Several Founders, Co-Founders, CXO Bankers, CXO Fintech professional & people who participated in the discussions:
- Mr. P D Singh, Former General Manager, Bank of Baroda
- Mr Narayan Rao, Chief Services Officer, Suryoday Small Finance Bank
- Mr Ajay B Panicker, CEO & Founder, NetPay Limited
- Mr Neeraj Chandra, Head of Operations, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank
- Mr. Anupam Varghese , Governing Board Member,NITJ Technology Business Incubator
- Ms Sangeeta shankar, Co-founder & Partner, The Brand & Mark
- Mr Atish Shelar, Head – Acquisition /Business Development,Indiaideas.com Ltd
- Mr Sony A, Head – Digital, South Indian Bank
- Mr. Ishan Vaish, India Partnership Manager, Apple
- Mr. P B Prakash, Head Financial Institutions Group, Indusind Bank
- Mr. Sharad Goklani, Senior Vice President- Technology, Equitas Small Finance Bank
- Mr Rishi Prakash Mantri, Senior Vice President (Digital Payment – Solurtions & Design , YES Bank
- Ms. Aishwarya Jaishankar, Vice President , Kotak Mahindra Bank
- Mr. Ravi Shankar, Co founder & CEO, Active Intelligence Pte Ltd.
- Mr Kamonasish Aayush Mazumdar, Chief Marketing Officer, MeraEvents
- Mr Vineet Tewari , Executive Director , Payza
- Mr. Abhay Kulkarni, General Manager Sales, Worldline Global
- Mr. Rana Sinha Ray, Head Technology, TimesofMoney
- Mr Avro Mukerji, Investment counselor-NRI Burgundy, Axis Bank
- Mr. Abhishek Mody, Associate Director-Payment & Digital Initiatives, IDFC Bank
- Mr Parag Mehta Founder & CEO , Evolute Group
- Mr Shirsha Ghosh, Co-Founder, Torit Innovations
- Mr Shashank Kumar, Co- Founder at Razorpay
- Mr Vikas R Panditrao, Advisor, Forum of Industry Academic Knowledge Sharing(FIAKS)
- Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum
An intriguing question was raised in the FIAKS community – Can banks in-house technology team manage banking technology or have they completely surrendered themselves to vendors under name of Fintech collaboration? Take look at this
- Core banking – Outsourced
- Mobile wallet – Outsourced
- CRM – Outsourced
- Call centre – Outsourced
- ATM – Outsourced
- Phone banking – Outsourced
- SMS banking – Outsourced
- Internet banking – Outsourced
- Mobile banking – Outsourced
- Agency banking – Outsourced
- AI – Outsourced
- POS – Outsourced
- Office management – Outsourced
- Digital marketing – Outsourced
- Strategy – Outsourced
- Hiring – Outsourced
- Risk tech tools OFAC/SDN – Outsourced……. and list goes on
So what is in-house for banks? It looks like for every function, doers are only vendors and banks is doing vendor management. Are banks becoming an aggregation of Vendors? and Product managers new procurement heads? INNOVATION=ZERO?
A leading member starts the discussion by commenting that this was a very poignant question. The CEO of Monzo, a challenger bank in the UK has this to say about his bank “We’re not really in the business of building a massive balance sheet. Instead, we want to be a control centre for your money, and manage numerous different providers to save you time & money. We need a new phrase for this. Smart Bank?” Like e-Commerce, banks are becoming a marketplace or at least adopting that model.
The first responder said that the main business of banks is lending money and taking deposits and as long as banks can do that efficiently even if most of the other things are outsourced, it is absolutely okay. Getting the job done by the best vendor is a good thing. The question is – what about NPA?
A member replies, “What is outsourced is the key here. If its product in the box solutions then I agree, but if vendors are only for coding and the idea is proprietary then what’s the harm?”
This invokes a response from another intellectual who says that it’s the other way round. Vendors suggest and then whitelist the solution.A young but an intelligent member of the community contributes by stating that the “user experience” is not even in the top 3 for most banks.The heights of user experience are leather sofas and a free coffee machine, that is, if you maintain 100,000 USD Quaterly Average Balance (QAB)! He jokes that he keep a stress ball handy whenever he needs to log in to a particular bank net banking portal.
An expert in the community then asks – Doesn’t this logic apply to all entities? There isn’t a single entity which manufactures or prepares and creates all the stuff in-house. On the lighter note, even the roadside Vada Pav guy also outsources/buys his pav from a bakery.
A member states that the banks are dead because they don’t know their “Why’s”. If you really ask why should Banks exists in a new world, you won’t get a great answer. Keeping money safe is managing deposit risk and in an increasingly digital world, it perhaps also isn’t banking – it’s more of digital accounting and digital safekeeping. UX and even CX is something that no one in the bank is worried about or is even willing to learn.
A person experienced in internet banking shares that this problem is real. He gives a lot of examples and says that it is like flying an aeroplane –
- Memory test – For customer id, login id, password
- Pray to the telecom gods – Input the OTP (which is better nowadays)
- Keep an eye on the clock (since timeout)
- Juggle multiple windows to enter info (because you can’t copy paste)
- Keep my fingers lean (escape and back button can destroy all the efforts so far)
- Patience – To last multiple pages hops like “I agree”, “Ok”, “Ok sure”, etc.
- God forbid if the internet connection goes slow in between
Register & Read the entire discussions