IBSi Blogs

The world of banking today is like a race car on the grid preparing for the inevitable green light. There is a lot of noise before the ‘go’ signal; from the vehicles revving their engines, pundits in commentary boxes speculating on the race outcome, and spectators cheering on favourites from the grandstands. When the chequered flag drops and the race begins, a plume of dust and smoke is left behind as the vehicles speed off across the track. The winner is yet to be decided… 

In banking, the race is just starting. Amidst the noise, speculation and fanfare, success in this industry will come down to one key thing: open APIs. Those that can harness them correctly will take the top spot on the podium. 

Shifting up a gear 

Modernisation in retail banking is largely being driven by customers, who have come to expect a level of digitalisation consistent with what they experience in other areas of their lives. Simply compare well-known consumer tech innovations such as the Amazon Echo, or Google’s impressive AI-enabled search function, to understand why people expect more from those who handle their money.  

This is not to say banks have neglected innovation. Flashier, more convenient services for customers have been introduced. But in the face of ongoing political, legacy, technological, competitive and regulatory challenges, the ‘from scratch’ development of advanced Google or Amazon-style services remains an uphill struggle.  

Even in light of the recent technological advancements permitted by open banking, the issues outlined above have prevented many banks from properly grasping the opportunities of technology and the disintermediation of data.  

Opening the throttle 

Open banking is accelerating the banking industry into the future, with APIs acting as the fuel to power the innovation ahead. But successful development and implementation of API-based technology is a long-winded and costly task for banks to undertake alone. To combat this, some banks have started acquiring fintech businesses to quickly bolster their own service offerings. However, for maximum benefit, industry-wide collaboration around innovation is needed. 

This will require banks to shift from a historically closed-off, competitive mentality, to recognising the advantages of pooling knowledge and raising standards of industry innovation together. BIAN, the organisation that I am proud to head up, has spent a decade promoting this ideology. Our global organisation brings together some of the biggest, most innovative banks and technology vendors, to build a common IT architecture or ‘how-to guide’ to streamline the inevitable move to modern, high-quality, and customer oriented services. 

A large part of how to create a modern IT architecture for banks involves utilising a library of definitions for popular APIs, to avoid unnecessary duplication of time, money and effort. BIAN’s current banking architecture contains 26 new API definitions, including ones that instruct banks how to build automated customer on-boarding processes. These API definitions comply with the SWIFT ISO20022 open banking standardisation approach, making them universally compatible. 

Miles ahead 

Adopting a common IT framework would allow the banking industry to launch services faster, and better meet customer demands for smarter and more transparent services. As time goes on, more complex API functionalities will be built, allowing banks to not just incorporate more exciting services into their offering (e.g. WhatsApp payment), but also establish novel ways to maximise new and previously untapped revenue streams. Naturally, modern and streamlined services can reduce operational costs by eliminating outdated back and middle-office processes.  

Looking ahead, the next phase of API development will focus on ‘micro-services’ – that is, API first banking capabilities which run independently from core banking systems. Microservices will provision banks to facilitate a “pick-and-mix” approach to their offerings, allowing them to be more aligned to their customer base. In time, such a model could renew the core banking system and change the banking IT function forever. 

First place 

The introduction of a common IT framework will be of massive benefit to the banking industry, helping major players to address customers’ demands for modern banking solutions in a more effective manner. As the introduction of higher standards for global banking services grows, the industry will eventually move away from competing on service offerings to competing on brand value. Like we have seen in the retail industry, the winners in banking will be those that provide the right mix of innovative offerings as well as premium customer service.  

By Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director at BIAN 

We have come a long way from the first commercial use of Oculus Rift VR headset 0f 2013. Yet, most people associate the technology of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) with the realm of gaming. However, many industries including marketing, healthcare, real-estate are accepting the immense potential of VR to improve their business. A report by Goldman Sachs group estimates the virtual and augmented reality to become an $80 billion market by 2025.

Even financial institutions like the banks are well aware of this conundrum, and many firms are aggressively experimenting with the new coming technology to enhance customer experience (CX). From basic apps that use customer location to help locate ATM branches nearby to promoting banking solutions in an engaging 3D environment. Some financial institutions are using it as a marketing tool, others are using AR to offer customer-centric apps that display real-time cost and other information associated with properties which are up for sale, offer a mortgage calculator and more.

According to a study, ‘AR/VR can transform financial data into a visual, engaging experience and can eventually bring the face-to-face experience into a customer’s home’. The possibility of hybrid branches is also in the pipeline where physical branches use AR technology to offer self-service like chatbots, or robots to provide information. If required, customers can also connect to an actual bank-representative via video conferences.

All things said and done, the idea of banking in virtual reality is still half-baked and the road to reach that reality is daunting and surrounded by skepticism about the possibilities of virtual banking. Nonetheless, there are a few corners in the financial sector where VR and AR have already made an impact:

Immersive Experience through Data Visualization

The financial industry has a lot riding on analyzing large amounts of data on a day to day basis. Data visualization helps financial traders and advisors to get a visual breakdown of the copious amount of data and make informed decisions about wealth management. Using the modern technology of VR and AR, data visualization is quicker and easier than ever before.

Remember we spoke about Oculus Rift earlier? Fidelity labs used the technology behind the Oculus Rift to create an immersive 3D environment to analyze data accurately. They created a virtual world where people can talk to financial advisors in virtual reality to learn about the progress of their stock portfolios. Their VR assistant, Cora, will display the stock chart on a wall of her virtual office just like presenting graph on a virtual projector.

Virtual Trading Workshops

Some financial institutions are using VR to create virtual trading workshops. In April 2017, FlexTrade Systems announced the launch of ‘FlexAR’ – a virtual reality trading application that uses Microsoft HoloLens to offer an extraordinary way of visualizing and presenting trading. It uses components from the real world and allows traders to see and interact with the markets and identify the holistic patterns in the trading environment.

Virtual Reality Shopping Experience

Taking customer and shopping experience to the next level, in 2017, MasterCard and Swarovski launched a VR shopping app that allows consumers to browse and purchase items from Atelier Swarovski home décor line and immerse into a complete virtual shopping experience. They can use Masterpass, MasterCard’s digital payment service to make payments.

Security

With biometrics as part of the AR experience, financial services can offer more secure and substantial protection against cybercrime. A number of banking applications already offer fingerprint authentication for many smartphones. With AR, iris identification and voice recognition, are being introduced as well. In 2018, Axis Bank became India’s first bank to introduce Iris Scan Authentication feature for Aadhaar-based transactions at its micro-ATM tablets.

Possibilities of Virtual Branches

As more and more financial service providers are incrementally moving towards digitized banking, the idea of a virtual bank doesn’t seem too far-fetched. Imagine never having to take a break during working hours and wait in a line at the bank. Now imagine, getting the personalized banking service at the comfort of your home, when it’s convenient for you while enjoying a cup of coffee. That’s what virtual branches have to offer. To aid customer demand for contact anytime, financial institutions are already offering services like Chatbots and are developing solutions to provide banking solutions exclusively in a VR environment. This would be a win-win for both- customers will get their service anytime, anywhere and banks will be able to reduce costs as they will not need to invest in physical locations.

Living in today’s high-tech world, we all know that technology is something that has been and will keep on evolving. With each day passing, reality adjacent technologies like VR and AR are becoming mainstream, and already impacting the way financial institutions operate, manage data, interact with customers and more.

There is no doubt that the financial industry will need to integrate this new science into banking operations. Not only will this help them attract and retain customers, enrich the customer’s user experience (UX) but also help in operational cost reduction. Failing to do so, their customers are most likely to move toward non-financial institutions that offer ease of use and flexible services that they demand.

By Vikram Bhagvan, Associate Vice President, Business Operation, Maveric Systems Limited

In June, Visa started rejecting one in 10 financial transactions across the U.K. and Europe – a problem lasting 10 hours and affecting 1.7 million cardholders. Even in an IT environment designed to support 24,000 transactions per second, a hardware failure crashed the system. The incident was a wake-up call for an industry reluctant to suspend services for scheduled, expensive repairs. Could predictive maintenance have prevented the crisis?

Predictive maintenance draws on machine learning, neural networking, and artificial intelligence. Commonly used in marketing, learning technologies improve with use: every time you search Google, its accuracy improves.

Yet while AI can predict preference, it is still learning how to factor in context. Nirvana for marketers will be when technology shows my car purchase is followed by a caffeine urge, with my coffee advertised accordingly. It’s the search for the unforeseeable yet real relationship that can only be found with a deep data dive. We’re not there yet, but we’re on the way.

Maintenance that informs itself

The same neural networking technologies are being applied to hardware and networks. There is countless data in a data centre. Just as marketers want to utilise all the information available, so do data centre managers. The promise in machine learning is the ability to examine the full range of performance data in real-time to detect patterns indicative of “faults-in-the-making”, uncovering relationships no human engineer would return, like cars and caffeine.

This application of AI algorithms to data centre maintenance underpins our ParkView advanced monitoring system, which contextualises patterns to “understand” infrastructure behaviours. This means instant fault identification and fewer false alarms. Future predictive systems will prevent the types of issues Visa experienced.

The next stage: predictive maintenance taps IoT

In the Tom Cruise sci-fi movie, Minority Report, police use “psychic technology” to prevent crimes before they happen. The twist comes when the crime-solver is accused of the future murder of a man he hasn’t yet met.

There is a parallel with data centres. Human error causes an estimated 75 percent of downtime. That’s why data centres are less populated. The perimeter has security staff, but the interiors are becoming vast and lonely server expanses, where the electric hum is rarely broken by the sound of footsteps. The downside is the lack of human detection of things like temperature changes and dripping water.

That’s where the IoT and the Industry 4.0 playbook developed in heavy industry comes in, in which remote monitoring enables smart and predictive maintenance. A good example here is fixing a data centre air-conditioning system based on its predicted performance in relation to it’s surrounding environment. This concept can be applied across the entirety of a data centre and its cooling, power, networking, compute, storage, and other equipment. Emerging dynamic and largely automated predictive maintenance management will transform the data centres we know today into self-monitoring, self-healing technology hubs, enabling reliability as we move computers to the edge to support the IoT applications of tomorrow.

Evidence indicates a move from a reactive/corrective stance, still dominant in many data centres, to more preventative maintenance delivering average savings of up to 18%. The next leap towards predictive maintenance drops spending about 12% further. In fact, Google used such strategies to drive a 15% drop in overall energy overhead.

Combating downtime with predictive technology

Enterprises must integrate predictive maintenance. Downtime kills reputations, profits, and customer relationships. Most organisations like Visa can recover from unplanned outages, but reducing unscheduled maintenance is always preferable.

IT leaders must make hardware and facilities as downtime-proof as possible. This means using machine learning and AI to return a pound of ROI on every ounce of prevention possible. Banks are investing in AI for a range of purposes, from contract scanning to fighting fraud. It’s essential that the new technology is used to fix problems in advance.

By Evan Kenty, Managing Director EMEA, Park Place Technologies

Online banking is fast becoming the norm and brings with it many benefits. However, it is not without risk. How can firms ensure that customers are being best served by these new ways of transacting?

Digital banking has many benefits. For customers, they can instantly manage their finances from any location using an ‘always-on’ service. For firms, they can scale, gain reach, save cost, capture data more easily and build loyalty. However digital is not without risk. The same risks of mis-selling, poor servicing and inadequate complaint management are still present; albeit in different ways. Control frameworks need to be in tune with these new ways of interacting with customers. The FCA is clear that good customer outcomes should always result, regardless of the channel.

Research from Forrester indicates that rather than undergo a re-design, many products have simply been migrated online. Products designed for sale in branch or by telephone may not be suited to online. Digital demands an alternative way of thinking. When using an electronic interface, customers behave differently than when talking to an adviser. Natural cognitive biases go unchecked and people may be prone to making rushed and less optimal decisions.

Digital readiness demands more

Provider side, digital typically tends toward a pre-occupation with optimising conversion rates. Less attention can be given to end-to-end service design and compliance. Digital readiness means more than having high performing front-end interfaces. It also demands the right back-end processes, policies and controls. Without this good customer outcomes can easily be compromised.

As with most sectors, omnichannel experiences are standard. Customers will switch from one channel to another throughout their journey and firms need to ensure continuity. Typically, this demands good CRM processes so that customers are treated consistently and appropriately at all touchpoints.

Given the risks inherent with digital, a thorough testing programme is recommended. This provides assurance that each channel is working; and where not gives the insight needed to put things right.

The five key risks of digital

Risks in digital may manifest in different ways to other channels. Here are the most critical areas where good customer outcomes need to be assured.

1. Buying the right product

Without an advisor to carry out a thorough needs assessment, and then recommend products, customers may select products that are not best suited. Online journeys need to guide customers through a process that is easy to follow and provides them with a good match to their needs and circumstances.

2. Disclosure

Effective disclosure is particularly problematic in digital journeys. Customers may overlook important

information and be prone to over-confidence in financial decision making. It is important that digital journeys provide clear, unambiguous and impartial information. Firms need to be sure that customers fully understand the risks, and this understanding needs to be complicit and tested.

3. Decision making

The data that customers provide needs to be adequate, appropriate and verified. In addition, the decision-making processes used need to be made clear. This is so customers understand how their information is being used and the terms by which they have been approved, or denied, at any stage.

4. Product servicing

During the life of the product, service must be effective. Documentation, account servicing, complaints, cancellations and renewals all need to be readily available and compliant. There also needs to be integration with other channels, so where need be, customers can rely on human advice to help them achieve good outcomes.

5. Vulnerable customers

Firms need to ensure that vulnerable customers are supported and neither disadvantaged or marginalised by digital. Some are unable to access online services, or to use them effectively. The same levels of service must be available offline, either for the whole or part of the customer journey. In addition, firms need to consider how vulnerability is identified in an online environment and then provide appropriate treatment to ensure good outcomes.

Technology vs. humans in a digital world

The industry is already speculating on how technology can be used to improve compliance. The first steps are simply to optimise existing sources of data so that it can be used for analysing compliance performance. More sophisticated approaches, such as applying voice recognition and semantic technology, will only be a matter of time. However, humans are far from redundant in this.

Humans can spot patterns and anomalies in ways that have not yet been coded, and humans are also capable of moral and ethical judgements that machines are not. Machines also need to be taught, calibrated and checked, a task that needs ‘real’ input and intervention.

FCA concerns over robo-advice shows that we may have gone too far in putting all parts of a process to machines. Instead, a balance is needed that incorporates the best of technology and the best of people.

For the time being, at least, people still have a place in ensuring good customer outcomes.

By James Nethercott, Group Head of Marketing at Regulatory Finance Solutions

The Catalyst for Change

Billed as a game changer by most in the industry, Open Banking witnessed a managed roll out in the UK in April 2018, paving the way for customers to experience enhanced banking services through a variety of authorised providers. The Competition and Markets Authority ushered in Open Banking with the aim to improve the quality of banking and financial services, ensuring banks remain customer-oriented in an extremely competitive market.

Optimistic market forecasts estimate that Open Banking could generate more than £7.2bn by 2022 if various sectors tap into its massive potential.

Open Banking allows secure data sharing by using an integration technology called Application Programming Interface (‘API’) that accesses the account and transaction information of customers and even allows third party providers (‘TPPs’) to initiate payment on behalf of customers, only upon their explicit approval.

As we move into 2019, what has actually changed and what lessons can we learn? Has this ‘great disruptor’ in the banking sector lived up to its initial hype?

A Closed Mind to Open Banking

The CMA reported that in June, there were 1.2 million uses of Open Banking APIs, describing it as a slow but positive start to changing consumer attitudes and revitalising the banking ecosystem for the better.

However, one senior source at a financial technology company told The Daily Telegraph: “The lack of promotion by the big banks has been disappointing and it’s the main reason for the slow take-up”.

So what are the reasons for the slow start? Why are the big banks taking their time?

Anne Boden, CEO and founder of Starling Bank, has been quoted as saying that the big banks “are all using legacy technology that’s 20, 30 or 40 years old… there’s no commercial reason why they want to do it [Open Banking]. Without that it’s a very difficult thing to do.”

Though public sentiment towards Open Banking is far from effusive, do remember it is a complex change that will take time to transform the way banking is done. Open Banking inherently brings a raft of technological and economic risks for the traditional banking model and navigating those changes is going to be an uphill task. One of the biggest teething problems faced in the banking sector is the legacy technology that is still used in the major banks, preventing them from quickly benefiting from this ambitious regulatory-driven process. In some instances, the technology could be even thirty or forty years old. The cost of overhauling their legacy technology to allow integration with API is prohibitively high, adding further traction to the process of adoption. However, if banks and financial organisations are eager to monetise the myriad opportunities presented by Open Banking, they need to be quick about overhauling their systems and IT infrastructure. Further, they also need to constantly innovate and bring out banking apps and other technology-driven solutions to enhance the banking experience for their customers.

Though the CMA provides guidelines on security measures and details of regulated providers, it still fails to address the underlying issues of legacy technology to ensure that there is no loss in the transfer of customer data.

Driving the Change

Banks own valuable customer data and are fiercely protective of it. Also, consumers who are not familiar with the actual applications of Open Banking are reluctant to embrace it as they fear fraudulent transactions and other complications arising from this technology. Adding to this hurdle is also the lack of awareness of the risks and benefits associated with Open Banking that has limited its appeal among the masses.

Therefore, the challenge for the banking sector is in implementing these concepts on the ground. Any compromise on customer data will not only result in regulatory penalties but also in the damaging press. No wonder then that cyber and data security rank amongst the top priorities of every Bank CIO and CEO.

Since Open Banking requires banks to share detailed customer information (other than sensitive payment data), they are required to undertake due diligence while sharing the same, even under the express consent of the customer. Banks and TPPs need to ensure customer consent is taken with due emphasis on the customer’s ability to understand and appreciate the possible outcome from the provision of their data. Since banks are deemed to be the final custodian of customer information, they have to secure their systems against financial crime, fraud detection and AML, among other things. Further, a bank’s IT infrastructure will need to be more secure and resilient as it will now be exposed to threats ported through TPP systems. They have to invest more effort and energy to analyse and discover potential points of vulnerability and take adequate measures to address this holistically. Core banking systems need to adopt open API based peripheral development, delivering quicker implementation cycles and minimal customisation of the core product. Furthermore, the industry’s adoption of API standards should set a benchmark for all involved parties. Banks and TPPs should adhere to and promote development in line with these standards.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that many large payment systems and core banking providers have developed Open Banking-compliant solutions. Without going into a lengthy debate on the merits and demerits of each of them, it might suffice to recognise that these systems, along with robust identity and access management systems, can comprise a strong first line of defence for the Open Banking ecosystem.

The Best Has Yet to Come

While the consumer experience may not have altered significantly in the initial rollout of Open Banking, experts opine that it won’t be long before the positive effects of this innovative model trickle down to the end users.

Already, the market is charged with competition and has become riper for innovation. Positive changes are taking place internally and banks are strategising to become more customer-centric and proactive. This will bode well for the long-term relationships banks have with their customers. As we gear up for the next wave of Open Banking, we hope that its innovative model will lead to a level playing field for both customers and banks. For once, innovation will go hand in hand with pragmatism and plain grit, to script the winning equation for the future of banking.

By Shuvo G. Roy, Vice President & Head – Banking Solutions (EMEA), Mphasis

Julian Saunders, CEO and founder of personal data governance company PORT.im, discusses how alleged breaches of GDPR by Facebook and Twitter may just be the beginning

Cast your mind back to early 2018. The world was alive with the sound of GDPR commentary. In the run-up to the May compliance deadline, everything was up for debate. Would it spell the end of marketing as we know it? Was anyone actually compliant? Was it good news or bad news for businesses? And, getting the most airtime – would GDPR be a damp squib like the Cookie Directive?

If you were of the opinion GDPR was a lot of hot air, the intervening months may feel like vindication. GDPR has largely gone off the agenda of most media publications and with it the minds of many business owners. However, we’re merely in the eye of the storm. In the last few weeks Facebook, and now Twitter, have been squarely in the crosshairs of regulators for allegedly failing to comply with GDPR. The EU has issued a stark warning that big fines will be handed down before the end of the year. Similarly, the ICO has ramped up its warnings that major action is likely to be taken. Added to this momentum has been a seemingly endless series of high-profile data breaches with Google+ the latest casualty.

For business owners who put their GDPR compliance on the backburner since May, the warnings could not be clearer: If you aren’t GDPR compliant you’re likely to be in some serious trouble in the next few months.

Facebook has quickly become the poster boy for poor data governance procedures. Cambridge Analytica, data breaches, and GDPR failures have all come in quick succession and provide a case study for businesses on how not to collect and manage data. While it may be tempting to revel in some schadenfreude, a better approach is to see what every business can learn from Facebook and how they can protect themselves from the expected GDPR storm.

First, it should go without saying that financial organisations hold some of the most sensitive personal data. Thankfully, the most important data linked to account information has largely been well protected. However, having high security standards around bank accounts can breed complacency especially when you consider it’s not the only information the average financial company holds. The marketing, customer service and sales departments will all, usually, have their own customer databases which may be subject to vastly different security and governance standards. A breach related to any of this data could be fatal to a financial organisation and result in hefty GDPR fines.

General complacency is kryptonite for data management and protection. For Facebook, its complacency manifested itself in lax standards, questionable practices and a belief it would never be brought to account. For financial organisations, it can lead to blind spots related to data that is deemed less ‘sensitive’. Often, to enable smooth marketing, client management and sales operations, customer data is more readily accessible than financial information, shared with more parties, updated more frequently and inputted into more platforms. Each of these processes increases risk. Compounding this issue is a general lack of education related to the power of this data to do harm. Many would ask, what use is an email address to a hacker? The short answer is, a lot. This is why GDPR seeks to protect every piece of personal data.

If you’ve got to this point in this article and you’re beginning to feel some doubt surrounding your data practices – good. Now is the perfect time to audit and review all your data processes and security standards. The baseline should be – is everything GDPR compliant? If it was in May – is it still compliant? New technology, teams and initiatives can all impact your data processes and result in non-compliance.

If you avoided all of this in the faint hope that GDPR wasn’t going to be an issue, you need to get on it immediately. In this instance, buying in technology and availing yourself of the services of specialist consultants will be the fastest (but not the cheapest) option.

Next, what is the general understanding of your staff? All the procedures and technological safeguards will mean nothing if your colleagues do not understand what GDPR is and the danger of data breaches. Undertaking company-wide training regularly and incorporating data management expertise and ethics into staff development and assessment can be a powerful way to measure and improve education.

Finally, if the worst happens and there’s a breach – are you prepared? Time and again we see that a poorly handled response to the data breach generally do more damage than the breach itself. Again – I’ll point to Facebook and its slow, incomplete and unsatisfactory responses to each and every data issue it has encountered.

Slow responses are symptomatic of a failure to have the right procedures in place. This can be because there is no technology or expertise available to identify the breach in the first instance or the right people are not empowered to make quick decisions. You need to start from the position that any breach, no matter how minor it appears, is serious. It should be reported to a specialist team led by the CEO. Within that team should be the IT lead, marketing, customer service and legal. Consumers should be informed as quickly as possible, both to be GDPR compliant, and to reassure. The business needs to identify who is impacted, how, what went wrong, how it can be fixed and how consumers will be protected in the future. The faster these boxes are ticked and communicated the better the end result – especially if the ICO gets involved. As with anything, practice makes perfect. Conducting wargames and drawing up ideal responses and contingencies with this team could make all the difference.

We now live in a world where the reputation and future of a company can be destroyed by hacks and data breaches. Organisations are generally to blame for this environment. There has long been a culture that personal data is a commodity that businesses can deal with as they wish. Now the wheel has turned. If you’re one of the many business owners that still believe that data governance is just something for the IT department to worry about – you’re going to be in for a big surprise. By the end of the year, a number of large businesses will be hit with near-fatal fines as a warning to other companies. Acting now will ensure that your company is not one of these cautionary tales.

Accenture has completed its acquisition of Italian banking technology service provider, SEC Servizi Spa from the Intesa Sanpaolo Group. Accenture now has 80.8% ownership in SEC Servizi and will also be acquiring the remaining interests held by other shareholders.

Established in 1972, SEC Servizi is a consortium formed by Italian banks to provide IT services and outsourcing solutions for banks and other financial institutions in the country. Its offerings include application and facility management, centralized back office services and specialized multi-channel, consulting, education and support solutions. The company reportedly manages more than 21 million transactions per day for nearly 1,400 bank branches in Italy and had revenues of EUR 152 million by the end of 2017. Some of its clients include Banca di Credito Popolare, Banca Italo Romena, Banca Nuova, Veneto Banca, Allianz Bank Financial Advisors, others. Intesa Sanpaolo acquired SEC Servizi in 2017 as part of the acquisition of certain assets, liabilities and legal relationships of Banca Popolare di Vicenza S.p.A. and Veneto Banca S.p.A, both in compulsory administrative liquidation.

The acquisition of SEC Servizi’s expertise and technology and operational assets will enable Accenture to create an advanced and innovative core banking platform that can support banks in their transition to digital. This transaction will help to establish Accenture as a leader in the banking technology market in Italy, serving SEC Servizi Spa’s existing customers, including Intesa Sanpaolo and other mid-sized financial institutions in Italy.

After slowly recovering from the financial crisis, Italian banks are now looking at modernizing their technology infrastructure and are increasingly relying on digital resources to remain competitive in the market and align their services to the digital savvy customer. An indication of this is the drop in the number
of branches at the end of 2017 which was was 20 per cent lower than in 2008.  Banks such as Unicredit, Intesa Sanpaolo, Monte dei Paschi, Mediobanca, Banca Carige are leading the way with digitalization initiatives ranging from contactless payments, virtual reality branches, robo advisory service, etc.

For Accenture, this presents an opportune time to enhance its core banking technology services with the acquisition of SEC Servizi Spa.

Uncertainty around Brexit continues, but practical preparations have begun – many banks are now well in the throes of duplicating or moving systems and business processes from London to other financial hubs.

Extricating processes isn’t going to be an easy task. There are two aspects to this separation process – formal IT supported enterprise systems and the grey IT (or end user supported IT systems). Most banks have the understanding and the ability to effectively disentangle the core enterprise systems. Where in this extrication activity, banks are likely to come unstuck is situations wherever there are end user supported IT, commonly Microsoft Excel spreadsheet-based processes, that are deeply linked with the rest of the banking group’s enterprise systems.

If a bank is required to set up a separate entity in the UK, all the data residing in ancillary spreadsheets that feed data into the various systems pertaining to this jurisdiction will need to be delinked/duplicated and housed separately too. For instance, as banks separate their Treasury operations, there will likely be certain processes that heavily rely on common Bloomberg and Reuters market feeds that are owned by or have deep linkages to the banking group’s systems. Similar issues will arise for capital modelling-related processes. While previously a bank might be evaluating business risk based on its aggregated position across its European operation, post-Brexit, determining the UK entity’s risk position will require the financial institution to disconnect and separate the relevant data for this jurisdiction.

Essentially, as banks duplicate their enterprise systems for specific jurisdictions, they need to do the same for the spreadsheet-based application landscape that they rely on operationally.

Disentangling these unstructured, but business-critical processes manually will prove impossible and eye-wateringly costly.  Typically, spreadsheets surround the core systems such as accounting, risk management, trading, compliance, tax and more. Complete visibility of the spreadsheet-based processes landscape is essential to identify the ones that need to be duplicated/extricated for the new entity, but due to the uncontrolled nature of spreadsheet usage, there will potentially be 1,000s of such interconnected applications and no inventory of these processes.

Banks should consider adopting an automated approach to safely extricating their spreadsheet-based processes. Spreadsheet management technologies, can scan and inventory the entire spreadsheet landscape, based on very specific complexity rules and criteria. The technology can expose the data lineages of individual files across the spreadsheet environment to accurately reveal the data sources and relationships between the applications.

This approach is already proven in M&A type operational transformation situation, which to some extent resemble the Brexit scenario. Aberdeen Asset Management adopted this approach to separate the Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP) when it bought the business from Lloyds Banking Group. Due to the number of convolutedly connected spreadsheets across the vast spreadsheet landscape and the complexities of the business processes residing in this environment at SWIP, manually understanding the lay of the land was unfeasible. Utilising spreadsheet management technology, SWIP inventoried the spreadsheet landscape, identify the business-critical processes, and pinpointed the files that required remediation. Simultaneously, the technology helped expose the data lineage for all the individual files, revealing their data sources and relationships with other spreadsheets. SWIP was able to securely migrate the relevant business processes to Aberdeen Asset Management and where necessary decommissioned the redundant processes.

Post-Brexit too, banks have a lot more to gain from automated spreadsheet management.  Spreadsheets will likely be the used to set up temporary business processes/solutions for the new operations. Spreadsheet management will embed best practice-led use of these tools across the lifecycle of such applications – from creation through to remediation and decommissioning into formal IT supported applications– encompassing spreadsheets and their unique data flows. It will also offer banks an in-depth understanding of their data landscape. This will help institute data controls and spreadsheet change management processes so that there is complete transparency and an audit trail tangibly reducing operational, financial and regulatory risks caused by spreadsheet error.

 

By Henry Umney, CEO, ClusterSeven

 

About the author

Henry Umney is CEO of ClusterSeven. He joined the company in 2006 and for over 10 years was responsible for the commercial operations of ClusterSeven, overseeing globally all Sales and Client activity as well as Partner engagements. In July 2017, he was appointed CEO and is strongly positioned to take the business forward.