Khaleej Times partners with Cloud4C and Oracle on the future of financial services

More than three-quarters (78 per cent) of financial services respondents said Covid-19 has resulted in IT being viewed more strategically in their organisations. In addition, 50 per cent of financial services respondents said they increased their investments in cloud as a direct result of the pandemic in order to enhance customer and user experience.

However, the financial services sector faces a delicate balancing act when it comes to mitigating risk and maintaining a positive user experience. Offering a good customer experience is important for several reasons—it increases conversion rates, optimises customer engagement with the product, allows for cross selling, creates positive brand association and can help your bank stand out from the competition. To address this dilemma, Khaleej Times in Partnership with Cloud4C and Oracle recently hosted an online webinar ‘Finance Transformed’ where leaders from the BFSI sector took part to better understand and manage this challenge.

Mohammed Muneebuddin, vice-president for Global ISV and BFSI at Cloud4C and CtrlS, said: “Financial services are being re-articulated in terms of the systems of engagement. New services being introduced by the challenger banks, collaborations between the traditional banks and challenger banks mean that the end users, the customers, are benefiting from these developments.”

“The question is not whether or which applications to move to the cloud, it is about how to move them without compromising security or any risk. For most financial services, the challenge of moving to the cloud has little to do with developing cloud native applications and everything to do with ensuring the perceived risk mitigation robustness of their current environment in the cloud. Experience and risk mitigation are both equally important,” Muneebuddin added.

Following Muneebuddin’s session, Shahid Khan, industry leader of FSI from Oracle spoke about cloud transformation for financial services. He addressed how banking platform modernisation could enable the banking leaders to run their banks better and transform the banks faster. “The most important aspect of course in cloud adoption is compliance with mandated regulations,” Khan said. “Oracle’s cloud products and services portfolio also ensure database security, cloud infrastructure security plus identity and access management to ensure banks are protected and they protect their customer’s information at all times”.

To give further insights on the future of financial services, the webinar shifted to a panel discussion that involved Muneebuddin, Khan and Anil Jaggia, strategic advisor at Cloud4C, also serving as the director of Epimoney, a Digital Lending NBFC. Previously, Jaggia served as the CIO of HDFC Bank, overseeing critical operations across financial services, microfinance, quality management, customer service, legal, and infrastructure administration. Jaggia highlighted how large banks are using cloud services to drive digital transformation and scaling their services and products. “Legacy systems are holding banks back as they can be doubling their average output easily through cloud transformation. Also, nowadays customer expectations are fickle as their demands are not the same as what they wanted yesterday. Agility is paramount and you can’t survive your competition without having the speed to pivot to your customers’ needs. Cloud is the best way to do it,” Jaggia said.

Cloud transformation presents major opportunities in the financial services industry, but they also pose significant challenges that need the right technology partner to guide the BFSI sector. However, the biggest take away for most participants was that the economic and business impact of cloud is one that sets you apart from your competitors in the modern digital world.

• KT Network