Analysts, bankers bullish on emerging technologies at Finacle conclave

Mumbai: The banking industry is in the midst of a transformation and business and technology professionals need to prepare themselves for the banking customer of the coming decade, who, in all likelihood, is going to be very different and even more demanding than what is seen today. Seemed to be the tone and tenor of the deliberations and discussions at the Finacle Conclave at Goa.

In his keynote address, K V Kamath, Managing Director and CEO, ICICI Bank, set out the ground rules for doing banking for the masses. Citing ICICI bank as a model of successfully leveraging technology to achieve leadership and competitive advantage, he traced the bank's technology-led transformation from year 1999 with the bank deciding to use it as a disruptive tool to expand service delivery to the growing customer base coupled with lower costs. Outlining the bank's new growth horizon, he said that the bank is now focusing on rural banking as a key growth driver and there is need for new business model and distribution strategy to reach the un-banked world.

In an interesting session on emerging technologies, William Conner, lead analyst, Financial Services Technology, Datamonitor said that upper tier banks are beginning to consider core systems replacement over the next five years, although due to their size and complexity, they will be approaching replacement incrementally. The new generation core banking technology will play a key role in defining business agility and operational efficiencies of the organisations to compete with the older behemoths.

Underlining the importance of service-oriented architecture (SOA), he added that banks need to understand how to take advantage of the benefits it can provide and make the transition from their existing architecture with the minimum disruption. The majority of upper tier banks are expecting SOA to impact their business in the next three years and see web services as having the most significant impact.

The conclave is a global banking CXO forum and is organised by Infosys Technologies. Over 100 delegates from 26 countries comprising of global banking leaders, leading analysts and renowned experts from the banking sector are participating in the event.