30 Per Cent of Business Will
Migrate To New Technologies,
says Vodafone India CEO
BFSI sector will witness major disruptions in the coming years
M
ore than 30 per cent
of the business in
the banking sector
will migrate to new
technologies in the coming years,
said Sunil Sood, CEO and MD of
Vodafone India, on the second day
of Outlook Money Conclave 2018.
In a chat with Outlook Money
editor Malini Bhupta, Sood said
“Open Banking, IndiaStack, Cloud
First Strategy and technologies like
artificial intelligence, big data and
blockchain technology are going to be
major disruptors in the BFSI sector.
This will completely change the speed
and accuracy of the response.”
Holding forth on the topic of
‘Disruption in the Banking, Financial
Services and Insurance (BFSI)
Sector’ and how digital technology
will impact the way business will be
done, Sood said rapid proliferation
of data will lead to sharp shifts
in consumer behaviour and have
implications for companies too.
According to him, “The data
connectivity layer, which is the
job of the telco to provide, will be
a key enabler for the future of the
country.” A lot of new technologies
will disrupt the BFSI space and the
first one would be open banking.
This is basically one large connected
ecosystem that links financial and
non-financial institutions to multiple
service providers. And enabling
this will be IndiaStack, which is
essentially JAM (Jan-Dhan Aadhaar
and Mobile) and Unified Payments
Interface (UPI). This stack is far
ahead of some other countries,
and the Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs) and platforms are
the ones which will show the way.
“New technologies will deliver
on service experience and the
manual processes will disappear.
We are working on ‘one view’ of the
customer,” he said. Customers tend to
Mobility Driven Disruption: Vodafone India MD & CEO, Sunil Sood, speaks on open banking and
tech changes in financial services
switch channels rapidly and expect
service providers to know more
details like what happened in the
past two interactions. To deal with
this challenge, Vodafone is working
on one-view instruments like
chatbots, voice bots and data bots
to automate all the processes. This
will enable the company to have one
view, at any one instance and at any
one of the company’s touchpoints.
Ultimately, it boils down to three
things – knowing the customer
well, simplifying the journey for the
customer and assisting the customer
the right way and at the right time,
wherever he or she is.
Commenting on the role
of telecom operators in the
changing times, he said that digital
connectivity and big data would be
the key enablers in future. Vodafone
has 200 million customers and this
number is expected to increase to
400 million following its merger with
Idea Cellular Ltd.
The biggest challenge for
every CEO is how to make a big
organisation go digital. “The legacy
of the big and established companies
versus the approach to change and
adapt digital technology is the real
challenge in the age of disruption,”
Sood said.
Availability of data is going to
change the way people operate
and many new startups will take
advantage of this. “Government
direction and technologies are there,
now with new ideas, the sky is the
limit,’’ he concluded.
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www.outlookmoney.com April 2018 Outlook Money
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