When the FinTech revolution started, traditional banking felt the heat of competition from the ‘new kid on the block’. FinTechs promised (and often delivered) fast turnarounds and personalised services. Banks were forced to look at their operations through the lens of customer experience, constantly re-evaluating risk exposures to compete with FinTechs.
But traditional banks are giving their ‘neo-competitors’ a run for their money. Many have transformed their core banking for operational efficiency. They have also taken lessons from FinTechs and are actively working on their customer engagements. This Ecosystm Snapshot looks at how banks (such as Standard Chartered Bank, ANZ Bank, Westpac, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Timo, and Welcome Bank) are investing in tech-led transformation and the ways tech vendors (such as IBM, Temenos, Mambu, TCS and Wipro) are empowering them.
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Moving from a product or regional focus to an industry focus appears to be the “strategy du jour” for many technology vendors today. For some it is a new strategy – with the plan to improve customer focus and increase growth; for others it is the pendulum moving back to where they were five or ten years ago as they bounce from being industry-centric to product-centric to geography-centric and back again.
Getting your industry focus right is much harder than it seems – and has to be timed with client needs and market opportunity. The need to focus on the industry varies for different technology products, services and capabilities. For example, most technology buyers want their vendors to understand what their business does and how they add value to customers – that is a given and industry-aligned Sales teams make a lot of sense. Many tech buyers also want certain software functions to align directly to their processes – there is little appetite to customise ERP and financial suites to specific industry needs and processes – and tech vendors should support these out-of-the-box or cloud needs.
Industry Solutions May Not Drive Competitive Advantage
If the industry solution you are selling is the same as what any of their competitors can buy from you, then organisations get the exact same benefit as the market – no more, no less. For example, about 10-15 years ago, large telecom providers around the globe made significant investments in CRM platforms (often from Siebel) – bringing in one of a few large global systems integrators to deploy their standard processes and systems. These CRMs were supposed to provide business and customer benefit, and drive competitive advantage. And while they did deliver positive change (often at SIGNIFICANT cost!) when every telecom provider was using the same solution with the same or similar processes, any competitive advantage was lost.
Industry Solutions are Often the Sign of a Mature Market
The widely accepted hypothesis is that the technology innovation and adoption happens in waves. The market has 5-7 year waves of innovation, followed by 5-7 year waves of deployment, adoption and consolidation.
The Innovation Phase. In this stage new companies emerge, new products or services are launched and leading/bleeding edge companies embrace these new technologies to drive competitive advantage and business growth. They experiment with new technologies that drive new business capabilities – sometimes failing, but always pushing the envelope for business innovation and forging the path for mass market adoption. In this stage there is often little demand for industry solutions – as both the providers and buyers of the solutions are still working out where the business benefit is; where the technology might be able to drive change or help them get ahead of competitors. If you examine the growth of a company such as Salesforce, you see that the early stage products are targeted towards a generic market – customers are expected to customise the solution based on their needs and individual requirements. In 2002 I worked for a challenger telecom provider that had deployed a traditional Peoplesoft CRM capability, and I was part of the team that brought Salesforce into the business – and as a cloud-based solution, we saw the competitive advantage was the pace at which we could customise the product (by excluding IT teams and processes). However, the solution was a “one-size-fits-all” product. The innovation stage is typically characterised by high growth of smaller vendors and technology service providers who challenge the status quo.
The Deployment, Adoption and Consolidation Phase. This stage of market growth is when the mass market starts to adopt these solutions. Many of these buyers walk the paths that have been forged before them by the more innovative, leading edge businesses. This stage typically sees less innovation, less experimentation, and more standard deployments. To make the solutions more palatable and easier to sell to the mass market tech vendors typically pre-configure or customise the solutions to specific needs – for business teams, roles or industries. It is usually in this stage of market growth and deployment that the industry solutions see significant interest and adoption. This is where the mass market gets access to the business benefits the more innovative businesses received many years earlier (and often profited from in this time). In my example of the Salesforce deployment in 2002, over the following years many partners started to create industry solutions, and eventually Salesforce themselves sold industry-specific solutions – or at least targeted certain products and capabilities at specific industries and provided accelerated deployment models to drive advantage at a faster rate. The deployment and consolidation stage of market growth is typically characterised by steady, slow growth across the entire market as benefits are being driven to all providers (product vendors and solutions or implementation providers). Legacy providers either play catch up or suffer declining business as they realise the solution they sell no longer provides the business and customer the benefits that it used to.
Industry Focus Should be Aligned to Customer Segments, Solution Type and Geography
The decision to sell industry-focused solutions should be driven by the type of solution you are selling; the business benefit you are promising; and the type of business you are targeting the solution towards. Businesses that are more innovative will still buy some pre-configured, industry-specific solutions that don’t differentiate their business or drive competitive advantage. But where they expect competitive advantage, they need to stand apart – to be the only business with that capability.
It is also worth understanding that an innovation in one market might be standard practice in another (and vice-versa). Countries across the globe and specifically here in Asia Pacific have different approaches to technology and innovation. China and parts of Southeast Asia are often innovators – pushing the boundaries of new and emerging tech to do things we never thought possible (in the same way Silicon Valley traditionally has done). Australia and India are traditional markets that adopt industry solutions after they have been tried and tested by others. Innovation in Japan seems to happen in stages and at pace but only once every 10-15 years or so. New Zealand and Singapore are generally more nimble economies where businesses often have to be innovative to gain global competitive advantage quickly.
Evidence indicates that the rate of innovation is increasing across the entire region – even in the less innovative economies. The window for industry solutions is much smaller regardless of location – as the next new innovation is just around the corner. Even the large, traditionally less agile businesses are driving innovation programs – for example, many of the big financial services “dinosaurs” such as DBS and Commonwealth Bank often win tech innovation awards and offer market-leading customer experiences.
Use this lens to better develop your industry approach. The depth of your industry solution or capability will dictate the opportunities that you will drive based on the type of customer and technology stage. Do you want to drive innovation or efficiency in your clients? Do you want to win the big “safer” deals – but be thought of as a technology solution provider; or win the smaller deals in companies that will become the market leaders of tomorrow – and be considered a market leader and king maker? Understanding your own business goals, the current sales and delivery capabilities, and the capacity to change will help your company create a go-to-market strategy that suits your current and future customers and will likely dictate the growth rate of your business over the next 5-7 years.
Keep yourself abreast with the latest industry trends
Ecosystm market insights, data, and reports are jam-packed with industry analysis and digital trends across several industry verticals to help you keep tabs on the fast-paced world of tech.
In the last few months, we have seen greater adoption of Fintech especially in the area of digital payments, as more organisations and consumers adopt eCommerce. However, Fintech also appears to grow in areas such as Regtech and blockchain for ease of reporting and enhanced transaction security. As we prepare for recovery, there will be a need for a more open and interconnected economy that is borderless and transparent and does not need counter-party trust to operate. Blockchain has a role to play in enabling that environment where transactions and processes are secure, interoperable and risk-free.
Australian Banking Leveraging Blockchain
Major Australian banks – ANZ Bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and Westpac – have joined hands with property management firm Scentre Group and IBM for the expansion and commercial launch of a Blockchain technology platform Lygon that manages end-to-end bank guarantees on retail property leases.
Financial guarantee is an essential part of retail property leases and involves a lot of paperwork such as payment assurances, financial guarantee, bank bonds, credit letters and other legal documents. Bank guarantees have primarily been issued through paper-based processes – digitalising the entire route will reduce the risks, manual errors and significantly speed up the complete procedure. The use of blockchain provides a trusted system of record for digitised documents, removes the risk of document loss and allows secure sharing of data. It also has a strong cryptography security aimed at eliminating fraud and enabling the sharing of key information across organisational boundaries.
Ecosystm Principal Advisor, Phil Hassey says, “This joint venture shows the value of applying new technology to bring legacy and overlooked business processes into the digital age. The ability to reduce the bank guarantee process time frame from one month to one hour, alongside a 15-minute onboarding highlights the speed and scale that can be gained from the technology.”
“It helps the landlord, retailer and bank alike. One of the key benefits for the retail tenant is that they can concentrate on running a business rather than the back-end administration required for the new lease. Furthermore, the blockchain technology will enable heightened security capabilities and reduce the risk to all parties of fraud and data loss.”
From this month, early adopters will be able to join the platform. The intention is to expand the services into New Zealand, with the view to creating a true cross-border solution. The platform will be open to the general public, along with new features, in early 2021.
A Successful Pilot
The platform was piloted in July 2019 and was proved successful later in the year. The outcomes reported to have been achieved include reduction of time to issue a bank guarantee from one month to one day; onboarding new applicants to the platform in less than 15 minutes; and supporting other common bank guarantee processes including amendments and cancellations. The pilot used live data and legal transactions from about 20 Australian businesses, with an aim to improve customer experience and process automation.
IBM, one of the 5 shareholders and the technology provider for the platform, is responsible for developing, operating, and maintaining the platform. The initial proof of concept (POC) was developed within the IBM Research division. The platform also runs on the IBM Blockchain Platform and IBM provides services such as the security.
Hassey says, “This initiative highlights that in a digital world – regardless of the platform – joint ventures can readily provide benefits to all stakeholders if digital enablement and technology is at the core of the execution.”
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has entered into a partnership kicking off trials of 5G and edge computing with telecommunication majors Telstra and Ericsson to explore the benefits of 5G in the banking sector.
The partnership agreement was signed at the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019, in Barcelona. The trials are projected to showcase what banking in the future might look like, and how 5G technology and edge computing can help to lower the requirements of the infrastructure presently required for banking operations.
Speaking on the subject, Ecosystm’s, Principal Advisor, Tim Sheedy, thinks that “this trial will help all parties better understand where the opportunities are for users of the mobile networks, and for the telco and equipment providers too. They will understand the potential demand for specific network slices and capabilities and get a better idea of what they need to deliver and whether or not there may be demand for these services”.
5G edge computing is still in nascent stages and there’s not much present in the market. Whether it minimises infrastructure or distributes it differently is yet to be seen. “The trials will likely determine what the shape of the new distributed architecture looks like (how close to the “edge” do the data centres need to be?)” says Tim, “There are unknowns of 5G at the moment – so the trials are invaluable to all parties to help them know where and what they need to invest in to make 5G services commercially viable.”
For a layman, 5G edge computing is all about delivering the reliability, speed, and latency that they need – or more likely – a sensor needs in order to get its job done. Once the technology becomes mainstream the end-users/banking customers will reap benefits from it. “5G is not just about delivering faster speed but it is about delivering them intelligently”, says Tim, “5G will help Telco’s to prioritise traffic AND network services – meaning that the end user can achieve their goals.”
While it’s too early to tell at this stage how will 5G benefit the banking sector, it should help banks offer their customers more reliable and relevant services – but what services need to be distributed at what times, and what can remain at the core are not yet understood.