It is India Inc.’s most well-known fact that the first sector to always leap towards digital adoption has been banking and financial services. BFSI was among the first few sectors to be impacted by digital too. Parveen K Gupta, Former MD, SBI & Chairman, Utkarsh Small Finance Bank, speaking at the ETCIO BFSI Digital Conclave 2023, gives an insight into the evolution of tech usage in banks to set the context.

Evolution of banking:

“When I joined SBI we were not allowed to use calculators, rather relied on a mechanical facit. Then came computers. The speed of change in BFSI has been rapid. Today, we are at a stage where you might not need banks at all. Hence, the future of banking cannot be predicted,” Gupta says.

So would that mean the banks will wither away? Too early to write off, he believes. “Banks have come up with innovative products to keep up with the competition from fintech. Going forward we will see collaboration with new age fintech companies, who bring a lot more agility to serve customers,” Gupta states.

Data is king:

The most important part of digitization for BFSI has been data analytics. “The banks processed huge amounts of data but had to yet innovate on customer patterns, etc. They didn’t know how to make use of data residing in their branch. Unless you have capabilities to process the data, it is useless,” he says.

According to Gupta, branches today are delivery points rather than relationship points. The banks now have much more customer data–coming from internal sources and KYC details–than it did previously. Over the years, external sources of data have become more important for the bank too, including bureau data, also known as CIBIL score, income tax data, etc.

“Data explosion has enabled banks to do much more analytics and offer products to the customers. The accounts aggregator have just started. SEBI too has written to all entities to start supplying data to aggregators. The GST data has started to flow. Ultimately, the limitation would be the people analyzing the data,” he says.

Right investment leads to success:

Over the years banks have invested resources in building data analytical capabilities–data warehouses, servers, data lakes built and hired data scientists for analysis. This enables banks to take risk assessment and sanction loans.

Similarly, internet banking revolutionized transactions and brought convenience to the customers. The customers then turned into employees in the process. It allowed the banks to be able to undertake a lot more transactions that couldn’t have been possible in a typical bank branch. It empowered customers. They didn’t mind until they had a good and secure experience.

“Therefore, organizations have to invest in building digital infrastructure and scale the available ones as data comes in. Superior data analytics is possible using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Chatbots and filling out forms will be replaced by ChatGPT. The use cases are only limited by our imagination.

Organizations have to invest in how best to make use of emerging technologies like AI and its capabilities getting developed,” Gupta says.

He asserts customers will also be concerned about security. “Organizations investing in data privacy and security will be the ones being successful,” he says. “Some assurance of the security of the systems is essential. Organizations, therefore, have to invest in cybersecurity and give comfort to the customer with a robust security environment.”

Next essential aspect would be customer experience. “Users aren’t concerned about the backend but more about what they experience. More innovations and investment have to happen in CX,” Gupta says.

Organizations making use of the growing opportunities in these areas will be successful in the future, concludes Gupta.

Note: This article is part of the ETCIO BFSI Digital Conclave 2023 coverage.