CHAPTER 04
The Role of Cloud in a Customer-Centric Organisation
The advent of cloud technology has allowed financial institutions to create new, customer-centric services built around siloed, on-premise data, processes and platforms.
Cloud has also provided organisations with access to an a la carte technology model for timely services and technology adoption, without the need for additional investments in internal infrastructure and personnel. This is critical in an environment where banks and financial organisations are facing increasing competitive pressures.
The banking sector in general is hesitant to move towards cloud solutions, believes Dennis Harty, CEO of Alpha Asset Management, who says that nobody is rushing to move to the cloud.
I do think it’s wrong, I’ve seen a couple of firms take a different approach and actually progress with cloud solutions. But they’re few and far between.
The BFSI sector needs far more education around cloud’s potential, adds David Germain, Group CIO, RSA Group. This is particularly true when many insurance companies are looking for a hybrid solution that allows them to enable legacy and new technologies. “You can’t go to the board and just say: I want to move to Cloud. There has to be a benefit before you spend the cheque,” he says.
That said, RSA does routinely consider cloud for any new projects. “One benefit of cloud is agility in that it’s quicker to build out a new application and a new construct for the business in the cloud, compared to on-premise. But you also need to understand what makes sense to be on legacy, what capability you have to run things, what support you can get from third-party boutiques. It’s building out that education at the board level, through to the functional levels in the organisation management.”
According to McKinsey, cloud-specific spending is expected to grow at more than six times the rate of general IT spending through 2020. This would indicate that the majority of an enterprises’ legacy systems have either moved or are planning to be moved to the cloud.
At Mindtree, we believe that cloud is the only option for BFSI organisations to leverage in order to achieve customer-centricity and a successful, data-driven architecture. In our experience, working with financial organisations we have observed the following factors as critical to the success of cloud-based, customer-centric and personalised services:
Personalisation: Financial organisations can use cloud services to gather rich data that let them customise and personalise the customer experience. Personalisation is about giving every customer the feeling that they are the organisation’s only customer. This, in turn, will yield improved customer acquisition, satisfaction and retention. Cloud-based CRM software can capture data from multiple touch points as well as social network interactions to present a unified and personalised experience across omni channels.
Insights as a Service: To understand customer needs better, insights can be used to target promotion and marketing campaigns and delight the customer with personalised recommendations. This means engaging digitally native clients with contextual experience driven by customer intelligence, delivered through conversational interface, optimised through cognitive automation and powered by cloud. BFSI organisations can leverage cloud services to unearth patterns which human beings are not able to spot, using these insights to refine campaigns and provide personalised banking products and services.
Customer 360-degree view: Migrating to cloud-based customer-centric operations allows financial organisations to understand their customers at an enterprise level. Data integration, consolidation and organisation are all part of making the data available for both analytical and operational needs, to enrich the understanding of the customer, thereby removing blind spots in the decisioning process and resulting in actionable insights.
Trust and Security: In the recent past we have witnessed cyber-attacks causing a threat to the entire BFSI fraternity and its customers. In some cases, security breaches involving millions of records have had a serious impact on customer loyalty. This mandated the IT services organisation to consider security as an essential component in the customer experience journey. For this reason, cloud computing security has evolved to address this issue.
At Mindtree we adopt a holistic approach, from advisory to operations to transform the bank’s business and drive innovation and efficiency. The best practice we follow is the seven stages to win in the digital age with the cloud - as shown below:
Mindtree can support end-to-end cloud transformation program tailored to each stage of the journey
Next: Conclusion
A Future Roadmap for FinTech
