Banking operations have shifted from conservative to extremely aggressive
Chennai, June 29: Indian banks have worked on ‘hygiene’ factors such as having the right set of transactional applications, infrastructure, broad governance and architecture in place, according to Mr Rajarshi Sengupta, Executive Director, Technology Advisory Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Speaking to Business Line on the challenges that banks face, he said that they lie in the areas of managing data quality and data volumes, analytical applications, streamlining vendor management and sorting IT team skills and retention issues.
PricewaterhouseCoopers had conducted a survey of banks in India (public, private and foreign) to bring out a technology-readiness research report, which analysed metrics such as operational efficiencies, revenue growth and performance measurement and governance, risk and compliance.
The readiness was assessed in the context of being able to cater to the changing needs of the Indian consumers and industries, anticipated competition from foreign banks and the growing global footprint of Indian banks.
“It has never been better for India, with high GDP growth and ever growing middle class in the country; and the banking industry has been responsible for providing the impetus for economic growth, along with its own,” Mr Sengupta said.
Along with growth has emerged strong competition from private and foreign banks.
“The banking operations have shifted from conservative to extremely aggressive, backed by strong risk management practices. The weapons of competition have shifted to speed, convenience and efficiency through technology.”
According to him, the survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews with senior IT executives at banks and supplemented by PricewaterhouseCoopers research and global best practices.
Stating that all surveyed banks had core banking system in place, covering more than 80 per cent of branches, he said that banks are anticipating huge data volumes growth in the range of 30-40 per cent annually to manage growth.
Two-thirds of the respondents had a business intelligence system in place or were in the process of implementing one.
“This would serve as the key information infrastructure for providing the needed analytics on corporate performance management as well as customer and market growth.”
Besides, all the banks had enterprise-wide governance and architecture frameworks in place.
“However, coverage in areas such as metadata management and data quality was significantly lower than others. But all the banks surveyed are planning to build or procure a solution that will help with regulatory compliance. The public sector banks believe Basel-II will be one of the top drivers for growth in data volumes.”
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