The demand for digital banking apps
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VMware’s APJ CTO has emphasised a collection of VMware solutions that can help financial services institutions (FSIs) deliver any type of solution, to any cloud and to any device carried by any FSI employee.
“And the most important thing is to ensure that this is all delivered safely and securely, so there is intrinsic security embedded into all these solutions,” said Guru Venkatachalam.
He share these observations during a briefing with media from Southeast Asia and Korea (SEAK), and emphasised that enabling these capabilities for FSIs can help (FSIs) deliver digital services to the end consumer.
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Building digital relationships with Southeast Asia consumers
VP and MD of SEAK region, Sanjay Deshmukh, had kicked off the media briefing off by sharing that this region is more ready than most others, to embrace digital services.
“And it’s not surprising because, you know, while we have 600 plus million people in Southeast Asia we have a billion plus mobile phones and almost 60-percent of them are smartphones. So again consumers are more ready in consuming the digital services, as compared to the rest of the world,” Sanjay said.
In current times, digital presence like a mobile phone app has become a must-have capability. “Consumers are making decisions about services to consume, or which company to work with, or which bank to use, based on their experiences on mobile phones and tablets,” Sanjay said.
Trust has become a pertinent topic that financial services organisations need to address
According to the VMware Digital Frontiers 3.0 study, over 60-percent of consumers acknowledge they would switch service providers to another that offers better service and better digital experience.
Besides this, trust and security is another important parameter in their decision-making. Trust has become a pertinent topic that financial services organisations need to address with 80-percent of consumers surveyed expressing that security is the number one priority for them when it comes to choosing a financial services provider.
Digital apps by banks
Consumers have just as high expectations of digital services from FSIs and banks, if not higher.
The VMware Digital Frontiers 3.0 Study found that the customer battleground for Malaysia’s financial services industry has shifted online with 55-percent of Malaysians surveyed now preferring to engage with their banks via apps rather than visiting in-person at a branch. Malaysia’s readiness is ahead of its Southeast Asian counterparts Singapore (51%), and Indonesia (53%), on par with the Philippines (55%), but slightly behind Thailand (72%).
It has gotten to the point where FSI organisations are tracking their revenue and profitability from digital channels. Sanjay said they have discovered digital channels are giving them more coverage, more reach, more revenue, and that they would probably need to optimise investments (in digital channels) in other parts of the world.
Banks in the region also recognise this digital demand from consumers, while also acknowledging the uphill battle they have in leveraging legacy IT they have inherited over the decades.
Guru pointed out, “Many FSI customers have investments in infrastructure and applications.” All of these come with legacy processes in operations, security and compliance processes and procedures, which are very complex and overall challenging the speed of delivery to customers.
Banks in the region recognise this digital demand from consumers, while also acknowledging the uphill battle they have in leveraging legacy IT they have inherited over the decades.
On top of all this is the emergence of the infrastructure operations team and the developer & operations (Devops) team, which have yet to figure out how to work together.
Banks want multi-cloud option
According to the survey, 90-percent of FSI customers are migrating and modernising their legacy applications. “They do this via modernising the on-premise cloud, or leveraging cloud functionalities and features from the hyperscalers.”
They do this to satisfy consumer demand for speed and scale.
Multi-cloud is a future that increasingly more FSIs want to achieve. They would like to have the flexibility of using which cloud is suitable for their business need and take advantage of choice without being locked in to any one of them.
But how do they take advantage of the benefits cloud and hyperscalers offer while addressing the challenges of a legacy and heterogeneous IT environment?
“They have invested in aspects of on-premise which they want to leverage, but at same time they would like to go to any particular cloud (of their choice),” Guru explained.
But how do they take advantage of the benefits cloud and hyperscalers offer while addressing the challenges of a legacy and heterogeneous IT environment?
V Cloud Foundation is a stack of solutions which run on-premise or on any of the cloud vendors.
“This gives FSI CIOs the flexibility to go to any cloud or even any of our traditional partners (whether private or public cloud).”
Abstraction, the capability of virtualisation technology, enables a consistent infrastructure and consistent operations, ensuring that the operating model is consistent across any IT environment that FSIs choose to work with.
This infrastructure helps them to build run, manage, connect and protect any of the applications across any cloud delivered to any of the devices, carried by the employees, wherever they are, Guru concluded.