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In today’s competitive business environment, collaboration is the key to unlocking a company’s growth potential. It allows businesses to adapt to market changes and meet consumer demands instantly while fuelling their productivity and efficiency.

At YourStory’s Future of Work summit 2022, a fireside chat titled ‘Unlocking growth through collaboration’ – featuring Vikas Prasad, Director Service Line Sales – India/South Asia, Kyndryl and Sammeer Saurabbh, CTO, HDFC Securities – focused on building collaboration to unlock potential capabilities and foster the next wave of growth.

Factors responsible for sustainable growth

“The world is hyper-connected, customers have multiple choices. We must establish innovative and cost-effective ways to acquire and retain customers for accelerated growth in this competitive environment,” said Vikas, highlighting the company’s culture and efficient approaches to managing employees’ knowledge as key factors for growing sustainably. “What you deliver comes from knowledge and how you deliver comes from culture,” he added. In addition, he encouraged individuals to learn from failures and recover fast by following calculated risks.

Prioritising customers’ demands, Vikas pointed out the tremendous potential of big data analytics to understand customer requirements for personalised products and services. Data interferences allow companies to move from providing reactive services to predictive and cognitive solutions.

“Three fundamental pillars of understanding your organisation are – how it operates and grows, its value system, and culture,” cited Sammeer, explaining the essence of identifying and retaining the right talent and data-driven decision making to expand business capacity.

For Sammeer, customer focus is a critical part. Inspecting customer data drives the next generation of business agility and improves productivity at the workplace. He also spoke about cognitive approaches [human psychology about positive and negative feedback impacting business performance/reputation.

Effective collaboration for fintech growth

“Fintech is a disruptive, highly regulated, and complex space surrounded by potential risks. Forming partnerships and business alliances is the latest trend in fintech,” Vikas said. He explained that there is an acquisition trigger [common synergies to generate new revenue opportunities] in the market, hence financial service providers are keen on collaboration and co-developing possibilities.

In India, the financial space is expanding, for example, ICICI and neobanks’ initiatives, HDFC Bank and Paytm collaboration to offer new credit cards, Axis Bank’s partnership with BharatPe to expand business acquisition models, and more scope for cross-border trade financing.

In his view, financial collaboration improves customer relationships and user experience. Finserv and fintech can drive growth, scale financial services, and enhance business capabilities by leveraging collaboration with authentic organisations.

Speaking about partnerships between fintech and microfinance, Sammeer talked about lending objectives broadly, for example, why a business borrows money, what are its requirements, and the next phases to build a sustainable ecosystem at a much faster pace.

Additionally, he discussed evolving customer and employees’ psychology. “We need to conduct psychometric tests and analytics to understand employees and potential synergies. At the same time, the right talent should be able to handle customers emotionally and advance customer service to stay ahead of competition,” he said.

Future trends

“Collaboration is a complex decision. It can have ramifications on how acquisitions between conventional financial organisations and fintech companies will pan out in this space, for instance, telco giant Airtel offers payment bank services,” said Vikas. Other fascinating technologies, said Vikas, are blockchain technology and NFTs, open banking, gig economy, and how new financial services replace traditional banking infrastructure.

Data-rich technology platforms, blockchain, AI-driven decision making, and distributed ledger could become major game changers, according to Sammeer. Geopolitical situations and the pandemic have fuelled digitisation, he said, resulting in cybersecurity, information security, and data privacy. “How are we going to educate individuals about data privacy, cybersecurity, the role of GDPR in globalisation, and employability of AI/RPA for this purpose?” he added.

Specifying the implementation of multi-cloud in the IT sector, Sammeer revealed that HDFC will originate 95 percent of transactions from the cloud in the next six months. “We are implementing open API infrastructure, involving IoT in fintech, and touching different multi-cloud infrastructures for various applications,” he said.

Challenges in fintech

Integrating financial services into the existing world or an ability to replicate and scale it could become a major challenge. Vikas explained how the fintech solutions are successful when built from scratch and don’t demand real integration with complicated legacy systems [a concept of greenfield implementation].

For seamless integration/regulatory implementation, Kyndryl provides large-scale mainframes – flexibility for startups, correct legacy technology investment, supervising customers on how to integrate mainframes with public cloud infrastructure, mainframe security, and more.

According to Sammeer, data is encrypted in static and dynamic states, and certain data security practices are followed. There are some stringent policies and the repercussions of massive data sharing, thereby Data Loss & Prevention (DLP) services are implemented to protect data. “We are also implementing Key Management Services (KMS) solutions to prevent data from stealing and decrypting,” he said.

He suggested following certain security parameters and security mechanisms to protect personally identifiable information (PII) and transactional data, while educating customers about data privacy policies.

How ecosystem collaboration improves customer experience

“From an organisational perspective, effective communication, productive culture, data-rich platform, and retaining talent who understands customer needs are essential pillars for organisational success,” said Sammeer.

He further added that organisations must have a customer care/servicing team who must know policies, processes, and products to improve culture, existing value system, and overall ecosystem.

“An ecosystem should focus on outcomes from an end-user perspective rather than their individual agendas when it comes to collaboration strategies going forward,” Vikas added, elaborating on how fintech can collaborate with finserv to foster an efficient collaboration economy.