The BYTE May 2017 | Page 8

Stripe, a company based in San Francisco, proposes to enable a business to process electronic payments simply by integrating Stripe’s APIs. Apigee, another company in the Silicon Valley, propose to “API-ise” a business and make their services available in new ways on the Internet. So does the Open Bank Project, a German start-up, who focuses specifically on banks.

The third innovation is a crowd-sourced, social media based, identity system. In the current financial system, regulation imposes that banks conduct “Know Your Customer” (KYC) activities, to confirm the identity of people that open accounts and conduct transactions, this process being very manual and cumbersome. As an alternative, OIX (the open identity exchange) and the Respect Network have come up with a crowd-sourced reputation system on the internet, where people on the internet can trust each other based on their digital reputation. For example, Fidor, a financial service provider in Germany, allows you to open an account with only your Facebook profile. Of course, they will only let you start with a reduced service, and will provide additional financial services as they know more about you. This “tiered KYC” system reduces friction and is a powerful instrument of inclusion.

Optimising operations and improving efficiencies means more than just upgrading systems or outsourcing processes—it means innovation. One way to innovate is by using robotic process automation to improve the speed and accuracy of core business processes.

Robotic process automation (or RPA) is an emerging form of clerical process automation technology based on the notion of software robots or artificial intelligence(AI) workers. Software robots interpret the user interface of third-party applications and are configured to execute steps identically to a human user in mundane, repetitive, and manually intensive processes. They are configured (or "trained") using demonstrative steps, rather than being programmed using code-based instructions. Industry research has shown that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can drive 25-50% cost savings by automating data intensive, repetitive tasks, and by improving the accuracy and efficiency of process execution.

Closer home, PayTm(E-commerce, payment banks, and payments - wallet), BankBazzar.com (Online marketplace for loans and insurance products) and Policy Bazaar (Online lending platform for SMEs) are changing the face of financial services in India by adopting financial technology to enhance process efficiency.

“Technological innovations will be the heart and blood of the banking industry for many years to come and if big banks do not make the most of it, the new players from FinTech and large technology companies surely will.”

-David Brear