In December 2021, Publicis Sapient and Thailand’s SCBX Group announced their joint venture, SCB Tech X, a tech enabler for building the next generation of financial services across Southeast Asia.
For all organisations, modernisation of data infrastructure is one of the key building blocks for a successful digital business transformation and key to driving innovation and differentiation,” says Nitin Agarwal, Vice-President of Technology and Head of Data for Financial Services at Publicis Sapient. Mr. Agarwal was in Thailand recently to meet some of their key clients. “Banks and financial institutions in particular, must modernise their legacy technology infrastructure so that they could create differentiated data-driven experiences for their customers and stay competitive. Modernisation with an open data architecture at the core will help banks latch onto opportunities like banking-as-a-service, buy-now-pay-later, micro-investing, green-banking and more, at pace,” he added.
Optimising data
Businesses today have access to more data than ever before. Insights gleaned from that data can be used to build actionable business strategies that can help companies better understand their customer needs to improve the overall customer experience. These data insights can also help define new business models that leverage a broader ecosystem of partners for their individual and collective strength. Ultimately, all this comes down to building resilience and fuelling growth amid an uncertain economic environment.
Despite the best intentions, legacy infrastructures with low-quality data and data siloes make it extremely difficult for organisations to drive data-led innovations with speed and agility. For Banks to modernise legacy infrastructure, they need to rethink the approach to embrace a composable architecture premised on open data principles that enable democratised build-out of data products.
Banks have two options to deal with the data issue. The first is to take a ‘jump’ approach like a fintech or a new bank and build a totally new platform with data at the core. Building the platform with data at the core ensures that data is not locked into multiple systems and allows greater governance which can be automated easily while ensuring real-time access to the data across business functions. Alternatively, they can incrementally build the data core on the back of specific value-added use cases while removing the dependency of relevant data on the underlying legacy platforms/systems.
Publicis Sapient has helped several businesses address the data challenge through Speed Layer, its data streaming platform, that allows enterprises to access high-quality unified data from traditionally siloed sources in real-time.
“Having worked with several banks around the world, including in Southeast Asia, we know that for financial institutions to move away from legacy technology, they must reduce their dependency on traditional core banking systems. This shift will help them drive data-led innovations and business models more effectively,” explained Mr. Agarwal.
Speed Layer is designed to unlock organisations’ data, build resilience, foster real-time engagement experience, reduce cost and enable future innovation at speed. Using modern data streaming technologies and appropriate hosting solutions either in the cloud or in data centres, Speed Layer offers 99.99% system availability and above while achieving milliseconds-level read performance. It enables data linking, processing and insight generation in a federated manner enabling parallel build-out of use cases, including fraud signals, value-added alerts, real-time notifications for customers, and actionable insights for the bank.
“Speed Layer allows banks to launch more digital, customer-focused products while harnessing data for strategic business insights by standardising data access for channels. The platform enables banks to quickly build out new data-driven products and experiences to respond to market demands by allowing easy and repeatable access to data sets and interfaces without disturbing the underlying systems of record (SORs),”said Mr. Agarwal.
While the world around us remains uncertain, we know that digital business transformation is here to stay as a cornerstone to growth and competitive advantage. Businesses in Asia, too, will have to engage in this with a keen focus on quality, optimised use of data, and customer centricity, or risk falling behind their more digitally innovative counterparts.