Perhaps no industry is undergoing as dramatic a disruption as the financial services, as many organizations are transitioning to stay ahead of the digital curve. This was clearly apparent at the recent ‘SunTec Confluence’ conference, as banks from around the world gathered at the Palazzo Versace Dubai, to discuss the unprecedented opportunities in today’s financial services space.
The theme for this year’s Confluence was “Digital at the Core”, an essential strategy in today’s world, as leading organizations seek to digitally transform modernize their legacy systems and build a new core that is intelligent, immersive, integrated and invisible – one that can help in creating highly personalized customer experiences.
Among the various insights and impressions collected this year Brett King – financial services influencer, award-winning speaker, co-founder and CEO of Moven – stood out. As a futurist, he visualized how four major trends – Artificial Intelligence, Voice based Artificial Intelligence, Smart Glasses and Machine Learning – are changing the ecosystem dynamics and how these will need to be embedded in customer experience journeys across industries like banking, telecom, and retail.
“Access to credit is not the same as needing a credit card”, Brett explained, “It’s about creating an all-new Credit experience, where banks can predict and assist your daily life credit requirements without a credit card and how open banking can tie all these data together for the banks”.
Nanda Kumar, CEO of SunTec, also took to the stage to talk about the ever-pervasive effects of Industry 4.0. He stressed upon the need for organizations to understand and embrace the ‘basic human-needs’ driven approach if they want to succeed in today’s digital world.
The second day opened to an eagerly awaited session hosted by Jost Hopperman, Vice President, Forrester Research on “The New High Ground – The Digital Core”. This set the tone for the next two days with interesting sessions including:
- Elevating the ‘Customer Experience’ through Digital Transformation
- Hyper-personalization to meet customer expectations
- Digital at the Core – Crafting a successful strategy
- Product innovation in the age of ecosystem economy
- How organizations are enabling an end to end digital experience
The key takeaway from the event was the growing need for organizations to focus on the ‘Customer Experience’ part of their Digital Transformation programs. Replacing the core is not a viable option for most banks and this is a big hurdle for modernization projects – but not anymore. The SunTec product session demonstrated how banks can adopt a simple approach of Hollowing the core and separating the customer engagement layer to leap-frog the customer experience ladder. This simple yet highly effective strategy enables banks of all types, to exponentially increase their customer experience orchestration capabilities.
Amit Dua, President, SunTec, said, “via Confluence, our goal is to provide a meaningful platform for industry thought leaders to come together and deliberate upon the state of Digital Transformation. The response has been extremely positive with a generous appreciation for high-quality content. We are delighted to have delivered to expectations of our clients and partner eco-system in helping shape the Digital Transformation roadmap for the industry ”.
Keeping the event in Dubai highlights SunTec’s growing presence and focus in the Middle East, with most leading banks in the region preferring to work with SunTec in meeting VAT regulations as well as moving further in their legacy transformation journey by creating a truly Digital Core.
