Foreword

Cover Story

Sibos 2022: A look ahead of Global FinTech Growth Story

iGTB unveiled Consumerisation of Commercial Banking at Sibos 2022
By Tapan A – iGTB Payments

Amsterdam, known as the Venice of the North due to its many canals is a lovely city famous for its tulips, for Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Anne Frank and also for its famous nightlife. This quaint and beautiful capital city was host to the Sibos – the world’s premier financial services event that took place from 10th to 13th October, 2022.

Sibos is one of the biggest events for Payments and Transaction Banking and also covers Central Banking, Treasury and Trade Finance. This year Sibos had 8 stages, 150 conference sessions, 10,000 participants from companies and banks attending. Though an annual event, it happened in person after a two year hiatus due to the pandemic and everyone was excited and eager to rekindle old relationships.

Sibos is usually conducted in a massive conference centre and has many tracks. This year they had tracks covering

• Standard Forum – Discussion on Swift Standards
• Swift Innotribe – Innovation such as Quantum Computing, Tokenised Assets and discussions on the future of Money
• Leadership Talks – Crisp 20 minute capsules with banking leaders
  across the world
• Partner & Exhibitor Activities at various booths
• Industry Sessions – Panel Discussions on topics in banking involving domain evangelists

Day 1 kicked off with an opening plenary featuring the Queen of Holland and the CEO of Swift. Other notable speakers on day 1 included Andre Kuipers – ESA Astronaut, Ravi Menon of Monetary Authority of Singapore, Anne Boden – CEO of Starling Bank and our very own Uppili Srinivasan – President, iGTB.

Uppili Srinivasan, President and Business Head for Digital, Payments & Liquidity spoke on the Consumerisation of Commercial Banking (COCB) and how an individual consumer’s wants, needs and behaviour impact commercial banking products and services.

Uppili delved deep into the 6 tenets of consumerisation viz

1. Hyper-personalisation
2. Real-time connected user journeys
3. Action triggering insights
4. Immediacy
5. Desire and trust-based decision making and
6. Friction free experience at scale and how commercial banks need to think contextual (based on personas) and adopt a composable and hyperscale technology strategy.

The session was a big hit with a full packed audience and helped to firmly establish Intellect’s brand and thought leadership.

Day 2 of Sibos had a very interesting session on the metaverse by industry leaders. They defined the metaverse as a “digital lab to ideate what something looks like with digital virtual customers before you let it out into the physical world”. In fact, HSBC articulated 6 key user journeys that the bank is actively exploring in the metaverse.

Another fantastic session on Day 2 was the panel discussion “FX for a Changing World” and how FinTechs are enabling cross currency post-trade settlement in under 3 minutes using DLT Technology. The session “Instant Treasury for an Instant World” highlighted that while technology is becoming open and instant, the entire ecosystem (people, processes, ERP etc.) are still not ready. Manish Kohli of HSBC echoed similar thoughts and stated how APIs have become the engine for new business models and how HSBC is innovating by connecting assets across LOBs, getting Clients at the centre of the development process and focussing on client experience.

End of Day 2, Intellect hosted an exclusive invite-only networking evening where we set sail aboard the luxurious Ocean Diva over cocktails, dinner, a stunning flamenco performance and some fine conversations with the creme de la creme of the transaction banking industry. The cruise was a massive success and had over 125 attendees across bankers, analysts and media.

Day 3 of Sibos kicked off with a leadership talk by Cathy Bessant of BOFA followed by ‘Let’s get Digital: A Blueprint for the Payments Model of the Future’ featuring John Hunter of Wells Fargo, Bruno Mellado of BNP, Philip Panaino of SCB and Renara Vilanova of JPMC where it was nice to hear Philip of SCB state that “the payment is not relevant but the experience around that is”. Similar thoughts were echoed in the session on ‘Star tech: Supporting the Next Generation of Cross Border Payments’ when the panel spoke of “the uberification of payments and how they happen in the background”. Noted Sinologist Pascal Coppens also opined the same in his concept of “smart cities, smart logistics and how we are entering an era where machines are paying and there is no human intervention”. All of this tied up with what Uppili had expostulated on day 1 in his session on ‘Consumerisation of Commercial Banking’.

The panel discussion on ‘CBDCs: How could they be used in international payments?’ involving BDF, Natwest, CapGemini and RBC made interesting revelations that 105 banks are actively exploring CBDC, 9 are actually live and 15 banks are already connected on a X-border CBDC sandbox with Swift’s Transaction Manager!

Sibos not only provides excellent client meetings at the venue, but is also a great opportunity for us to take our clients out for dinner and exchange thoughts and seed ideas in a more informal manner. While we had over 200 high qualified meetings at the Intellect booth across our lines of business. We also had 50+ meetings outside the venue running well into the night every day.

Our booth itself was a delight. We had a large welcome area and behind that a giant screen where eye-catching “Whats New” videos of Payments, iColumbus.ai, Liquidity, Cash Cloud, CBX etc. were playing in a continuous loop. Our booth had a private meeting area for our senior management to meet with clients and prospects and also excellent product collateral and gifts to give away to visitors. This year, in line with our Sustainability (ESG) initiative we gave away QR codes of our collateral rather than printed copies! Our booth offered a really immersive experience into our products and capability.

By the time day 4 dawned, the legs were aching and backs were sore, but the spirits were as high as before. Day 4 started off with an excellent session in the Innotribe Track titled – ‘When an anthropologist, economist and technologist met for breakfast’ providing insights on sensible capitalism, disruptive versus incremental innovation and narrative economics and how the world is at the cusp of the 4th and 5th industrial revolution around energy.

In ‘Managing the new risks to Banks: Climate Change Litigation Risk and the new Due Diligence Risk’, Brian Scott-Quinn of the University of Reading, provided a very interesting overview of the challenges that banks may have to face once the EU CSDD directive comes into force. Indeed ESG was front and centre of all discussions on all days.

At the E&Y session on ‘The rise of PayTech – Seven forces shaping the future of payments’, they spoke of monetisation of ISO being a key priority for banks and how embedded finance will be a $7 Trillion market by 2030 and 60 to 70% of that will be embedded payments.

The grand finale in every Sibos is the closing plenary. This year they had the closing plenary by Bear Grylls who gave a riveting and inspirational speech on survival and spoke of the four F’s – Failure which leads to resilience; Fear which propels one forward; Fire – which helps to hand on and endure and, Faith – in oneself and one’s team which helps to give inner strength.

We are confident that at Sibos 2022, the Intellect brand was firmly cemented in the market and we are now perceived as a FinTech unicorn and undisputed leaders in Transaction Banking, Consumer Banking, Quantum Banking and Treasury.

Story

iGTB launches Consumerisation of Commercial Banking at Sibos 2022

Redefining commercial banking through composable, contextual and hyper-scale technology, Intellect Global Transaction Banking (iGTB), the transaction banking and technology specialist from Intellect Design Arena Limited, announces the launch of Consumerisation of Commercial Banking (COCB) at Sibos 2022.

Consumerisation is the emergence of the individual consumer as the primary driver of product and service design and COCB is the impact of an individual consumer’s wants, needs and behaviour on commercial banking products and services.

There are 6 key tenets to COCB that banks need to understand and have a gameplan to embrace.

Hyper Personalisation – The first tenet deals with treating each customer as if they are the only one, a segment of one. Use of extreme personalisation not only boosts customer experience and enables trust building but also has a beneficial influence on net revenue and lowering of cost.

Real-time, Connected Journeys – Any outcome that a user is trying to achieve is actually made up of a number of journeys that are more connected than one might imagine. Embedding the right technology enables customers to present their context only once which can then propagate to each service provider in the entire journey.

Action-triggering Insights – In the continuum of serving Information, offering Analytics, enabling Decision making and executing Transactions (the IADT paradigm), mere provision of information or acceptance of readymade instructions to execute in an order taker manner is passé. Banks need to operate on the sophisticated end of this spectrum where they use analytics to enable decision-making and then execute the transaction.

Immediacy – Recommending actions is good. Driving urgency and having them executed immediately, in a risk free manner, is better!

Desire & Trust based decision making – The two most important factors a consumer uses to make or rationalise a decision are a) desire in the product or service and b) trust in the provider. Desire and trust have relevance not only at the point of sale but also during the entire lifetime of the relationship. Banks need to address both these elements with their offering set.

Friction-free experience – even at scale – The consumption pattern in the world of consumers is not uniform. There are points of inflection where scale explodes significantly. However, the end user would accept no compromise on his/her experience being friction free – even at scale. Having the right kind of technology architecture to address this is key.

“Commercial banking is on the verge of a major upheaval that will significantly alter their technology roadmaps. Modernisation alone will not suffice. Banks should plan for a future that welcomes rapid change while catering to unprecedented customer demands. We are pleased to launch “Consumerisation of Commercial Banking” which will enable banks worldwide to not just digitally transform, but compete effectively in the new consumer-driven economy.” said Manish Maakan, CEO, iGTB. He further added, “To help banks embrace this trend, iGTB has leveraged design thinking to build commercial banking offerings that comprise contextual products, platforms, solutions and banking-as-a-service capability. These are underpinned by an architecture built on composable, contextual and hyperscale technology which we term as Commercial Banking Operating System (CBOS).

CBOS is built for the cloud, drives high performance and is highly efficient in commercial banking operations.

To embrace COCB, Intellect Design recommends an integrated three-pronged strategy to commercial banks comprising a) contextual design b) an architecture that is built on composable, contextual and hyperscale technology c) and an offering set that comprises products, solutions, platforms and banking-as-a-service capability.

Insights

FinTech Futures in conversation with Uppili Srinivasan on Consumerisation of Commercial Banking

Watch this exclusive conversation between Uppili Srinivasan, President, Business Head for Digital, Payments and Liquidity and Paul Hindle, Editor of FinTech Futures on COCB to learn:

• How consumers are influencing the strategies of commercial banks?
• What is the next evolution of Digital when it comes to commercial banking?
• How can iGTB create friction free experience at a large scale for their customers?

Managing needs and experiences for your consumer is more than science, it is an art that you hone with qualitative and quantitative research, design thinking and experiments. Keeping this in mind iGTB brings to you ‘Consumerisation of Commercial Banking’ focussing on the end consumer being the primary driver of product design and services even for a commercial entity like a commercial bank.

In this process, banks have to ensure that hyper-personalisation is an essential part of their strategy to deliver a customer experience or user experience. This will get customers in through the door but then comes the hard part, offering and assembling for them the right products, platforms, solutions and technologies.

iGTB recommends that banks adopt a three-pronged integrated strategy for adopting COCB. The first one is to think contextually (with due importance to consumer personas) and identify the stated and unstated needs of those personas and then connect the dots. That's the first step. Post that, banks are asked to choose the right kind of technology architecture that can deliver to the tenets of consumerisation with three key attributes: composability, contextuality and the last one is called hyperscale. This means having the right kind of data architecture to pre-package data so that you can keep data proximal to where it's going to be consumed to deliver a friction free experience even at scale. The third thing is your products and services, and for that we ask banks to consider individual products solutions by assembling those products, platforms where you take your own offerings and complement it with a FinTech capability from the outside or go direct or embed your capabilities on a Banking as a Service (BaaS) construct.

Catch the exclusive interview to learn more.

IBS Podcast on Consumerisation of Commercial Banking

EP 519

October 11, 2022
The consumerisation of commercial banking
Listen

Robin Amlôt of IBS Intelligence spoke with Manish Maakan, CEO of iGTB, about the ways in which commercial banking is changing and what that means for the banks and their customers; also, how iGTB itself provides a solution that leverages machine learning and predictive analytics, delivered through APIs and an omnichannel UX.

Listen to this exclusive podcast now.

Modern day banking is about discovering the fact that banking is a service industry. Banks today are on a quest to mirror a convenient retail experience into their system. It is much more real-time, here and now so that customers can make informed decisions.

When we talk about Consumerisation, we have to give hyper-personalisation its due importance. Technology is so advanced that now you have Artificial Intelligence (AI) playing a role in it, influencing you and taking decisions in your favour.

For example, smartwatches today consume health data and advise you on what to do. Or if you want to travel, Expedia will offer you airline tickets, hotels, local transportation, and now they've started integrating weather conditions integrating the full user journey of an individual.

What iGTB brings to you is all this and more from your day-to-day life deployed in the commercial banking world through composable, contextual and hyper-scale technology delivering value-added interactions with insights, so that the customer can make the right decision for themselves, by themselves.

Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Uppili Srinivasan at the Sibos Exhibitor Stage

Tune into this exclusive video of Uppili Srinivasan’s Exhibitor Stage session on the Consumerisation of Commercial Banking at Sibos 2022.

Watch Now

Some definitions of Consumerisation is the specific impact that consumer-originated technologies can have on enterprises. It reflects how enterprises will be affected by, and can take advantage of new technologies and models that originate and develop in the consumer space.

Business uses your everyday experiences to progress at a rapid pace.The first thing we can think of is hyper-personalisation. We live in an age where AI not only enhances customer satisfaction and decision making, but also has a beneficial impact on reduction of costs as well as customer process.

The consumption pattern in the world of consumers is not uniform but what remains constant is the need for friction free experiences on any scale. There are points of inflection where scale explodes significantly. However, the end user would accept no compromise on his/her experience being friction free. Having the right kind of technology architecture to address this is key - hyper personalization, real time connected journeys, actions, insight, immediacy in decision making etc.

Understand your customers. Understanding the state of the landscape of these customers. And finally, connecting the dots and designing the perfect search - persona, needs, wants, challenges, preferences in terms of device access, and so on and then come up with the right technology architecture that can deliver to the tenets of UI.

Your technology has to be composite - modular reusable blocks that can be wired together to create different experiences. The second one goes without showing, contextuality. The third attribute is architecture. These three attributes are foundational to the operating system of commercial banking.

Watch the video to learn more.