Dataquest, India: Cognizant’s Senior Vice President of Banking and Financial Services Says Clients are More Dependent on Technology and Data to Win in the Digital Era

“Financial institutions are embracing new digital technologies to change the way they interface with customers and employees and manage their operations,” says Jaideep Poondir. “Likewise, it is increasingly clear that the fintech revolution is driving our banking clients to invest in significant changes to their business model to meaningfully pivot towards becoming digital enterprises.” Excerpts:

“We believe that the medium to long-term outlook for our BFSI business remains as strong as ever. Our pipeline is healthy and, we continue to make investments in skills and capabilities that will help us meet our clients’ evolving need as they look for new solutions that allow them to defend their businesses against digital disruptors, while innovating to create new areas of growth.

In BFSI, like the other industries we serve, businesses are becoming more technology-intensive and our clients are more dependent on technology and data to compete and win in the digital era. The range of skills required in today’s technology landscape have broadened, further supporting the demand for services companies such as ours.

We are witnessing increasing activity in areas such as automation, cloud adoption, API (application programming interface), Agile and DevOps. Processes that were traditionally reliant on human intelligence are now under the purview of automation, thanks to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation. Cloud adoption, an area where banks have always lagged due to privacy and regulatory concerns, is now catching up quickly. As security standards improve, big banks are chalking up plans to scale up their infrastructure-as-a-service model on public/private hybrid cloud to save costs. Driven by the need to meet customer expectations and thwart competitive threats, banks are adopting agile and DevOps methodologies to accelerate the application development process.

As we look ahead, we believe our market opportunity has never been greater. That’s because with more technology in every product and behind every customer experience, and more data generated at every turn, our clients’ businesses are, and will continue to become, increasingly technology-intensive.

Our opportunity then is to work with our BFSI clients to help them win by making the fundamental, technology-enabled changes throughout their organizations that are required for them to compete in this new technology- and data-intensive world.

In looking ahead of evolving client needs, we continue to identify emerging technologies with the potential to create real business value, while also scaling the most promising technologies, productizing services, solutions and business models, and speeding them to market. We are working to incubate new IP-based offerings and realize the potential of developing technologies.

One such technology is blockchain. Keeping in mind our clients’ focus on leading technology innovation, we are actively building blockchain prototypes for the financial services industry at our dedicated lab in Pune. Many of our banking clients are engaging us for co-innovation around potential blockchain opportunities or by requesting use cases and proof-of-concepts relevant to their businesses.”

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