the company’s growth, that Harvard published a business study on the merger.

A challenge that we have is the regulatory restrictions that prevent certain types of registered employees from making statements on social media sites. Essentially it is no different than sales materials and requires the scrutiny of legal and compliance.

FST Media: Do Cloud computing, virtualisation, Near Field Communications (NFC) and digital imaging technologies justify the hype?

ParMar: Cloud computing has probably created the most hype, which is not surprising when you consider the industry has been moving towards a service-oriented approach for technology delivery for some time now. While I think that the public Cloud value proposition still has some way to go with respect to hosting enterprise business line applications, here at BNY Mellon we launched our first private Cloud at the end of 2011.

This allows for the computing stack to be essentially simplified and commoditised (standardised, optimised and virtualised), reducing time to market for application delivery and passing the savings, by only paying for what you use, directly back to the businesses.

We are looking at what business applications we need and what our business architecture looks like to allow us to run the business of IT better. It’s about being open for business 24x7, managing resources and portfolios and capturing usage so there’s more transparency on reporting, and understanding what infrastructure supports which applications.

A new area of personal interest is contextual-based computing. This is essentially combining sources of information culled from social networking and mobile devices to create a customer’s digital footprint, followed up by using data analysis techniques to provide intuitive customised service offerings relevant to the customer’s style of living.

A challenge that we have is the regulatory restrictions that prevent certain types of registered employees from making statements on social media sites.

Essentially it is no different than sales materials and requires the scrutiny of legal and compliance.

FST Media: Do BNY Mellon’s branches adopt a corporate standard, or is there scope to develop new technologies within a particular territory?

ParMar: In addition to Beijing, we recently opened a branch in Sydney. Our technology platforms are global, so we use the same core systems in the majority of the countries in which we operate.

That said, it is still important to assess the differences in individual countries and to localise/customise our needs according to

each country’s nuances, especially from a regulatory standpoint.

In anticipation of the continued growth in APAC, we recently completed the build of two state-of-the-art data centre environments. We also recently moved into new offices in Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul. On each occasion we incorporated the local data protection and privacy laws when architecting the required technology landscape within each respective location.

FST Media: Do additional measures need to be taken to maintain security across bank systems when dealing with mobile apps?

ParMar: Absolutely. Mobile banking should be considered equally, if not more, secure than traditional online banking, with keeping control of data and trust in identity being paramount. While applications teams and clients talk about functionality, there needs to be focus on appropriate security controls without compromising the inherent functionality of the device.

This is often difficult to do when trying to incorporate the high level of corporate security standards on a mobile device.

The key challenge, of course, is to provide a secure environment to access company information, or to store it in a secure way so that the information isn’t compromised in the event that the device is lost. At BNY Mellon we use a mobile device management software product that will be installed on certain devices to allow BNY Mellon to remotely manage and wipe devices in the event they are lost or stolen.

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

ParMar: My role as APAC CIO is to bring focus and resources to the technology challenges and needs in the region. We have the highest growth from a business viewpoint, and I would like to ensure that all business lines and employees of the company, regardless of geography, have a consistent level of technology service.

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HELPING FINANCIAL SERVICES GET CLOSER TO THEIR CUSTOMERS Polycom Solutions enable face-to-face collaboration and visual customer service Banks and financial institutions today use unified communication and collaboration solutions to enhance customer service, improve productivity, streamline operations and reduce costs. Polycom solutions enable powerful face-to-face collaboration, bringing both the organisation and customers closer together.

Audio and video collaboration can enable faster and more personalised customer service, deploy interactive kiosks, aid in new product training and facilitate faster time to market. Bank branches can communicate more effectively to increase customer service levels. New financial products can be launched more quickly to a larger audience. New product training or market trend analysis can be completed remotely. Key information and content such as market reports, trading information, stock prices can be shared with more impact. Critical financial processes such as interviewing, performance management, fiscal planning, project management, human capital development, business continuity planning, corporate communications can all be enhanced and shortened.

In an industry where face-to-face, personal relationships are the key to success, Polycom makes this a reality with high definition video solutions that bring financial institutions and customers together.

BENEFITS • Improved Customer Service • Enhanced Communications • Innovative Products and Services • Competitive Differentiation • Cost Reductions • Faster Decision-Making • Reduce Cost of Sales • Reduce Training Time and Costs • Improved Branch Sales • Increase Revenues and Deposits • Streamline Operational Efficiency

KEY APPLICATIONS • Branch-Level Communications Real-time collaboration transforms every bank branch into a vibrant sales channel that is more responsive, and able to offer more products and services such as real-time access to remote experts from anywhere.

• High Net-Worth Customers Polycom solutions help high net-worth clients and the mass-affluent customers collaborate in real-time with your financial experts for world-class advice and guidance from anywhere, obtaining instant market insight, quotations or instant approvals to shorten the sales cycle.

• Morning Call Market research and other relevant information from the morning call can be recorded and archived, so the sessions can be replayed throughout the day to increase productivity through content sharing.

• Partnering with Polycom Polycom solutions are backed by a world-class service and support organization, providing the most lifelike experience for collaboration and communication from anywhere to anywhere, instantly.

A customer’ s testimonial Telepresence plays a social role: groups of users working via audio connection are now very happy to work face to face!

-Regis Delayat, Chief Technical Officer, SCOR

A large, international group...

The SCOR group is a leading international company in the reinsurance market, serving more than 3600 clients globally. The team of 1600 employees based in 44 offices located in Paris, Zurich, London, Cologne, Singapore and New York, generated an annual turnover of EUR 6.38 billion.

Video conferencing is already in place A global organisation like SCOR relies on with visual communication technology, such as the Polycom® HDX®7000 Media Center in the CEO’s office. To further improve the quality and ease of use, as well as to minimize travel cost/time, the SCOR management engaged system integrator Verizon Business to implement a more advanced telepresence solution using Polycom RPX.

tion only

Image for illustra

For users, it’s all about the simplicity The overwhelming advantage of Polycom RPX immersive telepresence is its ease of use: at the time of the meeting, the user enters the room, immediately sees the other connected room or rooms on screen and can just sit down to begin working via telepresence!

Being able to discuss complex business matters face-to-face increases productivity and efficiency, and Regis Delayat - Chief Technical Officer at Scor, believes the quick adoption of telepresence by the employees is due to its simplicity. As a testament to the employees’ enthusiasm for immersive telepresence, a second room has been installed at the London hub, less than six months after the start of the operation!

Learn More To find out how Polycom solutions can help your organisation, visit us at www.polycom.asia/solutions/industry/financial_services.html or speak with a Polycom Account Representative or our Industry Expert today!

w h o’ s w h o Q& A // Ig n Ac I o M A n I pu l A

Ignacio Manipula

FsT MedIA: What IT trends are you keeping your eye on?

first VP head of Bank oPerations and suPPort diVision, PhiliPPine Veterans Bank (PVB)

MAnIpulA: The technologies we invest in are those that our markets are very comfortable in using, such as the ATM. We make sure that these channels work very well in delivering to our customers. So we are keeping an eye on technologies that will help us become very efficient and fast in our turn around time in delivering service to our clients. We are also on the look out for technologies that will assist us in utilising and enhancing the capabilities of our existing systems, creating a single view of the accounts of a client, managing our costs and increasing profitability.

We have been talking about virtualisation and have been looking at Business Intelligence (BI) systems to help us quantify our transactions costs, product costs, account profitability and ultimately our business unit profitability to allow us to manage all of these.

FsT MedIA: PVB’s original mandate was to secure the financial future of the nation’s war veterans. How has this mandate changed over the years?

FsT MedIA: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months?

MAnIpulA: Our top priority is implementating the upgrade of our Manufacturing Information Systems (MISYS) Equation core banking system. This upgrade includes the branch cashier and teller systems, as well as the current savings and time deposit systems to enhance capabilities and handle more transactions.

Our next priority is the migration of our home-grown lending system to the MISYS Equation lending system and the implementation of a loan origination system, making our lending workflow process automated from end-to-end. This will also allow transactions emanating from our lending system to communicate with our deposit system seamlessly.

Included in the upgrade is our Treasury and Trade Finance System. The idea is to integrate all of our systems to eliminate, or minimise, the manual hand off of data, as well as report preparation and generation to prevent errors.

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MAnIpulA: That mandate refers to our nation’s World War II veterans. As we grow from being number 32 to number 18 in terms of assets in the banking industry, we have been operating and competing just like any private commercial bank. We are a niche player because of our competitive advantage over the other commercial banks.

That advantage is our size and the fact that we are allowed by law to accept government deposits, although we are a private commercial bank. Much of the retail market we capture is primarily employees from the different national and local government units, Government Owned and Controlled Corporations (GOCCs) and about a third are either employees from private companies or they have their own businesses.

FsT MedIA: Does the demographic of the bank’s customer base mean internet and mobile services are not a key channel for PVB? MAnIpulA: On the contrary, I see the demographic profile of PVB’s clientele

becoming younger because of the younger relatives, colleagues and friends of our existing customers who are more familiar and open to these technologies. We offer access to these channels through the BancNet system, which allows PVB clients to enquire about their balances, pay their bills online, do fund transfers and other convenient services such as cashless shopping using their PVB ATM card as a debit card.

We are matching the pace of our clients’ readiness to adapt to these new technologies.

At the same time, the PVB ATM card is continuously being enhanced to give our clients the power to perform multi-functions on their ATM card. An example is our three-in-one ATM card which is being used by our local government unit clients as their company or office ID card, as a time-keeping card to do their time-in and time-out, and as an ATM-payroll card which allows them to access PVB and BancNet ATM machines to make cash withdrawals against their payroll credits.

FsT MedIA: How is the bank using BI and data analytics to develop its customer base?

MAnIpulA: For PVB these are mainly used to capture and monitor data and to create reports. We are also developing the use of BI and data analytics to create a profile of our loan clients, to calculate probability of default based on the history of our experience with the loan clients and their demographic profile, and to ultimately churn out credit scores of potential loan clients. Later on, these scores will also be used as a basis for risk-premium pricing based on the scores of the clients being approved for a loan.

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

MAnIpulA: I enthusiastically encourage participation and the generation of ideas from my team. I believe that everybody can contribute an idea that will enhance the insights and the standard of the discussions and actions.

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ENABLING THE HYPERCONNECTED WORLD OF FINANCIAL SERVICES Online users have very high performance expectations and it is no different when it comes to financial services applications. Applications have to be available 100%, 24x7 with personalised transaction information displayed instantly. If these requirements are not met, users relucantly defer the transaction, contact the call centre in some cases and express dissatisfaction with the service in their social circle, which has an undesirable impact on the organisation’s reputation and brand Consider the following findings from Forrester Consulting*: • 69% of online banking customers have had a dissatisfying experience online • Speed and availability accounted for 65% of those dissatisfying experiences • When users find their bank’s website is slow or unavailable, 50% will conduct

transactions through the branch or call centre • Of those who have a dissatisfying online experience, 47% are less likely

to recommend their bank Financial Institutions consider the speed and scale of their online systems to be a core competency. This is even more critical for retail banking and online trading. Three primary factors dictate online performance – the responsiveness of the core platform, the responsiveness of the application tier, and the network latency between the datacentre and the end user on the internet or mobile network.

The good news is financial services companies no longer need to view the internet as the weak link for a great online experience. Akamai’s managed service is designed to make it possible to deliver applications and content quickly and reliably across the internet. Akamai has deployed the most pervasive, highly-distributed cloud optimisation platform with over 105,000 servers in 78 countries within over 1,000 networks.

• 7 of the world’s 10 largest financial service firms depend on Akamai for critical web and mobile performance • Financial firms use Akamai for more than $1trillion in secure transactions annually • 85% of the world’s internet users are a single network hop (milliseconds) away from Akamai’s optimisation services • Akamai delivers between 15-30% of all Web traffic

To learn more, visit www.akamai.com/financialservices

Akamai’s Intelligent Platform can address core weaknesses of the public internet – avoiding internet congestion and bypassing inefficient protocols. The result is a faster, more reliable online experience – and higher customer satisfaction.

And it does more than just improve performance and availability. As your base of online users grows and applications are accessed more and more frequently, Akamai offers the scale they need to meet their demand. In addition, Akamai provides advanced security services to help protect sensitive user data and to help maintain availability in the face of the ever present specter of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. *The Impact of Poor Web Site Performance in Financial Services”, A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Akamai Technologies w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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w h o’ S w h o Q& a // dav e G ru b M a n

Dave Grubman Chief information offiCer, Chartis

In scope are policy administration, claims and finance systems. This modernisation effort relies heavily on commercial package solutions in contrast to the custom-built solutions that characterise our current legacy environment.

FST Media: What is the return on investment from Chartis’ data analytics initiatives?

GrubMan: We are doing a lot of analytical

FST Media: Has the rapid emergence of Asia as an economic power mandated a change in Chartis’ approach to IT? GrubMan: Chartis has identified globally nine countries that it considers opportunities for strategic business expansion. Three of those countries are in Asia Pacific: China, Indonesia and Vietnam. In each of these countries, Chartis has injected talent and capital to develop and execute our growth strategies. Our business is focused on developing the IT capabilities in these strategic countries.

FST Media: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months?

GrubMan: One of our top priorities is to externalise our transactional environment as much as possible. This will enable our customers, intermediaries and partners to easily do business with us through the internet and other channels. The second key priority is a modernisation and simplification of our middle office and back-end systems.

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work in the risk and profitability area for both our consumer and commercial businesses.

Using tools like SAS, we are able to identify, model and, most importantly, capitalise on opportunities hidden in the data we collect and acquire. In addition, from a risk standpoint, our analysis can help us identify profitability challenges early on so we can adjust our business before a small problem becomes a big problem. As a company, Chartis views data as a competitive weapon and is very focused on further expanding our competency in this area. In fact, recently our Chief Executive Officer announced the appointment of a Chief Science Officer who will drive much of the future strategic work we will be doing in the data analysis space.

FST Media: How have your systems evolved to cope with the growing demands of claims in the Asian region?

expectation that this in turn will impact, in a positive way, our loss ratios.

FST Media: Do the technology requirements for each country/region differ?

GrubMan: Absolutely. While we adhere to a global template, the needs of the regions are in fact distinct, and one size does not fit all. Our global architecture team sanctions and governs the technology options we can deploy. Based on the needs and characteristics of the regional business, the regional technology team will select the option best suited to the needs of their business stakeholders.

FST Media: What emerging technologies do you see shaping the insurance industry in the future?

GrubMan: I see tremendous opportunity in leveraging smartphones and tablets on the distribution and sales side. To me that is one of the most interesting areas. I also think the increasing ease with which businesses can connect electronically via the web will enable some very exciting new business models and opportunities in the area of online aggregators and insurance marketplaces. The growth of digital wallets and micro payments will also spur new and innovative insurance products.

GrubMan: We are in the midst of a global deployment of a technology platform called OneClaim. This solution incorporates workflow, imaging and a rules engine to optimise the claims handling process at Chartis. For customers, OneClaim means a simpler, faster claims process.

For Chartis, it yields a number of benefits including reduced claims handling expense, improved fraud detection and an enhanced adjudication process.

FST Media: Do you think Cloud computing has a role in insurance; and what kind of role do you see it playing in the future?

FST Media: What long term advantages do you see OneClaim delivering?

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

GrubMan: Claims service is an important point of differentiation for any insurance company. The deployment of OneClaim allows Chartis to quickly replicate best practice throughout the world. It is our

GrubMan: Eventually the story will be about Cloud computing; there will not be anything else, but right now the issue is security and compliance. I anticipate the industry will take small steps until financially regulated organisations feel comfortable that they can trust Cloud based solutions.

GrubMan: I hope my legacy will be that of a leader who knew how to take bold, innovative ideas and have them executed in a large, complex organisation.

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C o - SponSo r e d a r t i C le

Providing Insurers a Bridge to the Future

By Mr Robert Cummings, Global Head of Insurance, SAP Mr Mazahir Valikarimwala, Industry Senior Director – APJ, SAP Asia and Toni Tomic, Head of Strategy, Insurance Industry, SAP AG

Insurance Suite

Insurers face a daunting array of economic, market, and industry hurdles today. In the course of the financial crisis, market movements and greater government regulations, insurers are rethinking their key operational and IT strategies that can foster growth, increase profitability, and minimise risk. Meanwhile, several longer-term trends continue to drive industry change.

Success Stories: Customers on SAP 1. Industrialisation of Insurance Achmea Dutch insurer market leader Achmea Holding N.V., wanted to reduce complexity and improve processes. The company decided to replace over 50 disparate credit management systems with the SAP® Collections and Disbursements for Insurance package along with SAP ERP Financials solution, SAP ERP Human Capital Management solution, SAP NetWeaver® technology platform.

Achmea has now migrated the 20 systems that process over half the premium income, improving productivity and reducing customer balances outstanding. The results for process efficiency have been dramatic. Resources required for credit management within the health division have been halved, largely due to automation. The number of bank statements automatically reconciled has grown from 60 per cent to over 95 per cent.

2. Cross LOB Segmentation Platform ING Nationale Nederlanden (subsidiary of the ING Insurance division) ING started its SAP journey in 2001 and focused the last 3 years on Policy Management and ERP rationalisation and business segment orientation. ING’s vision “We have a dream… that one day the insurance factory we are now building is one platform running all our business functions” was met with a successful implementation of SAP end-to-end in the small and medium size business for life and pensions products. The new integrated landscape covering Policy Administration, Commission, Claims Management, Billing and Financials delivered Straight-Through Processing capabilities with SAP core insurance suite. Redundant and manual workstreams were eliminated, systems decommissioned and the product launch (including system setting and marketing) was achieved in weeks.

SAP proved that its software could be implemented successful in an agile/scrum way. Small teams with experts from business and IT showed that even ambitious targets can be achieved. For ING, finding the skilled and dedicated team from the business and IT sealed the successful rollout. ING is now rolling-out the Core Insurance Suite to the retail business segment in its journey to becoming an industrialised insurance company.

ApplicAtions

AnAlytics

CEO

db tech

HANA

mobile

cloud

ANALyTICS Business Intelligence Business Warehouse Insurance Analyzer

CfO

fINANCE & ADMIN

EPM HR

Accounting

GRC Purchasing

Investments Collections & Disbursements

COO

CORE OPERATION

Policy

Claims

Reinsurance

Products

CSO

SALES & SERVICE

Sales force Incentives & Commissions Customer Relationship Management Business Partner

CIO

3. International Platform Across Lines of Business Vienna Insurance Group The Vienna Insurance Group (VIG), a leading Austrian insurance group, chose SAP for Insurance, starting with the changeover of all processes to SAP, replacing the existing island solutions and individually developed systems in order to save costs. This change would include implementation of a standardised insurance management system for contract administration, claims and services, invoicing as well as collection and disbursements which would be rolled out module by module.

“We were looking for an innovative, standardised IT solution in order to incrementally replace our existing cost-intensive island solutions and host. SAP with its international orientation is a future-safe investment for us,” says Robert Redl, Business Administration Director at BIAC, the IT subsidiary of the Vienna Insurance Group (VIG) when asked how the company reached its decision.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // Joe C u n n ing h A m

agenda. At Visa, our technology research agenda is anchored by our open innovation philosophy, meaning we partner with third parties in advancing our agenda. For example, we have developed partnerships with a number of prestigious universities, government agencies and technology incubators around the world to leverage their expertise in areas that are relevant to our technology and business.

FsT mediA: What are your top IT priorities for the next 12–18 months?

Joe Cunningham head of Global TechnoloGy sTraTeGy and innovaTion, visa FsT mediA: As technology giants such as Google and Apple move into the financial services market, what do you see them offering customers that traditional players have yet to deliver?

CunninghAm: In our experience, a globally viable payments solution must have five fundamental characteristics – convenienc; simplicity; standardisation; interoperability; global accessibility; security – and we believe Visa embodies these characteristics fully. Visa has a track record of delivering highly secure and convenient electronic payment solutions to the point of sale environments. We are now extending

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our expertise to simplify commerce in new and emerging payment channels like online and mobile.

FsT mediA: Which emerging technologies do you see as potentially changing the face of the electronic payments sector?

CunninghAm: At Visa, there are essentially two aspects of innovation in which we are interested. The first is innovation on the product side, which includes advancements in mobile, social, ecommerce and information products.

The second aspect is the underlying technology. Some of our technology research themes include security and encryption, Big Data, predictive analytics and large scale virtualisation. These themes guide our internal technology Research and Development (R&D) priorities, and broadly inform the focus areas of our open innovation

CunninghAm: Our Global Technology Strategy links IT planning and decisionmaking with Visa’s corporate and business strategy, ensuring IT is oriented to enable our business and advance Visa’s technology capabilities. As the IT arm of the world’s largest retail electronic payments network, our highest priorities will always be to protect the Visa heritage of reliability, security and global inter-operability.

That aside, clearly this is an exciting time for us as we see numerous emerging technologies shaping the payments landscape. With the rising importance of digital ecommerce, mobile and social commerce, the benefits of digital currency are seeing a wider reach.

In addition, Visa has been quick to build, buy and deploy new technologies that enable greater payment access and extend our leadership across new payment channels.

Our very recent acquisitions of CyberSource and PlaySpan expand our ecommerce and digital wallet capabilities in developed and hybrid markets, while Fundamo enables us to extend our capabilities and services for the emerging markets.

FsT mediA: With the rapid rise of mobile banking, what do you see as the future for the traditional credit card?

CunninghAm: The traditional plastic card form is still a significant aspect for payments in many markets worldwide and will continue to be around for a long time. We continue to see growth for card payments across all markets, and we believe the format is not going away anytime soon.

Joe C u nn ing h a M // w h o’ S w h o Q& a

In fact, innovation is still happening: in certain market segments, consumers are still looking for feature rich cards that give them benefits in travel and online shopping. We continue to see innovation in this segment by card manufacturers and issuing banks, bringing new features and card offerings to market.

However, technology – especially online, mobile and social networks – has opened up new windows of opportunity. Visa continues to work at the leading edge of payments innovation to provide payment forms that are relevant to consumers around the world.

FST Media: How do you see open source software being utilised in the electronic payments space?

CunninghaM: Like many organisations, Visa’s core systems, distributed systems and operational environments rely heavily on open source technology. Our Global Technology Strategy describes our long term position on open source solutions, and all open source adoption is managed through our enterprise architecture technology standards process. Over time, we believe open source software will become even more important to Visa.

One example of this is Apache Hadoop, which has become a critical part of Visa’s enterprise data architecture. In the past few years, we moved this technology from R&D to a full scale production deployment supporting data intense innovative new products and services. We are very happy with the results to date, and we expect to continue to work closely with the open source community and to derive value from innovation in this field.

FST Media: How is Visa leveraging Near Field Communication (NFC) technology; and when can we expect NFC to be used as a mainstream payment option?

CunninghaM: From our perspective, NFC technology – irrespective of the manner in which it is enabled on the mobile device – will be the driver for mobile wallets.

As we have already seen, leading mobile handset manufacturers like Samsung and

Visa believes that access to a secure digital currency is a vital first step toward financial inclusion and economic growth and is critical to the development of strong, modern economies.

For example, the objective of our acquisition of Fundamo is to drive the development of products and solutions that integrate Fundamo’s mobile financial services platform with Visa’s global payments network, VisaNet. This is in line with our focus on bringing more payments services to developing markets, as Fundamo is one of the leading providers of mobile financial services for unbanked and under banked consumers in more than 40 developing markets.

FST Media: How is Visa investing in expanding its mobile banking and payments capabilities across Asia?

LG have announced they will embed NFC chips in their devices. Visa’s contactless payment application, Visa payWave, works with a number of mobile technologies that can facilitate NFC payments, including SIM card, an embedded NFC chip, or MicroSD card.

Visa is working with mobile network operators, mobile device and chip manufacturers to bring Visa payWave transactions, enabled by NFC technology, to more consumers around the world. There are a number of ways mobile payment technology can be commercialised, and we are working closely with financial institutions and telecommunications operators to determine the best business model for bringing this technology to consumers.

FST Media: The payments industry is experiencing a rapidly growing customer base in developing countries. What infrastructure is Visa investing in to build adequate capacity for these markets?

CunninghaM: Visa believes that access to a secure digital currency is a vital first step toward financial inclusion and economic growth and is critical to the development of strong, modern economies. We believe we can help increase this access in developing countries by extending our products, services and payments expertise; providing extensive financial literacy tools and resources; and developing key partnerships focused on reaching the financially underserved.

CunninghaM: Open partnerships feature prominently in Visa’s technology innovation strategy. Our ideal partners are like minded organisations who share Visa’s vision and whose existing customer base and global footprint are aligned with our target audience and geographies. Let me give you some examples. Visa’s partnership with Google allows Visa account holders to make mobile payments through Google Wallet.

The partnership is the latest effort by Visa to make mobile payments broadly available to consumers using a mobile phone. In addition, Visa has licensed Visa payWave to not just Google but also to Isis – the mobile commerce joint venture of US wireless service providers AT&T Mobility, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless.

Importantly, we also pursue an open innovation philosophy within our technology R&D group. We have developed relationships with a number of prestigious universities and technology incubators around the world to leverage their expertise in research areas that are relevant to our technology and business.

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

CunninghaM: I am fortunate to have had the chance to work with some great people and organisations. Right now, I am focused on making a positive difference in the role I play at Visa.

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w h o’ S w h o Q& a // r a jaT Ta n e ja

Rajat Taneja Regional Chief infoRmation offiCeR, ZuRiCh

Taneja: We have had numerous successful implementations across countries. For example, we are re-using much of the work done in Australia for our broker facing platform in Japan. We share corporate insurance platforms across Hong Kong, Singapore and China. On the infrastructure side, we have had a lot of success in consolidating platforms and leveraging data centre capabilities across countries.

FST Media: What are the key challenges in getting technology in line with the broader company perspective?

Taneja: There are plenty of challenges.

Our IT strategy is very much aligned with the business strategy. However, challenges continue beyond that point. Ensuring that the strategy is communicated and agreed across the breadth of the business is extremely important. All too often I have seen project decisions being made which are not aligned with the strategy.

for the next 12 to 18 months?

FST Media: To what extent do technological imperatives drive the overall business strategy at Zurich?

Taneja: Many parts of Asia Pacific are growth

Taneja: Other than the need to keep our

markets for Zurich. The focus for IT in this region will be to build our capabilities in the key growth markets and further leverage past investments in mature markets like Australia.

technology current, supported and robust, the overall IT strategy is driven by the business strategy. However, the business strategy is influenced by technology adoption in the market place. A classic example of this is the growth in usage of mobile devices. Interaction with customers on mobile devices is now common place and our business operations continue to be influenced by the emergence of such technology. Similarly, the emergence of new business-to-business interaction models in the Australian General Insurance intermediated market has heavily influenced our business strategy. Zurich has been quick to recognise this movement and our previous investment in platforms such as ZStream Xpress position us well in supporting the business strategy.

FST Media: What are your top IT priorities

FST Media: What are the key challenges in overseeing diverse operations across the Asia-Pacific region?

Taneja: It’s the diversity that makes this region challenging. Business priorities tend to be different based on the geography. Asia Pacific is a blend of mature, growing and future markets. In addition, industry practices tend to vary across these countries. The ideal mantra of a one size fits all rarely tends to work. Therefore, our challenge is to enable the business in each of these markets in a size and market appropriate fashion.

FST Media: Cross-border leverage is central to Zurich’s regional IT strategy. What do you see as the most successful examples of this?

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FST Media: How can social media be best utilised in the insurance space?

Taneja: As we see further maturity in leveraging social media as a source of market

intelligence and the GenY’s become more prominent customers of insurance, I suspect we the usage of social media in the insurance sector will grow quite significantly.

FST Media: What do you see as the relative advantages and disadvantages of thin client and Cloud computing technologies for the insurance industry?

Taneja: Depending on the market, the reason for moving to thin client technologies will be different. In mature markets, thin client technologies reduce end user computing costs, enhance security and improve service.

In emerging markets it is a key enabler for establishing rapid presence in geographically dispersed locations. Unfortunately, virtualising the desktop does increase the risk on the server side. Any server failures could immediately impact a significant user population.

With Cloud computing in general, I do see benefits in terms holding down costs of commodity services and in enabling the corporate to focus on value add services.

Public Clouds continue to face regulatory and security challenges.

FST Media: What do you expect will be your biggest challenges as a CIO on a regional level?

Taneja: Frankly, these are challenging times for CIOs in general. Every organisation is looking at optimising their IT dollars.

My challenges are no different. I need my IT organisations supporting the mature businesses to hold cost and yet support their businesses, while the IT organisations in the emerging markets need to scale up the IT capability in line with the business’s ability to invest in IT.

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

Taneja: My goal is to create a businessfocused IT organisation that partners with the business in defining and executing on enabling technology solutions.

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H o M ing H e n g // w H o’ S w H o Q& a

Ho Ming Heng Managing Director, operations anD inforMation technology, great eastern life assurance

Ho: OTP is just one of the many tools used for the protection of information.

Technology has been used both for and against the protection of information.

As has been seen time and again, each new generation of network defence tools generally leads to the spawning of a new generation of cyber attack weapons.

Effective protection against cyber threats and information theft can only come about if all elements involved in the information protection chain are effectively and diligently planned and executed. This starts with the information security policy and extends to processes, people, control measures, continuous monitoring and regular tool enhancements and updates.

FST Media: What is your approach to managing Big Data and social media?

Ho: We are still in the discovery stage with

FST Media: What are your top IT priorities for next 12-18 months?

Ho: The top priority is the consolidation and reinvention of IT within the organisation.

During the past decade, IT has been overwhelmed and has struggled to cope with high growth in demand for automation solutions from users. Users are no longer satisfied with leaving it to IT specialists to design and provide solutions, but they want to be engaged and empowered in the decision process, especially in the area of digital experience. IT needs to consolidate and be re-organised to enhance interaction, engagement and empowerment of the users.

Reinvention of the in-house IT specialist needs to take place for users to value IT as partners and consultants to their business, and not merely taken as service providers.

FST Media: Great Eastern recently introduced One-Time Password (OTP) authentication for access to online services.

Can technology alone protect business and consumers from cyber threats?

regard to Big Data. The uses and tools for social media are growing exponentially, and we have not reached the stage where we are able to identify the solution for managing unstructured data. Rather, our approach is to closely monitor the issues and challenges social media poses and concurrently be engaged with tool manufacturers to study and prepare us for the deployment of suitable solutions when the time is right.

FST Media: Do you see a role for advisers in the future, or will self-service mobile transactions become the norm?

Ho: In Asia, most of the life insurance markets still see advisers playing a major role in the distribution of products. Online sales of Simple Life and general insurance products are experiencing growth in some of the more mature markets, but these still do not contribute significantly to the overall market.

The advent of tablets and smartphone devices has spurned some innovative selfservice mobile applications, but these still have a long way to go before they become mainstream. In short, there is still a key role for intermediaries in the sales of life insurance products in Asia, although this will steadily diminish over time.

FST Media: What do you envisage as the next generation of digital insurance; and does Cloud computing justify its hype?

Ho: Great Eastern envisages that the next generation of digital insurance will be built upon new technologies to provide end users with enhanced customer experience, such as the availability of a wide range of online real-time information and services, enhanced intuitive and Aftificial Intelligence (AI) assisted user interfaces and location aware applications.

Cloud computing will complement such applications by enabling higher mobility and availability, making information and services available at the fingertips of the end user anywhere, anytime.

FST Media: In the future, will an international customer with interests in several countries be able to manage all policies from a single log-in?

Ho: A standard operating environment across all Great Eastern operations is a goal that we hope to achieve in the near future. With current technologies, it is certainly plausible for an international customer to manage all policies from a single log-in. However, current constraints to achieving this goal include regulatory requirements, industry practices, requirements of local distribution partners and local privacy laws.

FST Media: How will IT investment be impacted in light of the tightening global economic climate?

Ho: I am optimistic that the global economic climate will not have any significant negative impact on the IT investment of companies that have Asia as their dominant market place.

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

Ho: I will be happy just to be remembered as someone who made a difference to the people, organisation and causes that I care about.

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W H O’ S W H O Q& A // SU M I T PU R I

management system which streamlines and facilitates quick turnaround times for our operational systems and claim processes. We have a very robust claim management and workflow process approval system that has been recognised as best in class in the Asia Pacific region.

We also have comprehensive disaster recovery and Business Continuity Planning (BCP) strategies in place for our systems and have successfully achieved our recovery time objectives of our mission critical systems within 24 hours in comprehensive BCP simulations. In a disaster scenario, our systems and processes are designed to quickly provide all necessary information to our operations and customer service teams for processing claims. In parallel, to enhance our customers’ service, we also ensure they are constantly being provided updates via SMS, on their claim status.

Fst mediA: Do you see social media and mobile platforms dominating the way customers engage with their insurance providers in the future?

Sumit Puri CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER PRUDENTIAL LIFE ASSURANCE INDONESIA

Fst mediA: As Indonesia continues to emerge as a major economic power in the region, what challenges has this growth created for your systems? puri: The biggest challenge we face is about ensuring system scalability to keep pace with the considerable business growth. We have deployed a range of sophisticated monitoring tools that help us to proactively monitor any issues regarding system capacity so that we can plan and augment system capacity well in advance before it impacts business growth.

Fst mediA: Given the impact of natural disasters in the region, how have your systems and claims processes evolved in response? puri: For increased convenience and assurance to our customers, we have deployed an advanced business process workflow

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puri: Absolutely. Social media and mobile applications have already started playing a key role in customer engagement with their insurance providers. As we know, Indonesia is the second and third largest market in the world for Facebook and Twitter respectively.

Positive word of mouth publicity from customers on social media is becoming extremely important for the long term growth of corporations.

We are tracking the evolution of social media very carefully. Also, as insurance awareness and internet penetration levels are still considerably low in Indonesia compared to developed countries, information disbursed through mobile channels and applications helps in increasing insurance awareness for various customer segments.

We have already deployed our official Prudential Indonesia Facebook page to share information on key product developments and elicit feedback from our prospective and existing customers.

We believe social media can be used as a constructive two-way feedback mechanism for further educating our customers about

SU M I T PU R I // W H O’ S W H O Q& A

the benefits of insurance and also listening to their needs, so that we can refine our product and service offerings.

FST MEDIA: What are Prudential’s main IT priorities for the next year?

PURI: Our main priorities are to further improve convenience for our customers by offering flexible and user friendly business systems that help to simplify customer transactions. We are working to create a single integrated view of our customers across multiple source systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) customer website and datamart in order to help us understand our customers better. This way we can offer innovative, simple, customised products and solutions that meet the financial needs of customers across various life stages.

FST MEDIA: How have your customers responded to Prudential’s new range of digital applications?

PURI: We have received very positive feedback about our new digital and mobile applications for our customers and agency sales force. Some of our key digital systems – like unified communications, which provides online access to monthly transactions statements, debit and receipt information – have become the most frequented section of our website assessed by our customers.

We are planning to deploy additional statements, receipts and claims information on our website and also facilitate payment and other online transactions through digital and mobile channels to further improve our customer interface touchpoints.

FST MEDIA: How has technology played a role in keeping Prudential ahead of the curve in terms of financial performance?

PURI: Technology has indeed played a key role in ensuring Prudential always stays ahead of the curve on both customer service and product offerings. Despite being in the country for only 15 years, Prudential Life Assurance is currently the number one private sector insurance company

Positive word of mouth publicity from customers on social media is becoming extremely important for the long term growth of corporations.

in Indonesia in terms of new business premiums and market share. Technology has played a large part in driving that growth.

Recently we also became the biggest market for Prudential in the Asia region with over 22 per cent contributions to overall business growth. We are constantly striving to ensure that our IT systems differentiate us in the minds of our customers and agency force and provide a unique competitive advantage to the business.

The stated goal of our team is to leverage technology to simplify all insurance transactions and provide best in class service to our end customers – even before they feel the need to reach out to us. In order to facilitate a holistic experience for our end customers, we have deployed several leading edge systems, such as business process and workflow management, CRM, Sales Force Automation, mobile applications, unified communications and the like.

On account of our customer centric philosophy, we have won several Customer Satisfaction and Service Quality awards in the last five years in the Indonesian insurance market in both the Health and Life Insurance service categories. We have also received three regional technology awards across the Asia Pacific insurance sector for the use of innovative technology in Business Process Management (BPM).

However, we would like to constantly benchmark ourselves against new global technology trends and leverage the right technologies to help us further raise our service levels for the future.

FST MEDIA: Prudential has piloted Cloud technology. How far along are you in the process of adopting Cloud services?

PURI: We are in the final stages of deploying a Cloud based thin client solution for a large segment of our desktop users to improve our agility in service management. We have also initiated private Cloud based projects for some non-mission critical business areas on a pilot basis. We are closely tracking security standards and service level performances of present Cloud service providers and will work on enlarging the scope of our Cloud technology engagement based on the results of the same.

FST MEDIA: How is Prudential preparing to resolve the challenges presented by Big Data?

PURI: Given the increasing scale of our business, we indeed are facing huge increases in data volumes in our business.

We are working with our service providers to develop a cost-effective storage on demand model that will allow us to scale up and down data storage within 24 hours based on business demand. We have introduced a tier-based storage concept based on business importance for application systems and have finalised data optimisation and archival strategies.

FST MEDIA: Every leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy that they would like to be remembered for. What is yours?

PURI: I would like to be remembered as a strategic evangelist of change who proactively anticipated business challenges and helped his organisation fully leverage the power of technology adapted to local context. Within the last few years, Prudential Indonesia has grown to become Prudential’s largest business in Asia and we remain the clear market leader. My biggest source of satisfaction would be to successfully instil a customer-first attitude in my IT teammates, so that they start speaking the language of business in order to drive technology business alignment and long-term business ownership of technology solutions

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w h o’ S w h o Q& a // Sc o T T B a l eS

Scott Bales Chief Mobile offiCer, Movenbank

FST Media: Movenbank is being touted as the ‘third generation experience’ with no paper, no plastic and no cards. Where do you see Movenbank fitting into the banking system?

BaleS: Movenbank is looking at changing banking from a being a place you go, to something you do, meaning that all of our engagement points and our products are about creating utility. Movenbank will have some of the traditional transactional and credit-based products, but they won’t be our core differentiator. We are trying to improve on three key things: how you spend, how you save and how you live with your money. We do that by applying three different themes to the way we deliver our services and engage our customers.

These themes are around contextualisation and using the intelligence of Big Data and algorithms to identify the banking experience specific to each customer. We are implementing some of the things Google has put in place around creating an experience very specific to that person’s individual situation – the geographical context, the demographic context, the risk 86

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context and so on. That means everyone’s interaction with Movenbank will be very specific to their needs, much like a Google search is.

Another differentiator is mobility and the idea that the bank has actually been built from the ground up around the mobile experience. Our research shows that digital natives, Gen-Y and Gen-Z , who will be the primary workforce within the next five or six years, increasingly have a first internet experience on their mobile device.

We are able to look at specifics around Facebook and Twitter that show interactions with various online services, and these are increasingly through the mobile device. So we have put mobile at the heart of our offer. That will include things like the mobile wallet, Near Field Communications (NFC) capability and location based technologies.

The final piece of differentiation is around the use of the behavioural gamification theory. Gamification is not new – it has been used in FourSquare, LinkedIn and various other places around the world.

People do not tend to realise, but ‘happy hour’ is actually an application of gamification theory – the business owner is using a motivational factor to influence your behaviour. We will do similar things with Movenbank where we will incentivise customers to behave in a positive, smarter way and be accountable within their social networks if they opt in.

We will encourage our users to make frequent use of the facility and things that will actually improve the quality of the relationship over time.

Gamification will, for example, be used in place of applying for a product. Customers over time will instead qualify for a product and can be either accepted or declined. So as the customer builds a relationship with Movenbank, they may qualify for a particular credit card or a higher rate deposit account with us. It is a more organic approach to tiering customer relationships.

FST Media: How are you connecting with your target audience; are you needing to sell the concept first before the brand, or have people come on board from the outset?

BaleS: The feedback from the United States is that the idea of what we stand for resonates really well with our target audience. This is especially true given our target audience is generally more likely to adopt this experience faster than other people in the market. The measures we have taken around customer feedback and engagement have been very positive within our segment.

We also understand that the channels of engagement are very different for those who want word of mouth information via Facebook, for example, compared to the type of engagement someone might be looking for who is in their late 40s.

FST Media: Do you see Movenbank as being any different to BankSimple?

BaleS: We are good friends with the guys at BankSimple. We see them as co-pioneers in the online banking space. Our offerings are actually, at the core, very different. We are delivering a very specific experience around mobile banking and gamification to encourage positive financial behaviour – spend, save and live smarter.

FST Media: What inspires you working for an innovative company?

BaleS: The most inspiring part of working with the team at Movenbank is that they are some of the smartest people on the planet in the design and build of a bank created with a blank canvas. And the fact we are inheriting very little of the legacy that holds back traditional banks from transformational innovation inspires me as well.

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

BaleS: My journey at Movenbank is ground breaking; it brings together a number of concepts that individually few banks have attempted. Helping create a mobile-centric, socially connected, gamified experience allows me the same possibilities as a pioneer in the space.

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w h o’ s w h o Q& A // M A n u e l TAg A z A

Manuel Tagaza Chief information offiCer & head of e-Channels, Bank of the PhiliPPine islands (BPi) FsT MediA: Do you believe the hype surrounding Cloud computing, virtualisation, digital imaging and Near Field Communications (NFC) is justified?

TAgAzA: BPI has been virtualising its data centre for the last three years and this has brought both upsides and downsides to IT operations. It has definitely helped with the greening of the data centre and allowed us to better manage the geometric growth in the number of servers.

However, along with that came the need to acquire new monitoring tools and skill.

The foray into Cloud computing has been limited to non-core services and will probably always be limited to those which do not 88

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involve sensitive customer information.

The bank started with digital imaging back in 2005, and is now on its second phase for this technology as we move to enterprise content management.

We have used digital imaging extensively to enable our ‘Bank Anywhere’ program, which has served us very well competitively.

With respect to NFC, the jury is still out, but we believe that it is something that the banks cannot ignore. BPI is in the midst of launching its pilot NFC mobile wallet in partnership with selected retail outlets and restaurants.

FsT MediA: What are your key IT priorities for the year ahead?

TAgAzA: BPI continues to do very well.

IT remains central to the bank’s overall good performance with its role in facilitating operational efficiencies as well as in revenue generation. The major successes of BPI IT recently were focused on customer empowerment.

BPI Express Assist (BEA) is an IT-enabled service at the branch level that allows customers to enter transaction data on touchscreen machines. Transactions executed through BEA include cash and cheque deposits, withdrawals, bills payment, and tax and social security payments.

Through BEA, a client need not stand in a queue. The system will generate a queue number and customers can sit comfortably while waiting for their turn. The transaction will then be automatically transmitted to the teller. This process ensures accuracy and reduces the total transaction time by 33 per cent. It also eliminates the need to fill out deposit, withdrawal and payment slips.

Investments Online, on the other hand, allows investors to initiate mutual funds and Unit Investment Trust Fund (UITF) transactions through the internet. Investors can access portfolio information, explore further investment opportunities, subscribe to additional funds, redeem investments and make regular contributions online.

Aside from facilitating investment transactions, this online service seeks to further address a wider market as its efficiency has allowed the bank to reduce the minimum investment requirement to PHP 10,000 (USD $230).

For 2012/13, two major strategic areas for the bank where IT will play a significant role will be on customer experience innovation and precognitive/predictive marketing.

New ways of selling through all distribution channels, particularly the direct, non-branch channels continue to be a challenge.

More importantly, customers do not always find the service and buying experience easy and convenient across the different channels. The bank will therefore focus on innovating and introducing new, customercentric approaches to multi-channel delivery, leveraging on the business intelligence from its robust data warehouse.

FsT MediA: In your opinion, what have been the game changing technologies that have shaped today’s modern banking systems?

TAgAzA: The birth of the internet and the continuing development in this field have changed banking in almost every aspect. It

M a n u e l Tag a z a // w h o’ S w h o Q& a

has spawned new requirements in terms of user interface and new devices, and paved the way for the development of new products for convenience banking, but also brought to the forefront the need for more robust security infrastructure.

FST Media: As head of BPI’s new e-Channels Group, what innovations are you exploring in the customer experience space?

Tagaza: The first order of the day is to integrate all the non-branch channels so that the customer experience will be seamless and consistent across all channels. The rapid development of the internet and mobile computing, where speed to market was a primary concern while the technologies were still evolving, resulted in platforms that were not tightly integrated, both in the front and back-ends. If we can successfully re-engineer the integration, we should be able to offer products and services in any of the platforms without re-work on the part of the customer and back-room support.

FST Media: With the growth of online banking and eChannels, what do you see as the future role of the retail branch?

Tagaza: The branch office of the future will be mainly a sales channel, where business leads are sourced and pursued.

It will concentrate on specialised customer servicing and upstreaming more complex products.

FST Media: Do you regard social networking as a new channel opportunity for BPI and what security issues need to be overcome?

Tagaza: Social networking is potentially a rich channel for new business opportunities.

At this point, we are trying to understand how to better leverage the information harvested from these sources and what kind of products and services can be pushed. However, we have been using data gathered for enhancing our services, particularly responding to customer concerns that go viral. Security issues will definitely have to be addressed for us to proceed with financial transactions through social networks.

social networking is potentially a rich channel for new business opportunities … security issues will definitely have to be addressed for us to proceed with financial transactions through social networks.

Mobile computing, through mobile phones and tablet computers, is all part of our self-service banking blueprint where our mobile banking platform can be rendered in any device where there is already a significant user-base. Currently, our mobile banking application (app) is available in Java, Blackberry, iPhone and Android smartphones.

FST Media: What is your experience with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology at BPI, and what key lessons have been learnt?

Tagaza: We started our SOA journey about five years ago when we decided to standardise our application-to-application interface to use web services. Prior to this, we used different protocols for cross-platform integration that made our applications tightly coupled and inherently less flexible.

After standardising web services for application integration, we acquired tools and services from IBM for the implementation of our Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). The ESB helped de-couple complex integration logic from each application providing consistency in connectivity across point-to-point infrastructure diversity.

Together with the ESB, we implemented a business process server that provides for the automation and orchestration of business processes across the enterprise. Thus far, the most expansive implementation of our

SOA architecture is the bank’s Universal Customer Acquisition Platform (UCAS) which, aside from providing a 360 degree customer view for the bank’s frontliners, will fully automate the account onboarding process for most of the bank’s products and services.

FST Media: What do you see as key to managing the security concerns relating to digital banking?

Tagaza: E-banking requires more stringent security measures, but technology and software alone will never be enough to fully mitigate the risk. Customers need to be fully aware of the risks so they can smartly manage their accounts in electronic channels where threats continue to constantly emerge in varying forms. The compliance requirements also demand different and continuing training for bank personnel.

FST Media: What process improvement strategies are in place to ensure projects are managed on time and to budget?

Tagaza: Process improvement will be aligned with the bank’s business strategy. It is not just about what we do, but what we choose not to do. And in what we choose to do, we need to do exceptionally well. As such, we have increasingly been more selective in our choice of projects, so that our resources can be focused on strategic initiatives.

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

Tagaza: IT/business alignment. The IT governance model that I designed is heavily focused on the tight alignment of IT activities with the business strategies. It is about forcing the organisation to make hard decisions in terms of choosing projects that will lead to its attainment of higher business goals.

It is also about transparency in IT activities through published metrics and regular review of project benefits realisation. This legacy is carried forward as I move onto the business side, where I can now test how much I have instilled this in the organisation.

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The Next Frontier for Mobile and Web Applications Top row (left to right): Richard Bell, Former Director, Enterprise Mobility, Group Technology & Operations, Standard Chartered; Stephen Goh, SVP, T&O CBO Business Process Solutions, Program Management Office & Innovation Office, DBS; Edrick Ho, Head of Platform & Delivery Channels, Asia Pacific, ANZ; Yvonne Cheong, VP, Head of Internet & Mobile Banking, Consumer Financial Services, OCBC; Eddy Tai, MD, Head of IT, Asia, Julius Baer; Bottom row (left to right): Sandeep Lal, MD, eBusiness, Consumer Banking, DBS; Noel Santiago, SVP, Head Retail Supply Management, Group Technology & Operations, UOB; Ruedi Wipf, CEO, AdNovum; Martin Nokes, MD, AdNovum; Paul Tan, VP, Technology Strategist Global Commercial Corporate Investment Banking Technology, Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

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

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Mo b ile // ro u n dta b le

ruedi WiPF, adnoVuM: Singapore is AdNovum’s competence centre for mobile computing and solutions.

Clients for these solutions in the financial industry include major global banks such as UBS AG. UBS Mobile Banking became available for UBS customers in Switzerland as an iPhone application (app) in June 2011. The app’s user interface (UI) was designed jointly with Frog Design. AdNovum was responsible for all technical aspects, including architecture and security and provided full technical implementation and integration from the mobile app to the backend server.

The mobile banking app allows for checking account balances and viewing transaction details. There is full drill down for portfolios with details of stock exchange and security transactions carried out, purchase price, market value and so on. The app also has an excellent graphical portfolio overview with pie charts and flow charts. As a special feature for the Swiss market you

can scan payment slips with the iPhone camera. Maybe in a year you will be able to take a picture of a cheque and have it cleared at the same time. They already do this in the US. The next version of the app will have multiplatform support, integrated UBS quotes and stock market details using the latest market information.

The typical user of the app is not a retail client with just a checking account, but rather high net worth individuals who have an interest in essence with a lot of differentiation. In terms of technical aspects, let me address the multi-platform strategy and also security.

When you download the UBS Mobile Banking app it’s not native, it’s what we call a ‘hybrid mobile app’. We use an open source framework called PhoneGap which hides platform specific details and allows one to write portable applications. The UBS application was written in HTML5 and Javascript. We didn’t use any iPhone specific stuff, except for camera integration. Most of it w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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“What is the business case for mobile banking?

I see three obvious reasons: first is to retain existing customers; second is to generate additional business; and third is to reduce your operating costs.”

RUEDI WIPF, ADNOVUM

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is standard technology: HTML5, Javascript and CSS3.

As a consequence, the portability of the application to other platforms is straightforward; you can look at the app in any standard browser.

Security and visibility are more important issues for mobile banking than they are with traditional e-banking. When e-banking at home you normally have two factor authentication with a one-time password. However, most mobile users don’t want to carry around another device in their pocket in addition to their phone. For UBS at the moment there is no strong authentication but what has been done is very pragmatic. All the information that can be seen is anonymised. Account numbers can be given a name like ‘my savings account’ and you never see the account number or name of the customer. UBS decided to keep it simple for the moment and to make usage convenient by requiring just user identification and password authentication.

What is the business case for mobile banking? I see three obvious reasons: first is to retain existing customers; second is to generate additional business; and third is to reduce your operating costs. Mobile banking will become a commodity over the next two to three years so any serious bank will have to have it.

It will not be a strategic advantage, just a commodity.

When it comes to generating additional business, we have several ideas.

Take the younger generation, Generation Y; some research companies, especially in the US, assume that many young people will never use traditional e-banking in their life. They will just stay with mobile banking because everything’s mobile. They will never sit at home using their computer; they will just use it everywhere and anytime. We can’t expect that every user will be an e-banking user first and a mobile user afterwards. According to a US consulting firm, 25 per cent of all mobile banking customers will come from outside online banking.

I’m not sure how relevant these figures are here in Asia, but I’m sure that the younger generation will use these technologies in different ways. Another aspect involves the different groups of potential clients, for example more rural than local customers. Some are online already with a computer and an internet connection, but more have mobile phones. A study I read says that only around 50 million of the Indonesian population have a bank account out of a population of 250 million. However, 100 million have mobile phones, and the rate of new mobile phones is double the rate of new banking customers. Evidently there is a huge number of people who have low or no access to their bank information, but they have more and more access

to mobile technology. This will impact new business in the future. Also consider trading transactions; in the future people on holiday may say, “Hey I’ll do some trading while I’m in Barbados”. This will also generate new business.

Looking at reducing costs, a US study says that each call to a call centre costs an average of $6.50 – $8.

People are using their mobile phones to call the centre, but that service is not necessary if they can just log in and find the information they need. There is definitely potential to reduce costs, but as with many projects typically costs rise first. You have to be smart if you want to achieve cost savings through traditional IT infrastructure.

A mobile strategy should try to reduce existing infrastructure but if you build a greenfield mobile solution and do not reuse classic e-banking business logic then the costs and maintenance will certainly go up, not down. The business case for UBS Mobile Banking was built around a pure marketing initiative.

International competitors started to offer mobile banking, so UBS needed a good mobile solution. Not primarily for retail customers, but rather for high net worth individuals. Naturally, UBS also wants to retain customers, reduce costs and so on, but the main driver is an image campaign. UBS is positioning itself as an efficient modern bank that provides customers with all the information they need, wherever they want, whenever they want.

edriCK Ho, anZ: How long did it take to develop? ruedi WiPF, adnoVuM: Four months with a team of four people, two of them in Singapore and two of them in Zurich. edriCK Ho, anZ: How about the adoption rate? ruedi WiPF, adnoVuM: In the first month, there were 35,000 downloads, which is a great figure for the Swiss market.

SandeeP lal, dbS: The security piece is pretty well defined here in Singapore. The Monetary Authority of Singapore takes a fairly active role.

They agree that SMS on mobile phones doesn’t work, and have told us that we need transaction signing tokens by the end of next year. Singapore’s Central Bank has said this is the minimum level of security they expect for mobile banking. It makes it easier for us because it will be a level playing field; not Bank A doing this and Bank B doing that, as has been the case so far.

Mo b ile // ro u n dta b le

When DBS went into mobile banking, it wasn’t a marketing approach, it’s what the customer expects.

Everyone now in Singapore has iPhones. Smartphone usage is widespread. People expect these services, they expect the convenience. If you stay out of the market, in less than a year you will have fallout from everyone in your team. The customer is driving it.

YVonne CHeonG, oCbC: Yes, we have a trading app

than banking. Consumers are defining what kinds of services are put into a mobile platform. They are not just looking for transactions; they are not just looking for payment services; they want enrichment and interaction. If I’m a merchant I can capitalise on location based services and so on. They are expecting that guided recommendations are provided as part of their relationship with the bank.

as well as banking so we see a good mix of people. With younger ones, they use it to manage credit cards and check the latest promotions, and others will do fund and money transfers and things like that. It has wide usage. We even have people we call the jetsetters; they’ll be at Reagan Airport picking up the phone and making a new payment. Customers have been telling us how they use it and it’s quite surprising. With FRANK we target a very specific group: early 20s and Gen Y. The whole branding has a very different look. These are the guys that began reading online, the ‘educational natives’. They are not going to go to branches, everything is online. With mobile banking most banks don’t offer the full suite; it’s quick, simple, easy and you do what you need to do. Fully-fledged online banking they do at home or on campus.

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: Is it about a particular

eddY tai, JuliuS baer: We have online banking, but

generation or demographic?

it. Based on our dialogue with specific segments – for example female customers – they may say, “Instead of sending me flyers, or promotions by email, can you advise me at the point that I need it?” Would a unique card that addresses me as a lady with your organisation be a way for you to reach out instead of me carrying all these coupons?

the business demand is more in providing information to clients. We don’t have a strong demand for mobile trading yet. We have direct access clients who are trading more frequently, but they usually have the professional skills and prefer to call the execution desk. One type of client that has such demands and is becoming more common is the external asset manager. The business priority for the mobile banking transaction will be revisited over time according to clients’ needs.

SandeeP lal, dbS: We do see an age group bias.

YVonne CHeonG, oCbC: Now UBS has rolled out

Younger people are the ones who are adopting it faster.

Maybe they are managing their accounts closer to the line. Mobile banking is driven by urgency. You do mobile banking as opposed to e-banking because you need to look up something while you’re on the go. We see a lot of young people who keep lower balances, and who are managing their credit cards. It’s not always young people; maybe someone who’s managing fast account flows or someone who wants to do their investing and trading. Anything that needs more urgency will drive the early adopters.

these services, how do they see the client business model? Relationship Management (RM) is a lot about personal touch and recently it has become quite mobile intensive. How did they resolve this? The mobile phone is about the client servicing themselves with or without RM.

noel SantiaGo, uob: The expectation is more

noel SantiaGo, uob: It depends on how you look at

YVonne CHeonG, oCbC: When we first started, it was the young ones that came on board; they are very comfortable playing around with gadgets and just enjoy such things. Over the years we don’t see a gender bias, but we see it slowly moving into two age groups: younger ones and then customers even in their 50s and 60s trading online.

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: Does the OCBC application allow me to trade?

“Consumers are defining what kinds of services are put into a mobile platform. They are not just looking for transactions; they are not just looking for payment services; they want enrichment and interaction.”

NOEL SANTIAGO, UOB

ruedi WiPF, adnoVuM: It is a conflict all banks have with phone online banking. The bank would like to be in close touch with the customer, but the customer gets information via the phone so why call an advisor?

No bank is going to get good contact through the software. With certain clients, UBS can offer ‘driver functionality’ so that an advisor can join a customer’s e-banking session and, for example, show certain investment opportunities. However, these models haven’t really worked out; nowadays most customers just find all the information on the internet. This is a big question for the whole banking industry, and I don’t think IT can provide a final answer. It’s more a business question: what is the added value of a live bank from a customer perspective? w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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SandeeP lal, dbS: I read a study recently that suggested consumers, especially high value ones, will go to websites and collect data on what they might want to buy. However, before they execute the tendency is still to go to the branch before they purchase. After they purchase, they may do the servicing by net or mobile.

It’s probably for things that are a little more complex than routine stock trading, but they still want to talk to banks. Maybe it will change later.

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: Has anybody tried to save money with mobile banking? For example, if I lose a credit card or suspect that somebody has fraudulently copied it I need to block it immediately. But if I had a convenient app which allowed me to lock the card, that’s something I would probably use. Has anybody seen such cost reductions through mobile banking?

StePHen GoH, dbS: We can get a bit confused with

“Mobile is powerful; mobile with internet is very powerful... Mobile is a touch point that cuts across all levels of society.”

STEPHEN GOH, DBS

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mobile banking and mobile internet. The internet space itself is not mobile, so it’s really about mobile connectivity. We connect to our mobile internet, back to the internet space again. The union there is the mobility. It’s about making a touch point available and the key is that you have to identify the segment that wants the touch point. Mobile is powerful; mobile with internet is very powerful. Mobile with internet, with a touch point to the right segment, is what a lot of organisations are trying to identify. Mobile is a touch point that cuts across all levels of society. Look at Gen Y today. My daughter cannot leave the house without her mobile phone. Last week she needed some funds for a university iPad offer. She had lost her ATM card, so I said if you need money you can come back and I’ll give you a cheque. She said no, just send it to my friend’s account, she’ll text you. I did, and her friend withdrew the money and gave it to her, and it was done.

In India mobile phones are used for simple transactions like micro payments; again it’s a touch point. To access a bank could be 50 miles away. Micro payments are a very effective solution and already banks are able to build relationships with rural areas.

The micro payment industry is moving very fast. The users may seem insignificant but they have a huge influence now mobile gives them the ability. Whether the solution is a mobile internet or mobile SMS it’s all about that touch point that the bank is creating to be more attuned with the customer. It’s a service and the banking industry is all about service. Historically the first touch point started with the branch or the post office. In the ‘70s the evolution went to ATM as the touch point. Now the touch point is internet and mobile. Each generational touch point is focused on

getting faster. The challenge is how we apply that to our business.

SandeeP lal, dbS: When we look at our internet banking we constantly ask, is this making money for us, is this reducing costs? A tremendous amount of interaction is done through internet banking which may not have been there before. People didn’t enquire about their balances three times a week because they had to go into the branch or walk to an ATM. But now they have the internet they do that. We’re seeing the same thing on mobile; not that it’s cutting costs, but people on the go are checking their balances a lot more. If I look at my total volumes they are growing and mobile is taking the relationship.

riCHard bell, Standard CHartered: Access to your balances is now just a hygiene factor, every bank has to do it. The world is not all like Singapore where we have iPhones and unlimited 3G but places like Indonesia are changing where they are essentially using basic Symbian and BlackBerry. Chinese manufacturers are producing Android handsets for under $100 and that will drive change because the low point of entry will make smart devices ubiquitous. That will make it easier for banks because then we can target those richer smartphones. Singaporeans change devices every six months and customers will not stay on an iPhone if Google produces a better device. The challenge is being on top of that.

ruedi WiPF, adnoVuM: Can mobile technology change the situation for the under-banked in a way that’s interesting for banks?

SandeeP lal, dbS: You have to come up with a model.

In India there’s a company called Eko and their model is based on that segment of the Indian population that does not bank and does not want to keep cash in the bank. Banks in India are not necessarily welcoming of people who may not be well dressed and walk into a branch, but these guys do want banking. The regulators are interested to see that the under-banked and non-banked get banked because they are missing out on opportunities. They relaxed their requirements to allow banks to set up distribution networks without traditional branches but with local corner stores so you could deposit or transfer money at the store where you collect your groceries. There were banks which showed interest, but it was all on an experimental basis. Eko’s model has started taking off, but I don’t know if it’s successful to the point that mainstream banks would see it as a good business case today. The jury is still out.

Mo b ile // ro u n dta b le

riCHard bell, Standard CHartered: Platforms are evolving so quickly and market shares are changing radically. I read that Windows Phone 7 had gone below two per cent market share for new phones, which basically makes them irrelevant in the current context. If you plan to roll out an application, you need to decide which platforms you want to support, also the phones, even tablets. Are people trying to go as broad as possible, or like UBS be targeted, first going for iPhone and then three months later going to Android? Does UBS have plans after Android for BlackBerry or others? We use the hybrid approach, so we have apps that we bring out on multi-platforms.

First we bring out iPhone and Android, as well as the HTML5 website. From a maintenance, version and multi-country perspective, the mobile website is the easier way to go. But you can’t quite get the richness of application experience with a mobile app that users expect on their iPhone. So we’ve used multiple approaches.

SandeeP lal, dbS: Singapore is a special market.

In terms of smartphones it is easily 75 per cent iPhone, but DBS also came out with an app which is across operating systems. In Indonesia we hear that BlackBerry is popular. It depends on your segment.

For the more affluent segment smartphones are a reasonable assumption, but if you go to mass markets like Indonesia and India then you might want SMS banking. You need to have the flexibility of multiple operating systems. Tablets are slightly different; right now in Singapore we are seeing a great attraction for iPads.

need to make sure that your technology and platforms are able to keep up.

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: You don’t know what the situation is going to be even half a year down the road, so you need to be absolutely sure that no matter what happens you can adopt and support what comes out.

SandeeP lal, dbS: You are always scared about prejudicing yourself into a particular path, and then something changes in the market which you have no control over.

YVonne CHeonG, oCbC: The scary thing about dabbling in the mobile space is that change is so much faster compared to the internet. With the internet it didn’t matter when new browsers were introduced as the net would still function. That’s not the case in the mobile world. You realise that you have to invest continuously.

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: When it comes to the iPad, do your clients use the traditional online banking site?

YVonne CHeonG, oCbC: We have apps specifically for the iPad.

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: Was it worth it?

YVonne CHeonG, oCbC: Yes, people like surfing and

YVonne CHeonG, oCbC: Customers appreciate the fact that we really optimise the richness of an iPad device, the navigation and things which you can’t do on a PC.

using iPads as their primary internet device. They can also do all of their banking with them.

riCHard bell, Standard CHartered: That’s one of

SandeeP lal, dbS: Galaxy hasn’t caught up much.

YVonne CHeonG, oCbC: Even though other devices are catching up, iPads offer better value for money. The iPad has the appeal, brand and cult following. We have customers telling us that they don’t use a PC; they only use the iPad for internet banking. It’s a shift. Together with multi-platforms, the other consideration is the speed with which you are able to adapt to change, and the availability of the devices. When the iPhone arrived in 2008, it revolutionised how people used mobile internet. Before that mobile browsers wouldn’t optimise content, but the iPhone changed that. Android is another platform gaining speed. Banks have to adapt very quickly because the rate of change is amazing. You

“The iPad has the appeal, brand and cult following.

We have customers telling us that they don’t use a PC; they only use the iPad for internet banking. It’s a shift.” yvonne cheong, ocbc

the reasons we do it. It’s very popular. iPad users hate to see that times two button; they’re being cheated out of the experience of this wonderful device they have.

SandeeP lal, dbS: iPad users are definitely looking for something different to classic internet banking.

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: From a functional perspective, would it be broader than what you get on your mobile?

SandeeP lal, dbS: From a look and feel perspective they expect superiority. We don’t have enough experience to give you a clear indicator on functionality, but I feel they would want the same level as their internet banking, not necessarily mobile. w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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SiMon tan, adnoVuM: Besides applications for retail banking, will mobile technology change the way we do things in wealth management or private banking? edriCK Ho, anZ: In terms of wealth management,

“The key questions that a business needs to answer when embarking on mobile developments is what their business proposition is, how they make money, what their target clients are looking for, and the markets in which they operate.” edrick ho, anz

I believe there will always be a need for banker relationship manager interactions in the affluent and high net worth segments, particularly with an advisory-based model. Where internet and mobile banking can support this model, is by providing clients with easy access to up-to-date information on their wealth portfolio, relevant content and selective transaction capabilities. This results in the interaction with the relationship managers being focused on higher value transactions, such as advice. Added to this is extending mobile technologies to empower the relationship managers with mobility devices such as tablets with on hand information and tools to service and sell to clients while out of the office, which is the common profile of customer interactions in wealth management.

The key questions that a business needs to answer when embarking on mobile developments is what their business proposition is, how they make money, what their target clients are looking for, and the markets in which they operate. For example, a more affluent banking play in a mature market like Singapore with a relatively advanced IT infrastructure and high usage of smartphones, requires a rich experience developed across a wide product and service catalogue on devices such as the iPhone and iPad. In Indonesia, there is a high usage of BlackBerry particularly in the affluent segment, which requires a potentially different experience.

At the other end of the spectrum in markets like the Pacific where we have a large retail distribution network and the maturity of the internet and smartphones is quite low, we are working on providing a slightly different proposition using an SMS style mobile banking service aimed at reducing the high branch traffic for cash-based transactions, along with banking the unbanked, many of which have a mobile phone before they have a banking account.

more popular in Switzerland, Android or iPhone/iPad? And what are people using the phones and tablets for while they’re travelling?

ruedi WiPF, adnoVuM: I don’t know the statistics in detail, but there is a higher density of iPhone users. I’m not sure what people are doing on their phones when they’re on the train or walking to the office.

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: In the MRT here in Singapore you see people walking in the rush hour while using their smartphones and tablets, which seems almost dangerous. Are most of you using corporate email on the BlackBerry?

noel SantiaGo, uob: There seems to be some perception that BlackBerry security for corporate email is more robust; that seems to be why firms still use them.

riCHard bell, Standard CHartered: Certainly the

Paul tan, banK oF aMeriCa Merrill lYnCH: I’m from the commercial corporate investment banking side, and our mobile offering for corporate banking is still emerging, though we have pilot customers already on it. When you are one of the last players in the corporate mobile banking market and our competitors

ruedi WiPF, adnoVuM: Google announced recently it had bought Motorola Mobility. I guess they bought them mainly for the patents. Motorola’s patents are also used by Google’s competitors. Google has a lot of

Merrill Lynch, do you use any mobile or tablet apps?

who ’s wh o of fs i

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: Ruedi, which platform is

cost argument is compelling, as you have BlackBerry Enterprise Server licensing and infrastructures to maintain. BlackBerry people just love the physical keyboard. There are some issues, like regulation in London and the FSA ruling on mobile phone recording; you can’t do that on an iPhone at the moment. Our device is deployed as a hybrid device. We allow users to save movies or music or install their own apps, but at the same time we have our corporate side for services, contacts, calendars, email, and we’re virtual private network enabled so you can access our network from your phone. The underlying reason we have our system is for the apps. We have a lot of internal apps for our staff; productivity based apps, apps for sales enablement through our relationship manager. For instance, a letter of credit on hold can be fixed straight away for our trade focused customers and so on. That in turn helps reduce the burden on the back office. We are starting to see some real gains there.

Martin noKeS, adnoVuM: At Bank of America

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already have almost everything, the business and product teams sometime struggle to prioritise what is most important for the customer. At this point the mobile version available to our pilot corporate clients is the BlackBerry browser since most of them use or carry the BlackBerry.

Mo b ile // ro u n dta b le

fights now with competitors and I expect buying those patents helps them fight back. They certainly didn’t buy it because of the technology.

noel SantiaGo, uob: This is mostly pre-paid? So

eddY tai, JuliuS baer: It will be interesting to see

riCHard bell, Standard CHartered: Yes, it’s like

whether they are serious about half their business or whether they just sell it later.

their branch network.

SandeeP lal, dbS: Google is primarily a technology company, and their provision of financial services so far has failed. They’re losing some attractiveness in the Valley and Facebook is now attracting top-notch talent there. Apple is continuing to power ahead. Google have responded well with Google+ but for them to go into financial services they need to have people with a financial background. Their failure with Google Checkout is quite telling. They are very specifically focused on search and advertising. That’s their model, and their biggest threat is that search will happen on Facebook. Larry Page now has Google+ reporting directly to him, that’s where his focus is. Will they jump from where they are to being a bank? No. The company you need to be more worried about getting into online banking is PayPal. They’ve got their payments piece and now they have started sending e-statements. Next they’ll have a depository account with interest, and then they’ll have trading. Apple is the other one; they have this incredible hidden network where everyone buys though iTunes. They have credit cards or pre-paid cards and if Apple increases the merchants then they become a very strong payments company.

riCHard bell, Standard CHartered: I was talking to one of the telcos in the Philippines and they’re doing interesting things in mobile payments; rather like Western Union where you can have micro transfers occurring between accounts.

YVonne CHeonG, oCbC: GCash or Smart Money? riCHard bell, Standard CHartered: Smart Money, yes. Their customers are saying on average their income is 50 cents a day and they want to bank it. They want to transfer money to relatives who are in a village 15 kilometres down the road or wherever.

ruedi WiPF, adnoVuM: Is that run just as an internet service?

riCHard bell, Standard CHartered: This large telco has a huge number of subscribers and they’re happy to do micro payments between subscribers. They have an app, it’s easy to do, and it’s almost like online banking.

the balances are already fixed, and it’s just transferring notes from one phone to another?

SandeeP lal, dbS: I used to work at PayPal until 2008 and talking to these guys in the Philippines it looked very practical from the outside. A lot of their payments were eBay related payments. Their ability to convert the peer-to-peer payments, to monetise that and convert it into a profitable business model is still not demonstrated. The need is clearly there but how do you charge a customer? With the PayPal model there is always a merchant on the other side. But when you have a consumer on the other side and you start charging, they tend to go for the slower version.

noel SantiaGo, uob: Because it’s pre-paid, the primary holder of that account will load something more than he normally does. The family or the relatives who are relying on this person will be the purse; he is the one distributing. What the company is trying to do is get him to load more into his account.

The rest is downstream, they are the consumers.

Let them spend. Let them use their ‘load’ and then try to make the guy put more money into the account.

The company is still figuring out how to make money out of it.

riCHard bell, Standard CHartered: Surely they make money off the float. As long as it stays within your network, they can just make money off your money.

“The company you need to be more worried about getting into online banking is PayPal... Apple is the other one.” sandeep lal, dbs

SandeeP lal, dbS: Yes, even if they download more.

If the holder has an average balance of $20 and you multiply it by millions of users, the float is a significant piece of the model. The thing that really created the business model was the commission charged from the merchant. Bankers generally think flow, but that was not the juice.

noel SantiaGo, uob: There’s already a proliferation of ‘load stations’. On almost every corner anyone can put a sign on their house window and say ‘Come here with your phone and load it’. They will call the master merchant; they will do loading and they get some commission out of it. They’re making money out of the commission because there’s no additional cost to them; it is their house, people just walk to the window counter and request the services of topping up the value and loading to the phone.

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Evolving Trends in Governance, Risk & Compliance sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: Our discussion will focus on innovative developments in business operations and case management relating to Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). We will explore the evolving role of an integrated framework in overcoming challenges and managing risk effectively, whilst still making decisions consistent with business objectives. The challenges that remain in understanding market and credit risk exposure across multiple silos are around achieving an integrated GRC effort and tracking the current compliance obligations being put forward by regulators in Malaysia.

andrew kerr, ambank: In Asia there has been a push to fix the infrastructure of banking and catch up 98

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with western banking. That’s been a good thing in the sense that technology keeps moving so quickly that we were able to leapfrog into newer technologies and newer thought processes. AmBank has replaced the entire suite of risk infrastructure, or is in the process of doing so. We’ve introduced funds transfer pricing – which was a competitive battle – and asset liability management; we were also able to replace the bar engine in the markets area. With that, we look to see the economic capital and portfolio management tools in the next 12–18 months, and really move into that sort of advanced status under Basel. In Basel III, what we have to be careful of in Asia, and particularly Malaysia, is a false sense of security. Capital isn’t really the issue – liquidity and funding is – but we are in a

Gov e r n a n c e , r is k & co m pli a nc e // ro u n dta b le

Top row (left to right): Andrew Kerr, Chief Risk Officer, Ambank; Rozman Bin Shariff, Head of Operation Risk Management, Bank Simpanan Nasional; Lim Then Fui, Director, Risk Management, Public Bank; Geetha Sivapathasundram, Head of Group Compliance, CIMB; Matthias Chay, Head of AML Compliance, Public Bank; Bottom row (left to right): Sanjay Uppal, Group Chief Financial Officer, Hong Leong Bank; Jai Raj Batra, Country Chief Risk Officer, Standard Chartered; Sam Mukhopadhyay, Risk & Compliance Solutions Leader, IBM; Tiang Siew Lim, Chief Internal Auditor, CIMB; Rossaya Mohd Nashir, Head of Operations & Finance, CIMB The executives featured in this roundtable held these positions at the time of publication.

liquid environment at present. The benefit of portfolio management concentrations and correlations is something that we really need to understand better.

With Malaysia and Asia in general, we’re funded very much at the short end. You can’t change overnight on those types of issues, but that is one area that the banks need to improve on and really understand the asset and liability management perspective around operations and debt management.

The good news is that generally speaking we’re really well placed, with capital liquidity and balance sheet quality. But it’s highly competitive in Malaysia and Asia, and it’s easy to drop standards. From time to time, in the past five years I’ve seen that in different areas. Right now I sense that with the global economy being as it is, Malaysia is beginning to feel the pain.

The growth is slowing and the confidence is down.

There’s no real shock visible as yet, but with pressure on growth in profits it’s very easy to drop standards

and targets, and that’s probably collectively our biggest risk at present.

But overall it’s a good news story, and I think the banks are spending a lot of money – they are lifting their infrastructure and are beginning to benefit.

It’s a good beginning as long as we keep good, commonsense discipline.

lim then Fui, public bank: At Public Bank there is no difference in the business model; but we are extremely focused. Processes are to lower those risks and to implement a program management plan, both in the lending side and the management of those risks. There are two aspects of liquidity. Operator Compliance Risk (OCR), I think, is challenging because of the high runoff rates. And also the way that it is one size; you’ve got the terms of the Malaysians, the high selling rates, the management funds, the Bank Negara, that we have. Those are w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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called the hard per cent runoffs, which I think needs some discussion.

The way you make a bank fit the behaviour of the depositors, was also a great thing to do, but it is something for a new model that is susceptible to the Central Bank. That is Public Bank’s biggest challenge.

The other point is the data quality, because we are very focused on detail. Once you have got a loan, you don’t ask the customers for any further data, so the data is very static. We have a lot more to do, and it takes a more granular analysis on top of the loans. Accessing the customer’s hard data information (their income level, their age bracket, some other current states of the customers) is not very forthcoming, especially now with the industrial knowledge that comes in on these data professions.

“What we have found really interesting is that within the organisation, the compliance aspect has clearly been a game-changer in Asia since the Asian financial crisis.”

Sanjay Uppal, Hong leong Bank

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Jai raJ batra, standard chartered : From where I’m situated I see there are more challenges around Basel – there’s a good experience around it, so the recent trend that we are seeing is that it is possible that the Financial Services Association (FSA) could be pushing the banks back to the standardised approach.

Every bank has spent a lot and come up with the capital saves. That’s what the regulators want to look at now. There is a trend of wanting to move back to the standardised model, which would mean that we’re doing whatever they want, doing what Bank Negara wants. I think from the perspective of the systems and models, from the risk infrastructure or risk philosophy – that is where it is embedded across the field and we do have a risk management framework at this time. But the other challenge we face is the people. Malaysia has an exceptionally high level of attrition, much higher than other countries. sanJay uppal, honG leonG bank: What we have found really interesting is that within the organisation, the compliance aspect has clearly been a game-changer in Asia since the Asian financial crisis.

It has had an impact on the way you do business and on the cost of compliance. So I sat back and said, “Is this going to drive change in the way we should be looking at the returns that the bank generates?”

You should be looking at the pricing, because some of the compliance costs will be passed onto the customers. Further,combine that with the increased complexity in our businesses, and the impact on pricing is compounded.

There were key elements in Malaysian banking sector that were apparent in the crisis, and I think all those principles have worked – the regulatory focus on capital, liquidity, business complexity and

just an overall active level of supervision. It is admirable how much the banking system has lifted its own game and this was evident in the way Asia dealt with the recent crisis. Having said that, what does this mean for the future? What I think is, yes, the recent crisis is going to change the way we do business, also pricing to customers etc.

But do we have to change the way we operate in banking businesses?

In my view, one of the biggest challenges for the banking system is that, over the years, we have done everything as a business as usual (BAU)-plus. What we haven’t done is to say, “We need to rethink how we should operate in this new reality?” The current approach makes it more complicated, more expensive, but perhaps not effective enough.

We need to consider four key elements: first, the operating model itself; second, the people and capabilities; third, how are we leveraging technology?

And fourth, is the focus on governance. The primary challenge is that there is going to be a higher cost of doing business, and we have to look at how we create the right pricing and returns in our business.

First element is the banking financial model and how we manage our businesses to ensure adequate controls and make it more efficient , because the current approach has created further complexities and inefficiencies.

The second element is the experience. Today, unfortunately, we live in a fast moving age, and new bankers undergo very brief training and that is part of the challenge. You meet a person, and they may have done a reasonable post-graduation, or maybe they’re not even qualified, but they want to be an assistant manager right away. So, how do you bring people into the system with that level of expectation?

Thirdly, I think some of us have to bite the bullet on technology. It comes back to this situation because banks have spent $15 million or $18 million over the year, and you are thinking, “Well, can I just spend $5 million more?”, not realising if you just spent $25 million, you could replace the entire platform with current generation technology.

And lastly, it is just the mindset relating to risk management. We take it for granted, and so very often institutions deal with much of compliance and risk reactively rather than proactively. This comes back to fundamentals. How do you move your approach towards risk management from ticking-the-boxes to becoming more proactive. There is also the governance aspect that has to be built in here.

This crisis has proven beyond doubt how closely the banking system is linked to the broader economy.

Gov e r n a n c e , r is k & co m pli a nc e // ro u n dta b le

sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: In terms of the BAU versus a fresh paradigm, how do you see the practical angle of it? Is it workable? Is it doable?

sanjay uppal, honG leonG bank: I think it is easier said than done because it has many implications.

The first implication is the cost; second is the management process. Before I moved here, I was Group Chief Financial Officer at the Emirates NBD, Dubai, for five years. One of the things I did was to establish new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Datawarehouse systems across all group entities, which included the conventional bank, Islamic Bank, brokerage, investment bank, asset management, etc.

Selling it to the management and board took a few months and a great deal of effort as the investments I was asking the bank to make was in excess of the total finance cost for the previous three years.

By the time we implemented the ERP and established the enterprise-wide datawarehouse, it changed a lot of our organisation around it. As a result, at the onset of the crisis our level of preparedness was amazing.

We had dashboards and immediate information access for nearly everything because we had developed our capabilities extensively. So when you’re talking about driving a change, it comes down to how you position the case and demonstrate the value. But I think it’s doable, and I believe it is critical to the future of the banking system. There are a lot of current platforms that require upgrading.

andrew kerr, ambank: Absolutely, and I find that interesting coming from a finance person. It says: “If I’m going to do what you’ve just said I have to write off all the old systems, because the reason I keep patching them is finance driven”. Whereas the other is more visionary, and it’s about getting the balance right.

There’s no doubt if we opened a bank today, we’d be in paradise compared to the legacy system carrier – but there is that cost element.

For Malaysia, the allocation of capital is different between businesses. Banks in Malaysia, and local banks in particular, are at various levels of maturity.

Risk adjusted pricing, if it’s well understood, it is not necessarily executed well. If we had better understood customer information systems, either for retail or nonretail, and understood all our exposure to a customer, all the capital allocations by product and the risk adjusted returns – if we all understood that, charges to our customers would be different. From watching market practice, it’s clear that we don’t. And we call it competition. But it’s really not understanding what’s going on. You can certainly have loss leaders, but you

can’t have portfolio loss. If you understand the crosssell, that’s terrific; if you don’t, then you’re making guesses, which is dangerous.

There is a great deal of noise this year on risk appetite. But it’s really misunderstood, as a banking profession. Even stress testing is just not well understood. Stress testing in a normal environment is what drives your risk appetite. You need to do more stress tests to see what else you need to be mindful of.

Risk appetite, quite frankly, is about a ‘buy/hold/sell’ strategy. What do I do more of; what do I keep roughly at that level; and what do I ease off/reduce/get out of?

If you have good systems, you can do it (stress testing) very quickly. You can run programs and do stress testing overnight. I can tell you, up until this month, it took AmBank two months to run stress tests because it was all non-integrated spreadsheets. With all the new systems, this is now an overnight exercise, but that’s been a long time coming. But again, the evolution is progressing nicely, and we are getting on with it. So risk adjusted returns, capital allocation systems – are putting us on the right track. The issue about data, we’ve all experienced it, and I’ve done it with four different financial institutions – the headache of data cleaning is just a nightmare – getting it right, adjusting it all, then getting back to the project.

Geetha sivapathasundram, cimb: I agree from a compliance perspective that this is something we need to do, to be able to address the points that Andrew outlined. So it’s always a reactive approach to compliance, where in fact having your risk managed with those compliance measures in place at the outset helps. If we get our governance right, then all the issues that Sanjay mentioned would be addressed.

Sanjay mentioned about 70 per cent compliance and not getting much time allowance. But if we had that right in the first place, it’s just a matter of doing business. From a company’s perspective, that’s a change that I would like to see people looking at: compliance more to facilitate business. It is a cost, but it gives the long-term benefit.

“There is a great deal of noise this year on risk appetite. But it’s really misunderstood, as a banking profession.”

Andrew Kerr, AmBAnK

andrew kerr, ambank: Just to add one more word ‘culture’, because the word ‘governance’ sometimes hides it. For a start, getting the culture right makes governance easy.

Geetha sivapathasundram, cimb: Exactly, and I think the gentleman that spoke about the person who thinks they can become a manager or a senior manager in one or two years was very relevant. So in the process, w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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the training is actually compromised. You are here, trying to fight the talent pool, and saying, “I want to keep this person”, so just keep on rewarding him for every little thing that he does. And in the process, we are losing out in terms of the core values of the bank.

tianG siew lim, cimb: I hear people talk about talent management, but in Asia there is a big issue of having people with the right skills set. In Malaysia, there’s the issue with our own education system; the way the interests are being produced are not aligned to business, and the work culture is different. A number of people at the top of the data entry chain are paid about 800 Ringgit. They don’t care very much, and the employee sees that as a very mundane job. So that’s a challenge. How do you attract the right talent, and commensurate them in a proper way so that they see pride in their work? Of course, there’s communication and understanding. These days, you train someone and they become reasonably good. Somebody else comes and takes them over, not just locally but probably overseas, right? Malaysia goes to Singapore, Singapore goes to Hong Kong – you know where the attraction pool is.

sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: Are there any specific points of view around aspects of compliance or security?

“I hear people talk about talent management, but in Asia there is a big issue of having people with the right skills set.”

Tiang Siew Lim, CimB

matthias chay, public bank: The greatest challenge is compliance versus business. The expectation from the Central Bank is very high; they expect you to input a lot of sources to ensure a full compliance. But on the other hand, most would like to know that it is very cost-effective in the business. sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: Do you mean across most aspects of compliance, or any specific areas? So when you say it’s costly, do you mean collection of the data, putting the logic in place and so on?

matthias chay, public bank: Including the system, the cost of investment involved in establishing a good system, in effect, to monitor suspicious detections. rossaya mohd nashir, cimb: I would like to touch on points raised about culture and compliance. In many regions, people tend to meet risk and compliance by leaving all those aspects to the people responsible, the senior management and the compliance or risk departments. So there needs to be a review or a mindset change to help them with that. And that the first level of defense for compliance and risk should be at the business units or the frontliners themselves.

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sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: Can you make another point around how we match up the finance operational side of things? Do you do any kind of cost benefit for the analysis?

rossaya mohd nashir, cimb: Yes, for the past three or four years we have good processes at the front line, with compliance checking and monitoring. We have dedicated officers to do that initially and then it comes back to us.

sanjay uppal, honG leonG bank: The key piece of running any business is the tussle between how much money you make and how you make it. And if you are always focusing on only how much you make, you are very likely to ignore everything else. If I was a shareholder, how you make the money is more important to me.

At another bank where we had issues on client data, we at the management committee pondered, “What do we do with this, because we are just not getting credible customer data”. The CFO looked at the revenue line and the cost line, and said: “Where’s the revenue coming from customers? And who gets rewarded on the base of the revenue? It’s the frontline.” So we assigned the responsibility for completeness of customer data to the front-line with a target to complete it in one year.

This became a key performance metric for relationship managers and branch managers in their annual performance assessment. This approach served us very well and ensured that the frontline assumed complete ownership of customers.

I do at times wonder about a possible disconnect between the management of loans and deposits businesses with the same banks competing through driving down loan pricing while offering higher rates on deposits. From a returns on risk perspective, it highlights fundamental challenges in sustainability of the returns. sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: Even today, that is how I do it. And that’s why we developed our models, and of course you do get some wastage, but we still get 85 per cent of data, so that does benefit. Let us say a relationship manager fills in the data; it goes to the back office, but who is checking? It is not like it goes back to the relationship manager to set it right to be the way it should.

Geetha sivapathasundram, cimb: Having seen systems and after speaking to bankers from your section, what’s your take in terms of banking in Malaysia?

Gov e r n a n c e , r is k & co m pli a nc e // ro u n dta b le

sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: In Malaysia, I don’t

andrew kerr, ambank: I would probably throw

think we have a mature enough view to see down the road, to be honest. But if I look at the level of maturity Malaysia has regarding peer maturity across few geographical areas, I would probably mention Singapore, plus a few others. There are two things to it. In a risk and value context, I don’t think we have lined it up to a ‘method’ yet. In other words, in Malaysia we haven’t reached the point where we can actually map it to value. In IBM, we have benchmarks and studies where we map it to a particular process, maturity or value maturity, whether or not it is data allocation, technology, analytics and so on. So that’s my first point.

Mapping it back to compliance, operation and the like, to operational efficiency and operational risk – not just operational as an English word – but as the operational risk in Basel II, our take is that banks which have actually defined some sort of a uniform taxonomy (taxonomy being derived from process and methodology), are probably in a better place than the ones who have not done that.

If you are looking at the process side of operation and risk, the compliance aspect, you need to fine-tune elements such as what do you need to do and who does it? Leave aside the issue around Key Risk Indicators (KRI) and Risk Control Self Assessment (RCSA), which are basically sort of checks in the box, or certain other actions in compliance, or any other area. But if you have an intersection of more than 60 per cent or 70 per cent between operational risk and compliance, then the higher the intersection, the better placed that bank is.

So was that addressing your question?

Hong Kong into that.

Geetha sivapathasundram, cimb : Yes. In the Asian region, specifically in the ASEAN context, which country do you think has achieved something?

sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: In my view the risk and finance element of it is well executed in Australian banks. In terms of the Big Five, I think four of them have done pretty well. In terms of combining with the compliance side, I would mention two banks that are probably very well placed. Others are more or less getting there, and it is better executed in a more classical bank as opposed to an investment bank. In Singaporean banks, looking at the value aspect, I think they are probably not at the same level of maturity as Australian banks are.

Korean banks, however, are extremely strong and well managed.

sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: Yes – Hong Kong as well.

andrew kerr, ambank: In terms of speed to improve, Korea was probably the best-improved post crisis. They invest a lot in technology, and earlier than most. Malaysia would probably be ahead of the pack of in terms of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

Thailand is investing better and Indonesia is catching up, the Philippines is getting there, and Vietnam’s stepping up. Cambodia is a little behind, but we are reasonably well placed. Again, a danger for Malaysia is to think we are way up here, because we are not. sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: Data management is ultimately not very romantic, but it’s still right there.

Data is proving to be the critical element, so therefore whatever level of maturity you reach, data – or rather, data integration – is proving to be the pre-requisite for any level of maturity. And back to my comment earlier about the taxonomy, again, that is data and workflow, and process and all of that coming together. So there is no running away from data.

andrew kerr, ambank: That comes from what they call conscious decision-making. So there’s a one-off transaction through a pricing model, but it’s somewhat irrelevant. You actually need to have the MIS by group and by company, to see whether you can afford the discount. When you get one-off transactions, you have no relationship, so you need a system that captures a customer, group, by-product, and then the overall risk adjusted return. And what that tells you as a whole is, “Can I do that deal or not”. The market is saying, “My relationship return is four per cent, my cost of capital is 12 per cent. I’m killing my shareholders”. I can tell you we don’t have that kind of data, but we are building it. so we’re building on it and it takes a lot of time, because we have 22 legacy systems we are trying to attach together.

“If you are looking at the process side of operation and risk, the compliance aspect, you need to finetune elements such as what do you need to do and who does it?”

Sam mukhopadhyay, IBm

sam mukhopadhyay, ibm: Adding to the point about risk and value, if a bank approaches the matter from the point of strategic capital management or a better way to say it, strategic business planning, then it helps you with the threats that you need to track, in the sense of an active balance sheet. It won’t be achieved overnight but at least it gives you the structure to approach it in a systematic way.

*

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103

The Who’s Who of Financial Services 2012/2013 Directory Asia's top product, service and solution providers Advanced IT Solutions

105

Insurance Software

117

Analytics

105

IT Infrastructure

118

Banking Technology

106–107

Business Intelligence

108

Mainframe Connectivity Solutions

120

Card Management

108

Managed Services

121

Mobility

122

Cloud

109–111

IT Systems Management

119–120

Consulting & Systems Integration

111

Multi-Channel Communications

Contact Centres

112

Outsourcing

Customer Communications Management

113

Payments 124

Customer Experience

113–114

122–123 123

Recruitment

124

Document Management Systems

114

Risk Management

125

Enterprise Applications

115

Risk & Payments

125

Enterprise Linux Distribution

115

Security 126

Financial Application Platform

116

Systems Integration

Identity and Access Management

116

Unified Communications

104

w h o ’ s w h o o f fs i

127 127–128

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

aDvanceD it solutions

analytics

wincor nixdorf

Datalicious

about wincor nixdorf

Datalicious is a full service data agency established in Sydney in 2007.

At Datalicious we are all about smart data driven marketing and turning data into actionable insights.

Founded with the aim of creating a 360 degree data agency, our vision is to help our clients create smart data driven marketing campaigns. We are a passionate team of specialists who spend every day turning data into actionable insights that deliver measurable Return on Media Investment (ROMI).

We offer a wide range of data services from data warehousing, web analytics and media attribution over data mining, modelling and reporting, to the planning and development of smart data driven campaigns and entire websites.

Datalicious has had proven success driving and executing data projects in large organisations and we take pride in understanding the core values and processes required to drive change and deliver real return on investment.

As leaders in the data industry, we actively participate in various industry forums such as the Omniture Customer Advisory Board in the United States and the ADMA Data and Analytics Council in Australia to help shape industry best practice.

Wincor Nixdorf is one of the world’s leading providers of innovative IT solutions and services to retail banks and retailers. The company is headquartered in Paderborn, Germany, and is publicly traded on the Frankfurt Securities and Stock Exchange. The company has a global presence in more than 100 countries.

solutions expertise Wincor Nixdorf’s expertise is not only to produce advanced IT systems such as ATMs, cash deposit/cash recycling systems and automated teller safes, but to deliver holistic solutions that include software, consultancy and services which combine to optimise a bank’s processes.

cash cycle Management solutions Wincor Nixdorf’s Cash Cycle Management Solutions (CCMS) is the latest solution for banks and retailers that is designed to radically improve cash handling in branches and stores by enhancing security, improving transparency, upgrading processes and reducing cash handling related costs.

At the heart of CCMS is CINEO hardware systems and interchangeable cash cassettes that can be exchanged between CINEO systems in bank branches and into CINEO systems in retail stores. An intelligent memory chip in the cassettes stores information on cash levels and a new inking solution deters thieves.

The cassettes facilitate a reduction in costs of manual cash processes such as banknote counting and validation, and cash storage. In short, CCMS reduces the work, costs and errors of cash handling, and makes the cash process more secure and efficient.

wincor nixdorf Pty ltd 2 Kallang sector singapore 349277 Phone: +65 6740 2623 contact: Karsten Kemna, Director, Sales & Marketing, Banking Division, Asia Pacific

email: karsten.kemna@wincor-nixdorf.com website: www.wincor-nixdorf.com

Datalicious Pty ltd y&r level 15 35 clarence street sydney nsw 2000 australia Phone: +61 2 8355 3551 contact: Christian Bartens email : insights@datalicious.com twitter: @datalicious website: www.datalicious.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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Banking technology

Banking technology

Datacard

nucleus software

Datacard Group collaborates with customers to create highly secure financial card programs and government ID initiatives, as well as secure ID programs for education, corporate security and many other markets. We bring unmatched experience and expertise to every engagement, including industry best practices and a deep understanding of complex operational issues. All of this enables Datacard to deliver innovative solutions and services that help customers address critical challenges.

Datacard made secure, high-volume issuance of credit cards possible more than 40 years ago when we introduced the first highspeed card personalisation system. Today, we continue to develop patented technologies that help customers improve productivity, profitability and cardholder satisfaction. Our portfolio supports highvolume and instant card issuance, secure credential issuance and management, passport production, delivery, fulfilment and packaging.

The Datacard Group’s product and solutions portfolio offers a truly integrated platform that combines Datacard ® hardware, software, supplies and global support.

Nucleus Software is a leading software powerhouse providing innovative and pioneering software solutions for Banks and Financial organisations globally. Offerings include IT solutions for retail and corporate banking, lending, cash management, risk analytics and consultancy services designed to support the whole spectrum of business offerings mentioned above and more.

The flagship product, FinnOne™, ranked the 'World's Number 1 Selling Lending Software Product’ in 2011 by IBS Publishing for the fourth consecutive year, is a powerhouse of seamlessly integrated applications, designed to provide operational support, risk management and decision-making support to BFSI companies. The suite consists of several modules focusing on customer acquisition, loan management, collections, delinquency management and more.

It also provides account management, core financial accounting, document management and customer services. FinnOne™ supports multi-branch, multi-currency, multi-product and bi-lingual implementations.

Cash@Will™ is an end-to-end Cash Management product suite. It facilitates effective management of account payables and receivables and comes with seamlessly integrated yet standalone modules of payments, collections and liquidity management. It also comes with a corporate web front through which corporate clients can manage their cash flows. The suite provides features like cross-border/domestic sweeping, multi currency pooling, cash flow forecasting, netting, domestic, cross country payments, FX tracking and more.

secure issuance anywhere™ Secure Issuance Anywhere™ combines central and instant issuance, along with emerging mobile issuance capabilities, in a single platform.

This gives organisations the flexibility to issue secure cards and credentials anytime, anywhere. Secure Issuance Anywhere™ gives issuers the freedom and flexibility to manage their card and credential program exactly as they want – with exceptional physical and logical security.

Datacard asia Pacific limited 3 church street, #10-01 samsung hub singapore 049483 Phone: + 65 6227 7838 email: asiapacific@datacard.com twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/datacardgroup website: www.datacard.com 106

who ’s wh o of fs i

nucleus software a 39, sector – 62 noida 201307 U.P india Phone: +65 6785 9024 contact: Deep Singhania, Head – Asia Pacific email: deep.singhania@nucleussoftware.com twitter: nucleussoftware website: www.nucleussoftware.com

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

banking technology

banking technology

saP

wincor nixdorf

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organisations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. SAP specific industry solutions together with our leading business and analytical applications, help financial institutions run better.

about wincor nixdorf

saP for banking SAP for Banking enables processes covering multichannel front office, core processing, finance and risk management, human resources and procurement with integrated business insight. SAP enables banks to grow by delivering superior service and tailored products to their customers as well as to lower costs by streamlining core banking processes. In addition, SAP enables banks to manage risk and stay compliant with faster and integrated enterprise-wide monitoring of risks across all business units and risk types on the same technology platform leveraging the innovative in-memory technology of SAP HANA. More than 3,700 banks worldwide are reaping the benefits and running better with SAP.

saP asia Pte ltd 30 Pasir Panjang road #03-32, Mapletree business city singapore 117440 Phone: +65 6664-6868 email: info.asia@sap.com website: www.sap.com

Wincor Nixdorf is one of the world’s leading providers of innovative IT solutions and services to retail banks and retailers. The company is headquartered in Paderborn, Germany, and is publicly traded on the Frankfurt Securities and Stock Exchange. The company has a global presence in more than 100 countries.

solutions expertise Wincor Nixdorf’s expertise is not only to produce advanced IT systems such as ATMs, cash deposit/cash recycling systems and automated teller safes, but to deliver holistic solutions that include software, consultancy and services which combine to optimise a bank’s processes.

cash cycle Management solutions Wincor Nixdorf’s Cash Cycle Management Solutions (CCMS) is the latest solution for banks and retailers that is designed to radically improve cash handling in branches and stores by enhancing security, improving transparency, upgrading processes and reducing cash handling related costs.

At the heart of CCMS is CINEO hardware systems and interchangeable cash cassettes that can be exchanged between CINEO systems in bank branches and into CINEO systems in retail stores. An intelligent memory chip in the cassettes stores information on cash levels and a new inking solution deters thieves.

The cassettes facilitate a reduction in costs of manual cash processes such as banknote counting and validation, and cash storage. In short, CCMS reduces the work, costs and errors of cash handling, and makes the cash process more secure and efficient.

wincor nixdorf Pty ltd 2 kallang sector singapore 349277 Phone: +65 6740 2623 contact: Karsten Kemna, Director, Sales & Marketing, Banking Division, Asia Pacific

email: karsten.kemna@wincor-nixdorf.com website: www.wincor-nixdorf.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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w h o’ s w h o Di r ec t o ry

Business intelligence

carD ManageMent

QlikView

BPc Banking technologies

QlikView is a leader in business discovery – user-driven Business Intelligence (BI). QlikView disrupted the business intelligence market with our in-memory approach in delivering access to data to the masses and bridges the gap between traditional BI solutions and inadequate spreadsheet applications. Our innovative associative search technology allows organisations to rapidly consolidate, search and visualise information to make sense out of large amounts of data from multiple sources.

Appropriate from small-to-medium business to the largest global enterprise, QlikView Business Discovery platform enables intuitive user driven analysis that can be deployed with data governance in days or weeks rather than months, years, or not at all. Users can explore information freely rather than being confined to a predefined path of questions, and is able to conduct visual analysis while on the road or collaborating with specific groups. QlikView helps users get to the information they need to solve specific problems, share knowledge and analysis to make better decisions.

For 19 years, we have focused on simplifying decision making for business users across organisations. We pioneered new approaches to accessing, managing and interacting with data, and our business discovery platform is recognised as a groundbreaking solution.

In more than 30 countries on five continents, we have helped some of the world’s most innovative financial institutions transform their payments business. Whether you want to launch new products faster than your competitors, dramatically lower your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), meet card scheme and regulatory changes simply or cater for the ever changing needs of your customers – we have the perfect solution for you. Our SmartVista suite of integrated, scalable, flexible and secure solutions covers every aspect of electronic payments processing – high performance online, real-time transaction switching with full ATM and POS device monitoring and management, complete card management, advanced real-time fraud prevention, sophisticated loyalty program management, card personalisation and production, comprehensive billing and merchant management, and integrated internet and mobile ecommerce payment solutions. Supporting a wide range of industry standard platforms, not only does SmartVista provide you with options when selecting hardware providers but it also ensures you can easily source the technical skills you need. SmartVista delivers unrivalled performance, and is proven in a wide range of live production environments including driving over 40,000 ATMs from a single site and delivering 1,500 TPS in peak operation. SmartVista delivers 99.999 per cent availability for organisations of all sizes, from niche players to firms with over 77 million cards.

Operating from a network of global offices and with a partner ecosystem made up of industry leaders, we are committed to longterm relationships with our customers. Our relentless focus on our customers’ success is one of the key reasons why our customer base has grown by 1,000 per cent in the last 10 years.

QlikView

BPc asia Pacific 10 hoe chaing road #14-01 Keppel towers singapore 089315

email: infoapac@qlikview.com twitter: @QlikViewSENA website: www.qlikview.com

Phone: +65 6423 0313 email: info-ap@bpcbt.com website: www.bpcbt.com

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clouD

clouD

canon singapore

Dell

Canon is a global leader in photographic and digital imaging solutions.

With imaging technologies that empowers offices to increase productivity, Canon is dedicated to the advancement in technology and innovation, and provides unique solutions for small-to-medium businesses to large enterprises.

Canon’s Cloud Advantage is now packed with more features and offers greater flexibility for any business size. Canon leads the Cloud arena via the imageRUNNER-ADVANCE (iR-ADV) series of machines, with its ability to scan to commonly used commercial Cloud destinations such as Evernote, GoogleDocs, Salesforce.com and a variety of email platforms. The hardcopy documents that office users scan can also be converted into searchable PDF and MS Office formats for quick and easy keyword search to serve users on a tight schedule.

At the same time, the document conversion service supports more than 120 languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Using their mobile devices, office users who are frequently on the go can now print their important documents and emails via the web.

This can be achieved from anywhere they are. They can release their documents when they authenticate themselves at the multifunction device. Businesses can print their documents for the next meeting without the need to download an application or install a print driver making it very convenient to manage business urgencies. Users are assured that mobile printing is secured and the organisation can still have the ability to control their print costs.

Dell listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. The company’s broad portfolio of end-to-end IT solutions – enterprise solutions, servers, storage, security, networking, software, cloud applications, IT services, end user computing solutions, desktops, notebooks, mobility solutions and peripherals – support millions of customers in 180 countries around the globe.

• Our goal: Our people leverage technology to enable our customers’ success. We recognise that when our customers succeed, we succeed • Our approach: At a time when competitors are producing increasingly proprietary products, we combine leading technology hardware, software and services to deliver customers with open, high-performing, high-value solutions • Our solutions: Our customers achieve unprecedented efficiencies through technology without compromising performance because that’s been our promise from the beginning of Dell – one that we’ve continued to carry with us as our company has grown, diversified and entered in complex, new areas • Our values: We are open, optimistic and resourceful in all we do.

From creating leading technology products and services and running our business, to empowering youth, enabling entrepreneurship and minimising the environmental impact of IT

canon singapore Pte. ltd.

1 harbour Front Avenue #04-01/02 Keppel Bay tower singapore 098632

Dell Global B.V. 180 clemenceau Avenue #06-01 haw Par centre singapore 239922

Phone: +65 6799 8888 contact: Marketing Department, Business Imaging Solutions Division email: general@canon.com.sg website: www.canon.com.sg

Phone: +65 6 335 3426 /+65 6 823 6611 contact: Lee Kin Thong, South Asia Marketing email: Kin_Thong_Lee@Dell.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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clouD

clouD

NetApp

Polycom Asia Pacific Pte ltd

Private Clouds are about IT flexibility, efficiency, and cost savings.

Maximise the benefits by building your private Cloud with advanced storage and data management technologies from NetApp. Around the world, enterprises of all types and sizes have transformed the promise of private Cloud computing into breakthrough business results using technologies from NetApp and our partners. With a services delivery model, IT can offer services to its internal customers from a service catalog, automate processes, meter usage, create showback or chargeback models and deliver services for greater cost savings, utilisation, and efficiencies.

Drive business agility and IT efficiency while preserving capital and administrative resources.

NetApp understands that external Cloud services will play an increasing role in the IT plans of most enterprises. That is why NetApp has developed a global network of world class service provider partners that offer a portfolio of cloud services built on NetApp. Many companies are already realising the enhanced flexibility and efficiency of Cloud computing by working with NetApp service provider partners.

Our partners offer a range of services built on NetApp including: • Storage-as-a-Service • Infrastructure-as-a-Service • Desktop-as-a-Service • Backup-as-a-Service • Disaster-recovery-as-a-Service • Messaging and collaboration-as-a-Service • SAP-as-a-Service Learn how SoftBank lifts a nation with Cloud services here. Learn more about NetApp for Cloud computing in www.netapp.com/as.

Contact NetApp now.

Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based Unified Communications (UC) solutions for telepresence, video and voice powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform. The RealPresence Platform interoperates with the broadest range of business, mobile, and social applications and devices. More than 400,000 organisations trust Polycom solutions to collaborate and meet face-to-face from any location for more productive and effective engagement with colleagues, partners, customers, specialists and prospects. Polycom, together with its broad partner ecosystem, provides customers with the best total cost of ownership, interoperability, scalability, and security for video collaboration, whether on-premises, hosted, or cloud-delivered.

Polycom solutions enable face-to-face collaboration throughout the organisation as well as the delivery of personal and powerful, customer experiences across immersive environments, meeting rooms, desktops, kiosks tablets and smartphones. In an industry where faceto-face, personal relationships are the key to success, Polycom makes this a reality with high definition video solutions that bring financial institutions and customers together – just like being there.

Key information and content such as market reports, trading information, stock prices can be shared with more impact. Critical financial processes such as interviewing, performance management, fiscal planning, project management, human capital development, business continuity planning, corporate communications can all be enhanced and shortened. And, Polycom helps financial institutions worldwide implement video for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Process Management (BPM), enterprise social networking, e-learning and sales management. From mobile, desktop, room, to immersive, Polycom offers a complete portfolio of video conferencing and telepresence solutions over IP networks.

NetApp 1 temasek Avenue, #08-01 Millenia tower singapore 039192

Polycom Asia Pacific Pte ltd 8, shenton way, #11-01, AXA tower singapore 068811

Phone: +65 6496 3500 contact: Aileen Tang email: aileen.tang@netapp.com website: www.netapp.com/as

Phone: +65 6389 9200 email: asianinquiry@polycom.com twitter: @PolycomAlert website: www.polycom.asia

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clouD

thunderhead.com Thunderhead.com is a leading provider of enterprise solutions for customer experience management.

The Thunderhead.com ONE customer engagement platform provides powerful SaaS solutions that fundamentally change the way businesses engage with each other and their customers. Some of the world’s most demanding companies trust Thunderhead.com to help them build customer engagement and create enduring relationships.

With Thunderhead.com, businesses have more power to drive revenue, brand strength and differentiation through superior customer experience.

Thunderhead.com serves its global customer base from offices located in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

thunderhead.com Phone: +61 2 9299 4560 contact: Nick Smith, Head of Asia Pacific email: nick.smith@thunderhead.com twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Thunderheadon website: www.thunderhead.com

consulting & systems integration

wipro technologies Wipro Technologies, the global IT business of Wipro Limited (NYSE:WIT) is a leading information technology, consulting and outsourcing company, that delivers solutions to enable its clients do business better. Wipro Technologies delivers winning business outcomes through its deep industry experience and a 360 degree view of ‘business through technology’ – helping clients create successful and adaptive businesses. A company recognised globally for its comprehensive portfolio of services, a practitioner’s approach to delivering innovation and an organisation wide commitment to sustainability, Wipro Technologies has over 130,000 employees and clients across 54 countries. Wipro’s banking practice has partnered with over 50 of the world’s leading banks including four of the top five banks worldwide as well as leading banks in the Asia Pacific.

Our expertise across retail banking, enterprise banking, investment banking, regulatory risk and compliance, mobile banking, channels, payments, lending and mortgages and wealth management address transformational changes for our customers. Our solutions on Cloud, mobile, social computing and analytics enable our customers to build a bankable future.

wipro technologies Doddakannelli, sarjapur road, Bangalore 560 035 india email: info@wipro.com twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Wipro website: www.wipro.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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contact centres

contact centres

aspect

shoretel

Aspect is a global provider of customer contact solutions. The Aspect vision is to build customer-company relationships by bringing customer contact to every enterprise function. The company firmly believes that the only way to succeed in today’s consumer environment is by leveraging modern enterprise communications and collaboration platforms to enable the expansion of customer-facing processes across the enterprise, anchored by the contact center and its hard-learned best practices.

Aspect builds customer relationships through a combination of interaction management, workforce optimisation and Microsoft unified communications and collaboration platform solutions, enabling organisations to meet the expectations of today’s technology-savvy, socially connected consumer by bringing customer contact to every key functional area of the enterprise and its partner ecosystem.

Aspect is recognised by global industry analysts for its successful track record of helping companies achieve strategic objectives, deliver operational efficiency and enhance customer satisfaction. Aspect enables organisations of all sizes to meet their business goals with the combined power of time-tested software and professional services, including more than two-thirds of the Global Fortune 50.

ShoreTel provides brilliantly simple IP-based business communications featuring Unified Communications (UC), contact centre and mobile UC solutions. Using ShoreTel, organisations of all sizes gain the freedom to communicate and collaborate anywhere, on any device.

ShoreTel Mobility, the newest solution, even extends UC to all leading smartphones on all PBX platforms.

ShoreTel’s solution adapts to a company’s culture, processes, applications, and infrastructure, putting people first and giving them the flexibility they need to work and collaborate. Unparalleled deployment and administration ease eliminates the need for expensive provider involvement, and frees up valuable IT resources. The featurerich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use.

Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. Founded in 1996, ShoreTel sells through resellers and distributors to over 19,000 customers in 46 countries. ShoreTel’s corporate headquarters are based in Sunnyvale, California, with regional offices in Austin, Texas, United Kingdom Sydney, Australia; and Singapore.

aspect 138 robinson road the corporate office #13-00 singapore 068906

shoretel 9 temasek Blvd, #09-03 suntec tower two singapore 038989

Phone: +65 65900388 contact: Vincent Ong email: vincent.ong@aspect.com website: www.aspect.com 112

who ’s w h o of fs i

Phone: +65 6517 0800 twitter: @ShoreTel website: www.shoretel.com

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

customer communications management

customer exPerience

hP exstream

thunderhead.com

HP Exstream is the market leading Customer Communication Management (CCM) solution. It has been proven by leading financial services and insurance enterprises to improve the customer experience and make customer interactions more profitable.

Designed for enterprises that thrive on strong customer relationships, HP Exstream empowers business users to make the most of every customer touch point by creating insightful, impactful, real-time customer communications proven to fuel profitable business growth.

From fully customised high-volume statements and bills, to on-demand marketing and self-service web applications for enrolment and account sign-up, to personalised correspondence and proposals produced interactively by customer-facing employees, HP Exstream allows you to eliminate siloed systems, streamline communication processes, significantly reduce costs, get critical communications to customers faster, and improve the customer experience with relevant, meaningful communications delivered through the customer’s preferred channel.

With HP Exstream you can: • Create and deliver customer communications for customer-preferred channels and mobile devices • Significantly improve the customer experience to increase loyalty and referrals • Ensure brand consistency • Reduce risk and comply with government regulations and standards • Easily market targeted products and services to high-growth, high-net-worth customers • Drive top-line revenue while reducing costs

Thunderhead.com is a leading provider of enterprise solutions for customer experience management.

The Thunderhead.com ONE customer engagement platform provides powerful SaaS solutions that fundamentally change the way businesses engage with each other and their customers. Some of the world’s most demanding companies trust Thunderhead.com to help them build customer engagement and create enduring relationships.

With Thunderhead.com, businesses have more power to drive revenue, brand strength, and differentiation through superior customer experience.

Thunderhead.com serves its global customer base from offices located in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

thunderhead.com Phone: +61 2 9299 4560 contact: Nick Smith, Head of Asia Pacific email: nick.smith@thunderhead.com twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Thunderheadon website: www.thunderhead.com

hP exstream Phone: +65 8428 6442 contact: Peter Marini, Region Sales Manager, Asia and Japan email: peter.marini@hp.com website: www.hpexstream.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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customer experience

Document management systems

hp exstream

canon singapore

HP Exstream is the market leading Customer Communication Management (CCM) solution. It has been proven by leading financial services and insurance enterprises to improve the customer experience and make customer interactions more profitable.

Designed for enterprises that thrive on strong customer relationships, HP Exstream empowers business users to make the most of every customer touch point by creating insightful, impactful, real-time customer communications proven to fuel profitable business growth.

From fully customised high-volume statements and bills, to on-demand marketing and self-service web applications for enrolment and account sign-up, to personalised correspondence and proposals produced interactively by customer-facing employees, HP Exstream allows you to eliminate siloed systems, streamline communication processes, significantly reduce costs, get critical communications to customers faster, and improve the customer experience with relevant, meaningful communications delivered through the customer’s preferred channel.

With HP Exstream you can: • Create and deliver customer communications for customer-preferred channels and mobile devices • Significantly improve the customer experience to increase loyalty and referrals • Ensure brand consistency • Reduce risk and comply with government regulations and standards • Easily market targeted products and services to high-growth, high-net-worth customers • Drive top-line revenue while reducing costs

Canon is a global leader in photographic and digital imaging solutions.

With imaging technologies that empowers offices to increase productivity, Canon is dedicated to the advancement in technology and innovation, and provides unique solutions for SMBs to large enterprises.

imageFormuLa Document scanners Canon’s state-of-the-art scanning technology empowers businesses to take on the most demanding business needs. Leading the imaging arena by offering high-performance information capture, the wide range of scanning features let users scan from a variety of document sizes and types, in colour and monochrome and even intelligently detect double-feeds. Packed with software applications, office users can scan information to create, convert and collaborate, store and organise content to boost office performance. The hardcopy documents can also be OCR and converted into Searchable PDF and Microsoft Office formats for quick and easy keyword search to serve users on a tight schedule. Users on-the-go can conveniently scan to common Cloud destinations such as Evernote and Microsoft SharePoint and save them in a variety of file formats and destinations.

imageFormuLa check scanners These powerful high-speed check scanners support international check scanning standards and combine MICR codeline reading with OCR (MOCR) processing to ensure accurate MICR data capture, without compromising speed. Ideal for heavy-duty back office environments, the Canon Scanning Software provides file saving, image viewing, print features and it can be easily integrated into existing systems or used with leading check processing software.

hp exstream

canon singapore pte. Ltd. 1 harbourFront avenue #04-01/02 Keppel Bay tower singapore 098632

phone: +65 8428 6442 contact: Peter Marini, Region Sales Manager, Asia and Japan email: peter.marini@hp.com website: www.hpexstream.com

phone: +65 6799 8888 contact: Marketing Department, Business Imaging Solutions Division email: general@canon.com.sg website: www.canon.com.sg

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enterprise AppLicAtions

enterprise Linux Distribution

Micro Focus

suse

enterprise Application Modernisation

Established in 1992, SUSE is the original provider of the enterprise Linux distribution and the most interoperable platform for missioncritical computing. With a portfolio centered around SUSE Linux Enterprise, we power thousands of organisations around the world across physical, virtual and Cloud environments. Through our continued commitment to the highest quality Linux support and innovative products, SUSE grew more than threefold after it was acquired by Novell in 2004.

Now operating as an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group, SUSE continues its unwavering focus on the benefits of open source and the needs of its commercial partners and customers. More than 13,000 businesses worldwide rely on SUSE Linux Enterprise Sever.

Enterprise Linux Servers from SUSE are some of the most versatile, reliable and best supported software infrastructure solutions available to deliver mission-critical IT services efficiently and cost effectively.

Designed for mixed IT environments and exclusively recommended

by Microsoft, SAP and VMware, Enterprise Linux Servers helps you save time and money, increase resource utilisation, and reduce risk.

Optimised for the mainframe like no other Linux OS. In 2000, IBM and SUSE brought Linux to the mainframe. Now SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z is the number one choice for Linux on IBM mainframes and is also the only operating system optimised for all SAP software solutions.

Micro Focus is a FTSE 250 company that delivers innovative software to maximise the quality, efficiency and value of business critical applications. Micro Focus enterprise application modernisation, testing and management software helps businesses to optimise the return on their business software and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk.

Micro Focus offers a highly differentiated suite of software quality products to complement enterprise modernisation and migration propositions. These embed quality practices throughout the software development cycle, from defining requirements to ‘go live’. More than 18,000 companies, including 91 of the Fortune Global 100, benefit from our 34 years experience.

Borland Solutions from Micro Focus embed quality assurance throughout the development lifecycle and deliver value across: • Requirements: Calibre combines requirements definition, visualisation, and management into a single ‘three dimensional’ solution to clarify the direction for development and QA teams • Change: StarTeam provides development teams with a single ‘source of truth’ to control change and increase the quality of outputs • Quality: Silk testing solutions automate the quality process, synchronise testing with business goals and even take testing to the Cloud Borland Solutions align business priorities and quality expectations with project requirements, development and testing to deliver better software, faster.

Micro Focus 3 harbourFront place, #13-01/04 harbourFront tower 2 singapore 099254 phone: +65 6510 4210 contact: Steven Lee email: supportline.sales.asia@microfocus.com website: www.microfocus.com

suse Asia offices: Singapore, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia phone: +65 6395 6888 twitter: twitter.com/SUSE website: www.suse.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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Financial application platForm

iDentity anD access management

Datacard

netiQ

Datacard Group collaborates with customers to create highly secure financial card programs and government ID initiatives, as well as secure ID programs for education, corporate security and many other markets. We bring unmatched experience and expertise to every engagement, including industry best practices and a deep understanding of complex operational issues. All of this enables Datacard to deliver innovative solutions and services that help customers address critical challenges.

Datacard made secure, high-volume issuance of credit cards possible more than 40 years ago when we introduced the first highspeed card personalisation system. Today, we continue to develop patented technologies that help customers improve productivity, profitability and cardholder satisfaction. Our portfolio supports highvolume and instant card issuance, secure credential issuance and management, passport production, delivery, fulfilment and packaging.

The Datacard Group’s product and solutions portfolio offers a truly integrated platform that combines Datacard ® hardware, software, supplies and global support.

NetIQ is an enterprise software company that enables customers to cost-effectively tackle information protection challenges and manage the complexity of dynamic, highly-distributed business applications.

Our portfolio includes industry-acclaimed solutions for identity, security, compliance and data centre management that help organisations securely deliver, measure, and manage physical, virtual and Cloud computing environments. Build a Trusted Environment with NetIQ identity and security solutions: our identity and access management solutions help customers maintain both productivity and network security with confidence.

Improve your network security with capabilities like: • Identity lifecycle management • Access management • Enterprise single sign-on • Password management Identity federation NetIQ security management solutions uniquely provide real-time monitoring and audit of IT-based changes and user activity, detection of threats and intrusions, security event management and correlation, log management and incident response automation – all with a single, integrated and scalable infrastructure.

NetIQ compliance management solutions help you achieve, maintain and prove compliance with both internal policies and external regulations. Our unique approach integrates identity, access and security management technologies so you always know who is accessing what, when they’re doing it and if they’re authorised.

Our Compliance Management solutions include the following capabilities: • Compliance automation and validation • Access governance • Security and vulnerability management

secure issuance anywhere™ Secure Issuance Anywhere™ combines central and instant issuance, along with emerging mobile issuance capabilities, in a single platform.

This gives organisations the flexibility to issue secure cards and credentials anytime, anywhere. Secure Issuance Anywhere™ gives issuers the freedom and flexibility to manage their card and credential program exactly as they want – with exceptional physical and logical security.

Datacard asia pacific limited 3 church street, #10-01 samsung hub singapore 049483 phone: + 65 6227 7838 email: asiapacific@datacard.com twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/datacardgroup website: www.datacard.com 116

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netiQ asia offices: Singapore, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia phone: +65 6395 6888 email: info-asia@netiq.com twitter: twitter.com/netiq website: www.netiq.com

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

insurance software

insurance software

aXe

saP

AXE provides the Axelerator Insurance Platform, the first Adaptive Straight-Through Processing (STP) system for automation of new business, claims and lifecycle services. Axelerator delivers one-touch and personalised process execution, with smart handling of exceptions to enhance an insurer’s competitive advantage. A single platform manages all channels with accessibility via the internet, mobiles, tablets or offline laptops. As a rules-driven platform, changes can be made directly through configuration for product and process innovations allowing the insurer to adapt continuously with the business.

Axelerator offers a tailored solution by adding insurer specific content to a working model to allow for configuration of an insurance system that has an exact business fit. Three software modules are provided as working models, as follows: • New business – Straight Through Processing (STP) for quote, illustration, application, electronic underwriting and fulfilment, including back-office processing • Claims processing – automated claims process from lodgement through assessment, payment and resolution • Lifecycle services – automated client-facing policy management activities including handling mid-term changes, renewals, cancellations, client detail changes and enabling self-service and customer single-view The Axelerator Insurance Platform is highly extensible, enabling new channels, products or customers to be added quickly. In Life Insurance, Axelerator is used for retail, group, direct and bancassurance lines of business, and for property and casualty (P&C) insurance for home, motor and commercial lines.

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organisations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. SAP specific industry solutions together with our leading business and analytical applications, help financial institutions run better.

aXe Level 19, two international finance centre 8 finance street, central hong Kong Phone: +85 2 2251 8113 email: fresh-thinking@axegroup.com website: www.axegroup.com

saP for insurance SAP for Insurance provides a fully integrated suite of core insurance and enterprise solutions along with world-class analytics and cutting edge technology innovation that enables insurance companies to increase operational efficiency while cutting costs. These solutions can be implemented stand-alone or as an integrated suite. A comprehensive solution that aligns the activities of the C-suite for optimal enterprise performance, the suite covers all core processes (i.e. quotation management, underwriting, rating, policy, billing, claims, reinsurance and commissions management), combined with SAP’s market leading enterprise processes (such as customer relationship management, finance and human capital management). Add to this the innovative in-memory technology of SAP HANA, leading analytics and mobility, SAP for Insurance offers it all within a single, integrated yet modular package. Currently, over 1600 insurance companies globally rely on SAP to run better.

saP asia Pte Ltd 30 Pasir Panjang road #03-32, Mapletree Business city singapore 117440 Phone: +65 6664-6868 email: info.asia@sap.com website: www.sap.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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it infrastructure

it infrastructure

equinix

intel

Equinix connects businesses with partners and customers around the world through a global platform of high performance data centers, containing dynamic ecosystems and the broadest choice of networks.

Platform Equinix connects more than 4,000 enterprises, cloud, digital content and financial companies including more than 690 network service providers to help them grow their businesses, improve application performance and protect their vital digital assets. Equinix provides a neutral meeting place for the world’s leading financial market participants including trading venues, buy and sell side firms, market data providers, technology providers and financial networks.

These customers locate servers and infrastructure within Equinix data centers to support mission critical financial services applications with highly reliable, low-latency connectivity. Learn more at: http://www.equinix.com/industries/financial-exchange/

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. Intel has a proven record in the financial industry for several decades. Intel has recently doubled investment in this space and has local financial services technology expertise stretching from New York to Sydney and from London to Mumbai. The work between Intel and the industry has enabled new levels of performance and reliability while driving down the cost of computing and IT infrastructure.

Intel delivers technology to the industry in the areas of capital markets, retail banking, exchanges and liquidity venues. As a proven thought leader and technology partner, Intel is continually working on future concepts around intelligent data, intelligent banking, and intelligent money. These capabilities touch the entire financial services value chain from data centers to end-point consumer devices.

Intel delivers platforms for server, storage, networking, and client devices used extensively in the financial services industry. Intel and the eco-system deliver solutions that enable the industry to deploy innovative technology solutions and enable new products and services.

The broad eco-system of developers, system integrators, and service providers led by Intel allows for continued financial innovation based on open standard, that meet the critical business needs of financial services clients.

equinix suite 6504-07, 65/f central Plaza 18 harbour road wanchai hong Kong Phone: +852.2970.7788 email: info@ap.equinix.com twitter: http://twitter.com/Equinix website: www.equinix.com

intel websites: www.intel.com/apac-fsi newsroom.intel.com blogs.intel.com

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it systems management

it systems management

novell

nucleus software

Novell, Inc. is a global enterprise software leader, providing solutions that make work environments more productive, secure and manageable. Novell supports thousands of organisations around the world with collaboration, endpoint management, and file and networking technologies, all of which drive end-user productivity directly or on the backend. Collaboration solutions: enhance productivity by empowering individuals to work efficiently and team to collaborate effectively – in less time and at a lower cost. Our collaboration solutions include personal and team productivity tools and collaboration data management tools. Endpoint management solutions: leverage identity-based technology to empower the most important assets in your organisation – your end users.

Our endpoint management capabilities include: endpoint lifecycle management, endpoint security management, IT asset management and IT service management file and networking Services: Novell provides the core file, print, and networking services that are at the heart of any organisation. We offer the best platform for networking in a mixed Windows/Linux/Mac environment. With solutions like Novell GroupWise®, Novell ZENworks® and Novell Open Enterprise Server, businesses can reach new levels of productivity while minimising cost, complexity and risk. Today’s Novell is more focused than ever on delivering enterprise-class capabilities in a social, mobile and multi-platform world. We are committed to helping our customers get more value from their current investments and developing new solutions to help them stay competitive in a changing world.

Nucleus Software is a leading software powerhouse providing innovative and pioneering software solutions for Banks and Financial organisations globally. Offerings include IT solutions for retail and corporate banking, lending, cash management, risk analytics and consultancy services designed to support the whole spectrum of business offerings mentioned above and more.

The flagship product, FinnOne™, ranked the 'World's Number 1 Selling Lending Software Product’ in 2011 by IBS Publishing for the fourth consecutive year, is a powerhouse of seamlessly integrated applications, designed to provide operational support, risk management and decision-making support to BFSI companies. The suite consists of several modules focusing on customer acquisition, loan management, collections, delinquency management and more.

It also provides account management, core financial accounting, document management and customer services. FinnOne™ supports multi-branch, multi-currency, multi-product and bi-lingual implementations.

Cash@Will™ is an end-to-end Cash Management product suite. It facilitates effective management of Account Payables and Receivables and comes with seamlessly integrated yet standalone modules of Payments, Collections and Liquidity Management. It also comes with a corporate web front through which corporate clients can manage their cash flows. The suite provides features like cross-border/domestic sweeping, multi currency pooling, cash flow forecasting, netting, domestic, cross country payments, FX tracking and more.

novell asia offices: Singapore, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia Phone: +65 6395 6888 twitter: twitter.com/NOVELL website: www.novell.com

nucleus software a 39, sector – 62 noida 201307 U.P india Phone: +65 6785 9024 contact: Deep Singhania, Head – Asia Pacific email: deep.singhania@nucleussoftware.com twitter: nucleussoftware website: www.nucleussoftware.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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it systems management

mainframe connectivity solutions

Panduit

attachmate

Panduit’s intelligent Data centre solutions

Attachmate® delivers advanced software for terminal emulation, legacy modernisation, managed file transfer, and enterprise fraud management. Attachmate® Terminal Emulation Software Reflection® and Extra! ® can access information on any host and deliver it to any desktop, inside or outside the firewall. Built with the security and flexibility you need to meet modern IT demands, our next-generation terminal emulation products connect Windows users to applications on IBM, UNIX, OpenVMS, and HP NonStop (Tandem) hosts.

Attachmates’® Verastream® suite helps IT organisations respond to dynamic business demands without leaving legacy assets behind.

It’s tailored for low-risk, high-speed modernisation, while quickly delivering ROI. Whether your goal is simply to improve the workflow of a core legacy application or to retool it into a set of reusable services, Verastream solutions can help. Attachmate® Luminet® enterprise fraud management software sees, records, and analyses user activity across all applications. It gives you a complete and accurate picture of who did what, and when – providing the intelligence you need to take informed action.

With Attachmate FileXpress and Reflection for Secure IT, you can meet your modern file transfer challenges head on. Reflection for Secure IT managed file transfer clients and servers use SSH to secure internet file transfers, remote system administration, and TCP/IP-based application access. FileXpress managed file transfer solutions can manage and execute the secure delivery of any-size files, across all major platforms, to any location.

Panduit has developed the industry’s most comprehensive approach to intelligent data centre solutions that includes Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solutions. The key pillars of Panduit’s Intelligent Data Centre Solution include:

Dcim software and intelligent hardware Panduit’s Physical Infrastructure Manager™ (PIM™) Software Platform provides an end-to-end physical to logical view of your data centre and extended enterprise.

Data center advisory services Leverage best-practice methodologies to assist you with data centre consolidation, virtualisation and automation.

energy efficient cabinets Utilise modular components that address power, cooling, space, and cable management challenges, speed to deploy, and space utilisation.

Pre-configured Physical infrastructures These modular designs meet the demands of consolidation, virtualisation, and implementing Cloud architectures and may help reduce deployment times up to 65 per cent*.

high speed Data transport (hsDt) copper and fiber cabling systems Panduit’s HSDT Solutions are both protocol and media agnostic, delivering maximum flexibility during planning, designing, commissioning, and operation of the data centre.

Panduit 60 tuas ave 11 singapore 639106

attachmate asia offices: Singapore, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia

Phone: +65 6 3057575 Ext 74020 contact: Ng Khee Seong email: sgp-nks@panduit.com website: www.panduit.com

Phone: +65 6395 6888 email: info-APAC@attachmate.com twitter: twitter.com/Attachmate website: www.attachmate.com

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ManageD services

ManageD services

akamai technologies

cliftons

Akamai® is a leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere.

At the core of the company's solutions is the Akamai Intelligent Platform™ providing extensive reach, coupled with unmatched reliability, security, visibility and expertise. Akamai removes the complexities of connecting the increasingly mobile world, supporting 24/7 consumer demand, and enabling enterprises to securely leverage the cloud.

Financial services companies no longer need to view the public internet as the weak link for a great online or mobile experience.

Akamai’s managed services are designed to deliver applications and content quickly and securely across the public internet by avoiding congestion and bypassing inefficient protocols. This results in a faster, more reliable and secure online experience for end users – and that leads to higher customer satisfaction. This also helps institutions to grow revenue in their online and mobile channels without the cost of new infrastructure.

cliftons training venues Cliftons is the leading provider of premium, purpose-built training and event facilities, seamlessly delivering total event solutions and outstanding customer support around the globe.

Benefit From cliftons global Footprint With an extensive range of training-specific technologies, services and infrastructure, Cliftons has 12 venues in 10 locations across Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand. Its Affiliate Network provides access to an additional 5,000+ venues across 2,500+ cities worldwide.

a state-of-the-art training centre Located in the heart of singapore’s cBD Specifically targeted to the unique needs of its clients and located in the central business district at 108 Robinson Road, Cliftons Singapore boasts a number of large meeting rooms suitable for training courses, seminars, conferences, conventions and corporate events.

top Financial services institutions trust akamai including:

hassle Free Bookings and cutting-edge technology

• 7 of the top 10 world banks (Source: The Banker) • 8 of the top 10 world asset managers (Source: Towers Watson) • 10 of the top 10 P&C insurance carriers (Source: A.M. Best) • 5 of the top 10 Life & Health carriers (Source: A.M. Best) • 3 of the top 5 world stock exchanges (Source: WFE) To learn more about how Akamai is accelerating the pace of innovation in a hyperconnected world, please visit www.akamai.com and follow @Akamai on Twitter.

Its commitment to providing access to the latest computer training rooms in a professional business setting makes Cliftons Singapore the ideal training centre for you and your guests. Additionally, its flexible booking policy requires no deposit.

akamai technologies singapore Pte. Ltd. 1 raffles Place #16-61 one raffles Place tower 2 singapore 048616 contact: +65 6593 8717 email: sales-singapore@akamai.com twitter: http://twitter.com/akamai website: www.akamai.com

how the industry rates cliftons? winner of Best venue award!

Recognised by the industry for providing the optimal environment to enhance learning, Cliftons won the Gold Award for Best Venue in Asia Pacific at the 2011 LearnX Awards.

cliftons singapore Level 11, Finexis Building 108 robinson road singapore Phone: +65 6591 7999 email: enquiries@cliftons.com website: www.cliftons.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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mobility

multi-channel communications

shoretel

hP exstream

ShoreTel provides brilliantly simple IP-based business communications featuring UC, Contact Center and Mobile UC solutions. Using ShoreTel, organisations of all sizes gain the freedom to communicate and collaborate anywhere, on any device. ShoreTel Mobility, the newest solution, even extends UC to all leading smartphones on all PBX platforms.

ShoreTel’s solution adapts to a company’s culture, processes, applications, and infrastructure, putting people first and giving them the flexibility they need to work and collaborate. Unparalleled deployment and administration ease eliminates the need for expensive provider involvement, and frees up valuable IT resources. The featurerich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use.

Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. Founded in 1996, ShoreTel sells through resellers and distributors to over 19,000 customers in 46 countries. ShoreTel’s corporate headquarters are based in Sunnyvale, California, with regional offices in Austin, Texas; United Kingdom; Sydney, Australia; and Singapore.

HP Exstream is the market leading Customer Communication Management (CCM) solution. It has been proven by leading financial services and insurance enterprises to improve the customer experience and make customer interactions more profitable.

Designed for enterprises that thrive on strong customer relationships, HP Exstream empowers business users to make the most of every customer touch point by creating insightful, impactful, real-time customer communications proven to fuel profitable business growth.

From fully customised high-volume statements and bills, to on-demand marketing and self-service web applications for enrolment and account sign-up, to personalised correspondence and proposals produced interactively by customer-facing employees, HP Exstream allows you to eliminate siloed systems, streamline communication processes, significantly reduce costs, get critical communications to customers faster, and improve the customer experience with relevant, meaningful communications delivered through the customer’s preferred channel.

With HP Exstream you can: • Create and deliver customer communications for customer-preferred channels and mobile devices • Significantly improve the customer experience to increase loyalty and referrals • Ensure brand consistency • Reduce risk and comply with government regulations and standards • Easily market targeted products and services to high-growth, high-net-worth customers • Drive top-line revenue while reducing costs

shoretel 9 temasek blvd, #09-03 suntec tower two singapore 038989 Phone: +65 6517 0800 twitter: @ShoreTel website: www.shoretel.com 122

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hP exstream Phone: +65 8428 6442 contact: Peter Marini, Region Sales Manager, Asia and Japan email: peter.marini@hp.com website: www.hpexstream.com

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Multi-channel coMMunications

outsourcing

thunderhead.com

wipro technologies

Thunderhead.com is a leading provider of enterprise solutions for customer experience management.

The Thunderhead.com ONE customer engagement platform provides powerful SaaS solutions that fundamentally change the way businesses engage with each other and their customers. Some of the world’s most demanding companies trust Thunderhead.com to help them build customer engagement and create enduring relationships.

With Thunderhead.com, businesses have more power to drive revenue, brand strength, and differentiation through superior customer experience.

Thunderhead.com serves its global customer base from offices located in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Wipro Technologies, the global IT business of Wipro Limited (NYSE:WIT) is a leading Information Technology, consulting and outsourcing company, that delivers solutions to enable its clients do business better. Wipro Technologies delivers winning business outcomes through its deep industry experience and a 360 degree view of ‘Business through Technology’ – helping clients create successful and adaptive businesses. A company recognised globally for its comprehensive portfolio of services, a practitioner’s approach to delivering innovation and an organisation wide commitment to sustainability, Wipro Technologies has over 130,000 employees and clients across 54 countries. Wipro’s Banking Practice has partnered with over 50 of the world’s leading banks including four of the top five banks worldwide as well as leading banks in the Asia Pacific.

Our expertise across retail banking, enterprise banking, investment banking, regulatory risk and compliance, mobile banking, channels, payments, lending and mortgages and wealth management address transformational changes for our customers. Our solutions on cloud, mobile, social computing and analytics enable our customers to build a bankable future.

thunderhead.com Phone: +61 2 9299 4560 contact: Nick Smith, Head of Asia Pacific email: nick.smith@thunderhead.com twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Thunderheadon website: www.thunderhead.com

wipro technologies Doddakannelli, sarjapur road, Bangalore 560 035 india email: info@wipro.com twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Wipro website: www.wipro.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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payments

recrUitment

clear2pay

hays recruitment

Clear2Pay is a payments modernisation company that facilitates banks and financial institutions’ payments services, whether they be card, ACH, branch, bulk, high care or international payment transactions through its pure Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Open Payment Framework (OPF). Clients include ING, Banco Santander, Crédit Agricole, BNP Paribas, Royal Bank of Scotland, The Federal Reserve, The People’s Bank of China, Bank of East Asia, Rabobank and Commonwealth Bank. Clear2Pay operates out of 20 offices in 11 countries and employs over 1,200 staff, with 550 in Asia Pacific.

At Hays, we are the world’s leading recruiting experts in qualified, professional and skilled people. Our deep expertise across a wide spectrum of specialised industries and professions makes us unparalleled recruiters in the world of work. With this professional know-how we can help you achieve lasting impact, by finding you the right person to transform your business.

We will ask the questions that ensure we understand your needs.

We can offer deep expertise in the areas that are important to you and we are passionate about consistently delivering the right results. That’s why, for over 34 years, we have powered the world of work. In Asia our areas of expertise cover: accountancy and finance, architecture, banking, construction, contact centres, education, engineering, executive, finance technology, human resources, information technology, insurance, legal, life sciences, manufacturing and operations, office, professionals, oil and gas, property, sales and marketing, supply chain.

open payment Framework The OPF is built on a SOA delivering common, reusable services across all payment types. The OPF comprises packaged business solutions: Bank Payment Hub, SEPA, International Payments, EBPP, Remittance, UK Faster Payments, US Tax Data Services, G3 Immediate Payments, CNAPS for China, and more.

open card system The Open Card System (OCS) processes card payments across all channels from traditional ATM, branch and POS, to e-commerce, mobile and Near Field Communications (NFC). OCS manages multiple institutions, channels and brands and can operate both stand-alone or within a payment hub environment.

open test solutions Clear2Pay’s Open Test Solutions (OTS) enable secure, cost effective and fast end-to-end testing. The portfolio includes integrated test solutions and services for ATMs, cards, devices, handsets, payment networks and back-office systems and are accredited by industry bodies such as EMVCo, NFC Forum, ETSI, GCF, Visa, MasterCard, JCB, etc.

clear2pay singapore Level 35, 80 raffles place, UoB plaza 1 singapore 048624 contact: Stephen Peters, General Manager, Clear2Pay APAC email: stephen.peters@clear2pay.com 124

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hays recruitment akasaka twin tower, main tower 7F 2-17-22 akasaka minato-ku tokyo 107-0052 Japan phone: +81 3 3560 1188 email: info@hays.co.jp website: www.hays.co.jp

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

risk ManageMent

risk & PayMents

rsa security

BPc Banking technologies

RSA, the security division of EMC, is the premier provider of security, risk and compliance management solutions for business acceleration.

RSA helps the world’s leading organisations solve their most complex and sensitive security challenges. 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, continuous network monitoring, 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.

In more than 30 countries on five continents, we have helped some of the world’s most innovative financial institutions transform their payments business. Whether you want to launch new products faster than your competitors, dramatically lower your TCO, meet card scheme and regulatory changes simply or cater for the ever changing needs of your customers – we have the perfect solution for you.

Our SmartVista suite of integrated, scalable, flexible and secure solutions covers every aspect of electronic payments processing – high performance online, real-time transaction switching with full ATM and POS device monitoring and management, complete card management, advanced real-time fraud prevention, sophisticated loyalty program management, card personalisation and production, comprehensive billing and merchant management, and integrated internet and mobile ecommerce payment solutions. Supporting a wide range of industry standard platforms, not only does SmartVista provide you with options when selecting hardware providers but it also ensures you can easily source the technical skills you need. SmartVista delivers unrivalled performance, and is proven in a wide range of live production environments including driving over 40,000 ATMs from a single site and delivering 1,500 TPS in peak operation. SmartVista delivers 99.999 per cent availability for organisations of all sizes, from niche players to firms with over 77 million cards.

Operating from a network of global offices and with a partner ecosystem made up of industry leaders, we are committed to longterm relationships with our customers. Our relentless focus on our customers’ success is one of the key reasons why our customer base has grown by 1,000 per cent in the last 10 years.

eMc international sarL (singapore Branch) 6 temasek Boulevard suntec tower 4, #31-01 singapore 038986 Phone: +65 6333 6200 website: www.rsa.com

BPc asia Pacific 10 hoe chaing road #14-01 keppel towers singapore 089315 Phone: +65 6423 0313 email: info-ap@bpcbt.com website: www.bpcbt.com w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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security

security

Authentify inc.

rsA security

Authentify, Inc. is the leading provider of global telephone-based, out-of-band authentication services. These Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) services enable organisations that need strong security to quickly and cost-effectively add 2-Factor (2FA) or 3-Factor authentication layers to user logon, transaction verifications or critical changes such as adding a payee to an e-pay or wire account.

The company's patented technology employs a service oriented message architecture and XML API to seamlessly integrate into existing security processes.

Authentify has recently introduced the 2CHK™ service to extend the capabilities of its existing phone-based out-of-band authentication products. The heart of 2CHK™ is a small app that can be downloaded to a mobile device or a user's desktop. 2CHK™ establishes a secure second communication channel to a banking platform's back office and securely transmits transaction details to a display in the app.

In more than 120 countries Authentify provides user authentication, transaction confirmation, transaction authentication services, voice biometric and other authentication functions for many of the most familiar names on the internet, including five of the world's top 10 banks, the internet's largest e-commerce site, the largest online auction and commerce site, the leading Peer-to-Peer (P2P) e-payment firm and many others use Authentify.

RSA, the security division of EMC, is the premier provider of security, risk and compliance management solutions for business acceleration.

RSA helps the world’s leading organisations solve their most complex and sensitive security challenges. 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, continuous network monitoring, 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.

Authentify, inc.

8745 w. higgins road suite 240 chicago, illinois 60631 usA

Authentify, inc. Authentify Ltd. 12/F, capitol centre, tower ii 28 Jardine's crescent causeway Bay hong Kong

Phone: +1 773 243 0328 contact: John Zurawski,

Phone: +852 9304 6699 contact: Robert Soden,

Vice President

Managing Director

email: john.zurawski@authentify.com email: robert.soden@authentify.com website: www.authentify.com website: www.authentify.com 126

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eMc international sArL (singapore Branch) 6 temasek Boulevard suntec tower 4, #31-01 singapore 038986 Phone: +65 6333 6200 website: www.rsa.com

w ho’ s w ho Di r ec to ry

systems integration

UnifieD commUnications

s & i systems

Polycom asia Pacific Pte Ltd

S & I is an IT consulting, business solutions and services company that helps our customers leverage technology to drive operational and strategic business success. Build on 14 years of experience with 120 employees in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, we partner with leading technology vendor to serve more than 300 unique enterprise clients across industries and regions. With proven experience and domain expertise, S & I supports leading financial services companies, keeps their mission-critical applications available while optimising IT infrastructure resources to achieve real-time information access and managed decisions as well as to meet security and governance requirements.

Among the many awards received over the years that demonstrate our proven successes in financial services industry: • IBM Servers and Technology Group Top performing Business Partner – Financial Service Sector • Oracle Industry Partner of the Year – Financial Industry

Polycom is the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for telepresence, video and voice powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform. The RealPresence Platform interoperates with the broadest range of business, mobile, and social applications and devices. More than 400,000 organisations trust Polycom solutions to collaborate and meet face-to-face from any location for more productive and effective engagement with colleagues, partners, customers, specialists and prospects. Polycom, together with its broad partner ecosystem, provides customers with the best total cost of ownership, interoperability, scalability, and security for video collaboration, whether on-premises, hosted, or cloud-delivered.

Polycom solutions enable face to face collaboration throughout the organization as well as the delivery of personal and powerful, customer experiences across immersive environments, meeting rooms, desktops, kiosks tablets and smartphones. In an industry where faceto-face, personal relationships are the key to success, Polycom makes this a reality with high definition video solutions that bring financial institutions and customers together – just like being there.

Key information and content such as market reports, trading information, stock prices can be shared with more impact. Critical financial processes such as interviewing, performance management, fiscal planning, project management, human capital development, business continuity planning, corporate communications can all be enhanced and shortened. And, Polycom helps financial institutions worldwide implement video for customer relationship management (CRM), business process management (BPM), enterprise social networking, e-learning and sales management. From mobile, desktop, room, to immersive, Polycom offers a complete portfolio of video conferencing and telepresence solutions over IP networks.

how can s & i help you?

IT infrastructure consulting – Drive growth, efficiency and innovation • Infrastructure solutions planning, design and implementations • Server and storage optimisation, consolidation and virtualisation • Systems and network integration and high availability solutions Enterprise solutions – create powerful customer experiences • Client and wealth management solutions • Unified communications and collaboration • Data management and integration • Business intelligence and predictive analytics Managed services – deploy with best practices and service level • Operations management and maintenance and support services • Disaster recovery and business continuity planning • IT outsourcing and data centre hosting

s & i systems Pte Ltd 31 Kaki Bukit road 3, #05-20/23 techlink singapore 417818 Phone: +65 6319 4888 email: marketing@si-asia.com website: www.si-asia.com

Polycom asia Pacific Pte Ltd 8, shenton way, #11-01, aXa tower singapore 068811 Phone: +65 6389 9200 email: asianinquiry@polycom.com twitter: @PolycomAlert website: www.polycom.asia w ho ’ s w ho o f fs i

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w h o’ s w h o Di r ec t o ry

unifieD communications

unifieD communications

PGi

shoretel

PGi has been a global leader in virtual meetings for 20 years.

Our Cloud based solutions deliver multi-point, real-time virtual collaboration using video, voice and file sharing technologies. PGi solutions are available via desktops, tablets or mobile devices, helping businesses worldwide be more productive, mobile and green. PGi has a global presence in 25 countries and an established base of more than 35,000 enterprise customers, including 75 per cent of the Fortune 100™. In the last five years, we have hosted over 725 million people from 137 countries in over 65 million meetings.

ShoreTel provides brilliantly simple IP-based business communications featuring UC, Contact Centre and Mobile UC solutions. Using ShoreTel, organisations of all sizes gain the freedom to communicate and collaborate anywhere, on any device. ShoreTel Mobility, the newest solution, even extends UC to all leading smartphones on all PBX platforms.

ShoreTel’s solution adapts to a company’s culture, processes, applications, and infrastructure, putting people first and giving them the flexibility they need to work and collaborate. Unparalleled deployment and administration ease eliminates the need for expensive provider involvement, and frees up valuable IT resources. The featurerich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use.

Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. Founded in 1996, ShoreTel sells through resellers and distributors to over 19,000 customers in 46 countries. ShoreTel’s corporate headquarters are based in Sunnyvale, California, with regional offices in Austin, Texas; United Kingdom; Sydney, Australia; and Singapore.

Globalmeet Demand for quality meeting solutions is exponentially increasing. You want a solution that caters to your ever changing work and business environment that requires content collaboration. At the same time, the solution needs to be easy to implement and intuitive for users.

Now you can have it, with GlobalMeet. This straight forward solution features a combination of audio and web conferencing in a single click providing the tools to manage a smooth, interactive meeting.

imeet Demand for high quality desktop video meeting solutions across business is growing. You need a solution that’s cost effective, personal and engaging for both meeting hosts and guests. Now you can have it, with iMeet. Combining the best of desktop video, web and audio collaboration technologies, iMeet is PGi’s next generation Cloud based online solution providing a more personal and social meeting environment.

PGi 371 Beach road #13-08, Keypoint singapore 199597 Phone: +65 6419 5999 email: sginfo@pgi.com 128

who ’s w h o of fs i

shoretel 9 temasek Blvd, #09-03 suntec tower two singapore 038989 Phone: +65 6517 0800 twitter: @ShoreTel website: www.shoretel.com