Several Founders, Co-Founders, CXO Bankers, CXO Fintech professional & people who participated in the e-panel discussions:
- Mr. P.V. Ananthakrishnan, Executive Director & Country Head UOB
- Mr. Sridhar R, Former President & Credit Risk Officer, Lakshmi Vilas Bank
- Mr. Aneesh Khanna, Executive Vice President, NSDL Payment Bank Ltd
- Mr. Neeraj Chandra, Head of Operations, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank
- Mr. Dewang Neralla CEO Atom Technologies
- Mr. Sunil Dalal, Managing Director, Softcell Technologies Ltd
- Mr Parag Mehta Founder & CEO, Evolute Group
- Mr. Rahul Dayal, Senior Vice President & Head-Business Solutions Group Liabilities, cards & BI, RBL Bank
- Mr. Sharad Goklani, Senior Vice President- Technology, Equitas Small Finance Bank
- Mr. Ravi Shankar, Co founder & CEO, Active Intelligence Pte Ltd
- Mr. Rana Sinha Ray, Head Technology, TimesofMoney
- Mr. Rahul Shah, Director – Technical Integrations and Pre Sales FIS
- Mr. Hemal Shah, Technical Product Manager, Mastercard
- Mr Arun Tanksali, Co-founder & CTO, Nearex
- Mr. Shirsha Ghosh, Co-Founder, Torit Innovations
- Mr. Ketan Doshi, Managing Director, Paypoint India Network Pvt Ltd
- Mr. Sandeep Todi, Co-Founder & CMO, Remitr
- Mr. Piush Kothari, Former Business Head Digital, Customer Analytics and Strategy, Aditya Birla Idea Payment Bank
- Mr. V Ratnakar, Deputy Vice President- Rural Lending & Payments, Axis Bank
- Mr. P D Singh, Former General Manager, Bank of Baroda
- Mr. Vikram Kaushal, Managing Partner– Vardhan Ceqube India Investment fund
- Mr. Ajay B Panicker, CEO & Founder, NetPay Limited
- Mr P B Prakash, Head Financial Institutions Group, Indusind Bank
- Dr. R Bhaskaran, Former Chief Executive Officer, IIBF
- Mr. Chris Wakare, Founder & Managing Partner, IntelliConnect Technologies
- Mr. Rajiv Rai, Chief Digital Officer, Edelweiss Financial Services
- Mr. Deep Shah, Product Manager NPCI
- Mr. Vikas Panditrao, Co-Founder FIAKS
- Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum
In the FIAKS community, the list of Top 50 companies was shared which showed that 7 out of 10 were technology companies. None of Banks were featuring in the TOP 5. This led to the following question in the FIAKS Community that isn’t this ranking telling banks to acquire technology companies and allow them to run independently with zero interference from bank management to remain competitive in the tech-driven banking? Member also asked how successful is ICICI Infotech in leading tech innovation with the ICICI bank? Is IT arm running like a tech company or is it faced with too much interference from the bank? What should be the strategy of the bank?
A FIAKS Community expert says that quite a few banks have setup up IT companies but haven’t been successful. Eventually in the red or sold off. Various reasons are –
- Interference by banks
- Pricing pressure from parent
- Competing banks having reservations in using the services.
On the other hand, a few have been successful and those are primarily international banks which have focused on servicing only the parent and bring cost advantage by setting up central tech units and support units.
Another expert adds that the market views and measures the IT companies owned by banks and the independent ones differently. In a bank-owned IT company, the profits are measured; in the independent ones, the losses and market share/gross sale is measured (akin to earlier eyeballs). In the independent companies, the higher the losses, the higher the valuation.
A member is of the opinion that maintaining the profitability of these companies will be a problem as these companies basically have to do the job of the banks which they are connected to at a cheaper rate. One example is IDBI Intech. A member of the community reminds us that one more challenge is on retaining talent. These companies can’t give better remuneration than the parent bank.
A member questions which ranking is this? Curiously, Amazon is listed as a technology company, while Walmart is listed as a trading company. This is not unreasonable, given the profitability of AWS, but still curious.
A member said banks should focus on the things they are good at and that’s banking and lending. And every other thing they should just outsource.
FIAKS questions the banks capability to handle technology. If banks like Wells Fargo have such outage then it’s a clear signal of banks inability to manage technology. FIAKS is forecasting that instead of Banks buying technology companies, the trend would be of Technology companies buying out Banks in the coming years with the core product and risk management owned by expert bankers. This argument was supported by the following data by FIAKS:
A) Frequent technology issues/system going down reported by major banks in 2019 are –
FNB Bank ( 22-Feb-2019)
Barclay bank (22-Feb-2019)
Bank of Valletta (18 Feb-19)
Chase bank (17-Feb-2019)
Wells Fargo (15-Feb-2019)
ING Australia (13-Feb-2019)
Lloyd’s Bank (12-Feb-2019)
Nationwide (11-Feb-2019)
Metro bank (04-Feb-2019)
HDFC bank (04-Dec-2018)
B) Technology Companies buying out banks
08-Mar- 2019: Raisin, the marketplace for savings and investment products, acquires German banking provider MHB Bank
23- Jan 2019 : Cognizant to acquire Finnish bank-backed Oy Samlink (the link is provided in the bibliography).
This led to heated discussions. Register and Read the entire discussions