Outlook Money Outlook Money, April 2018 | Page 49

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. [email protected] www.outlookmoney.com April 2018 Outlook Money 47