10 minute read
Composable Future
Sally Bou Jaoude Account Director, Avaya
Sally Bou Jaoude Account Director, Avaya, tells MEA Finance that, while banks have responded well to the requirements forced on them by the global pandemic, a new, composable approach to technology will be required to enhance the overall banking experience and enable the adoption of emerging technologies
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What is top of mind for regional banking leaders at the moment?
In a word, ‘experience’ is top of mind for regional banking leaders.
Banks were quick to digitize over the last two years in their response to the pandemic. Now, armed with a new impetus, and new capabilities, local banks are in a better position to push the boundaries of customer and employee experiences.
Customers are more comfortable than ever with the convenience that online services deliver – indeed, they’re clamouring for even further digitization. As a result, banks see improving the quality of experiences through both the customer and employee journey as among their most important differentiators and creators of brand affinity.
The good news is that banks have realized that they cannot keep up with the demands of their customers and employees using legacy technologies, and many used the forced digitization of the pandemic to do away with monolithic, glass-ceiling apps. Now that they have the right technology platforms, they’re looking at how they can compose the experiences they need to address every step of the customer and employee journey.
As an example of this transformation away from monolithic apps, Emirates NBD last year partnered with Moro Hub and Avaya to create a cloud-based omnichannel platform. That platform exchanges legacy systems such as business phone systems, meeting services, and on-premises contact centre solutions with a fully integrated, endto-end cloud communications platform that can really create a Total Experience. And we’re seeing other banks across the region adopt a similar approach.
What are the big developments of the past year?
Over the past year, the word ‘effortless’ has been key to ensure the success of every business plan, and strategy. For example, an explosion in app use brought on by local stay-in-place orders compressed five years of mobile banking growth into a single year. And on the employee side, hybrid working models have become an expectation – workers are much more demanding about how and where they work (and this trend isn’t limited to the banking industry).
This has created the need for composable technologies that can really address the Total Experience, which is the interconnection of customer, employee, user, and multi-experience. The idea is that, if you want to be truly customer centric, you need a cohesive customer experience (CX) strategy that gives employees the tools they need to wow every customer, on any device, at every step of their journey.
Sure, the world is returning to something resembling normal, but it’s got a different flavour now, and consumer and employee expectations are never going back to how they used to be. Any banks that haven’t prepared for this shift are going to have a difficult time competing when experiences are the currency against which they’re measured.
Which sectors or aspects of the regional financial markets will see the greatest advancements in technology this year?
We’re seeing some impressive innovations in the field of customer
What are the big trends to watch out for 2022?
The most successful banks will realize that true customer-centricity interweaves customer experience, employee experience, multi-experience and user experience. The good news is that many of them have the right tools, and many have the right strategy. But the big trend we’ll see in 2022 will be banks working out how to bring those tools and strategies together to build a total experience.
On the CX side, an inability to satisfy customers’ needs in the moment will contribute to them switching brands, and with switching becoming more consumer-friendly in this region, that creates even more of an impetus to focus on effortless experiences.
And in the workspace, banks will assess what has worked and what hasn’t for their employees over the last two years. This may be the year when banks accept that working from the office may
no longer be the ideal scenario, and instead think more about how work gets done, rather than where it gets done.
Finally, as a result of the composable platforms that banks have been building over the past year, expect to see much more experimentation with emerging technologies such as robotic process automation, voice and facial recognition, and conversational AI. Not all of these experiments will pan out, but the beauty of a composable platform is that it massively reduces the time (and cost) for new capabilities to be rolled out, reducing the risk for that experimentation.
experience – from conversational AI for customer interactions to AI-powered analytics that provide employees with in-the-moment, contextual knowledge on live customer conversations. And regional banks are only just scratching the surface of the possibilities of AI when it comes to experiences.
Elsewhere, the fintech sector remains promising, but depending on the individual country, regulations are impacting the rate of uptake when it comes to innovations. In markets where open banking hasn’t yet taken off, banks are instead partnering with trusted technology providers to build out the capabilities that fintechs promise.
The Great Lakes
Head of Cloud and Cyber Security, at SmartStream, Peter Hainz tells MEA Finance that banks are looking to partner with fintech to provide a competitive edge and that making use of data lakes will provide them with unique advantages
As a regional leader in banking technology, what has been at the top of your mind in the past year?
Just few years back, banks were very shy to move their applications outside on-premises environments. In the past, banks moved only non-critical infrastructure to the cloud to benefit from cost reduction. However, in the last year, there was a huge uptake for cloud migration related to any service like Infrastructure, Platform or Software as a Service.
Last year, some financial institutions were migrating practically the entire IT infrastructure, from the back-office to the front-office, to the cloud. Banks not only migrated non-critical infrastructure but also real-time components. This illustrated how banks now believe that cloud computing will be of strategic importance to their organisations.
Banks realised that data storage is much less expensive when using a cloud-based infrastructure. Banks are awash with data, and data lakes provide fertile ground for Artificial Intelligence
Peter Hainz, Global Head of Product Management, Cloud and Cyber Security
(AI) supported, predictive and analytical models. These models support not only innovation but also tailor-made solutions for clients. Data lakes may utilize AI to generate forecasts for back-office and front-office applications. Moreover, data lakes are used to overcome siloed infrastructures, which is often found in financial institutions.
SmartStream has worked with many financial institutions during the past year to develop real-world solution that take advantage of what these data lakes can uniquely provide. Working with these customers we have developed and deployed data lake APIs that represent a real step change in compliance and enterprise resource management saving the client money and manhours as well as providing clearer more concise data.
Managed services, automation and digitization have also been important themes. Managed Services and Business Process Outsourcing, provided by Fintech providers like SmartStream, enable saving costs, automation, and highly efficient AI workflows.
Banks have stated that “approximately one-third of all IT spending is cloudinfrastructure related. Increasingly, this spending includes Platform as a Service testing environments, since cloud environments can be constructed much faster than on-premises”.
As a result, on top of my mind last year was how to combine the power of data lakes, AI, and security workflows in the cloud.
Describe how your experience of the past year has influenced the role you are in today?
During my career I have held various cyber security roles in the finance industry. In the past, there was always a perception that on-premises solutions were the most secure ones.
This has now changed, and banks often see the cloud as more secure with state-of-the art monitoring, logging, encryption solutions, business continuity and disaster recovery workflows and all this is audited. SmartStream is the perfect example with PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 1-3 and C5 certification.
Additionally, SmartStream is at the forefront, working very closely with AWS to develop innovative solutions. As mentioned earlier, we worked with them to construct a state-of-the-art data lake to better mine large swaths of data.
We also co-operated with AWS to develop different encryption and data masking workflows in the cloud, as many of our banking clients have regulatory needs along sensitive data. It was very important to increase employee’s knowledge level with fast upcoming technologies. As a result, we have AWS professional architecture and vendor independent security speciality certified employees, who provide consulting to our banking clients.
Banking clients also seek regulatory advice due to different local guidelines of data transfer to the cloud and storage requirements. SmartStream is closely working with AWS to provide state-ofthe-art regulatory compliant solutions. We have multiple clients in Singapore, where the Monetary Authority has one of the most stringent regulatory regimes in the world.
Those financial institutions that can leverage their data into business intelligence and innovative customer driven services will see great technological advancements. Banks will increasingly partner with Fintechs to provide innovative services competitors can’t offer.
Cloud-based Managed Services provided by Fintechs will increase as banks are largely unable to construct these without experience. We received feedback from our banking clients, that they wanted to engage with a trusted, experienced Fintech provider to create solutions that focused on the automation of workflows based on AI technology. SmartStream conducts this workflow automation with state-of-the-art security features which is often much easier to implement in the cloud, due to a variety of factors including the availability of a trained security team 24/7.
The head of IT of one bank told me, ‘We start with moving back- and frontoffice applications to the cloud as it is much more secure and there are no silos’. In the cloud you can more easily tag resources and implement software defined networking, which limits the
blast radius of any attacks. Therefore, in the cloud you have much more granular security control of your environment.
AI and cloud are perfect due to scalability and automation. We experienced that AI in combination with data lakes is a very powerful tool.
We believe that openness and APIs will be very important in the coming days. In an increasingly interconnected world, APIs will play a critical role connecting various environments within the cloud, as well as hybrid workflows. way. For example, cash management will now be in the managed services SaaS portfolio.
Another key element of that portfolio is SmartStream AIR, the company’s AI-enabled reconciliations platform, which can match any structured or unstructured data in seconds rather than weeks.
A relatively new feature to join the managed services cloud family is Affinity, an observational learning solution driven by machine learning, which can improve operational data management and data quality by learning how individual users work within the portfolio of solutions and automate the optimisation of their workflow.
Alongside powerful, cloud-enabled tools for reconciliations, corporate actions processing, collateral management, cash and liquidity management, fees and expense management, and reference data, clients can also access the data lake functionality. Data lakes act as centralised repositories in which clients can store their structured and unstructured data. Once the data has been gathered, banks can mine it to aid in enhanced regulatory reporting and to gain a deeper understanding of the data. Having these data lakes as part of the managed services portfolio allows clients to ramp up the use of the company’s comprehensive suite of cloud-based solutions enabling any kind of query or reporting requirement without any additional configuration.
In the light of the past year, what are your plans for 2022?
SmartStream’s managed services will bring more market-leading solutions to its banking customers in a scalable, reliable, secure, and cost-effective
