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In an environment where the financial services industry landscape and customers’ realities are constantly evolving, the combination of data and technology is proving to be a powerful tool when meeting and exceeding expectations. In this blog, Rajesh Awasthi, Vice President and Global Head of Managed Hosting and Cloud Services, Tata Communications, discusses the key considerations that those in the financial services industry should make when striving to create a more robust ecosystem. 

With business strategies pivoted on customer-centricity, organisations are harnessing the power of technology to deliver authentic and tailored experiences for their customers. This is the world of hyper-personalisation where targeted experiences and meaningful interactions with the customers are created with the help of advanced technologies that are elevating the end-user experience.

The earliest adopters of technology such as banking and finance industries are accelerating the holistic adoption of next generation technologies to offer the most personalised financial experience to the new-age customers.

“By capitalising the intelligence on the generated customer data and a scalable, secure and compliant digital venue for execution, financial institutions are addressing these needs and becoming the trusted advisors.”

Some of the key considerations to make the financial services ecosystem more robust, and to leverage the data effectively for hyper-personalisation include:

Cohesive IT systems: Financial services IT hosts valuable customer data which when seamlessly integrated can extract data values that can help build an in-depth consumer profile for a hyper-connected experience.

Compliant and secure platform: Data privacy and hyper-personalisation sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. While there is an expectation of delivering a highly personalised customer experience, it is also accompanied by a strong ask for data privacy. Thus, organisations need to adopt the right digital platforms which enable them to innovate while meeting the regulatory compliance guidelines.

Customisation on cohesive and complaint cloud

Banks are exploring new business frontiers by striking the right blend of cloud solutions and enhanced security. A cloud transformation can alter challenges into opportunities aiding a seamless and personalised customer experience through following features:

Unified Cloud Platform – This can dissolve the technological barriers of collaboration by providing a single platform for gathering, segmenting and integrating data from all first party, second party and third-party domains. It helps in homogenising the consolidated data pool, making it easier for computing and analysing as it now provides a 360-degree view of the organisation. This data integration ensures harnessing the utmost potential of data resulting in better product adoption and customer retention rate.

“The critical data analytics facilitated through a comprehensive cloud platform can drive business innovation along with agility and scalability.”

Privacy and security – Establishing digital trust is a key imperative for all banks. Building a highly resilient, agile and compliant platform from the ground can come attached with exorbitant prices. By investing in a security-rich financial cloud, organisations can take off the burden of hosting these services by themselves. This will allow them to pivot their focus on bettering their customer experience while remaining untroubled by additional responsibilities such as upgrading its security services regularly to meet with the constantly updating regulatory standards.

Also, as data travels across the world, abiding by the privacy laws become all the more important. Considering, most governments have been monitoring compliance closely, financial institutions in India are mandated to incorporate the guidelines issued by regulatory bodies. Therefore, banks are increasingly partnering with the right cloud service provider that can take care of both security and compliance guidelines.

An API Driven approach– Using APIs allows financial institutions to make its data available to partners while removing the technical complexities associated with it. This facilitates banks to augment the data and other complimentary specialties of the third party within its ecosystem to offer enhanced personalisation for more targeted customer experiences. Open banking also creates large volumes of data, insights from which help offer bespoke propositions to the customers and drive innovation for the industry.

Integrating latest technologies– With the consumer needs constantly evolving, banks are gearing to be future-ready to cater to the new-age requirements. This calls for a high-quality predictive analysis model that can be facilitated by advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to sustain customer satisfaction. ML algorithms help in detecting the behavioural pattern of consumers and provide actionable insights which would be otherwise difficult to detect via manual intervention.

“With the confluence of ML, AI and cloud, BFSI companies will be able to offer real time, contextual recommendations to its consumers, resulting in higher engagement.”

Thus, to augment the hyper-connected customer experiences, the ‘behind the scenes’ digital architecture needs to be evolved. Data, analytics and advanced technologies need to be embedded through the customer journey to generate personalised customer insights for driving innovative experiences for them. A comprehensive and compliant cloud framework will be the key to reimagine the future of banking.

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