The banking industry in India is rapidly upgrading in sync with technology. Banks are no longer limited to physical transactions and have now transformed completely into software based financial institutions, said Shiv Kumar Bhasin, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), State Bank of India.
Addressing a vital session on IT and Its Rising Significance in Managing Cashless Economy and Embracing the Digital Revolution at the recently organised 2nd BFSI CTO Summit in Mumbai, Bhasin said, “ The banks have now become progressive and all the technology heads from various banks now look for platforms to exchange ideas and challenges.”
Congratulating Elets Technomedia Pvt Ltd for organising pivotal summits for the banking fraternity, he added, “ These platforms help us continue our important discussion pertaining to banking fraternity and the exchange of ideas that were limited to email conversations, WhatsApp groups etc can now be performed in such large scale.”
He further explained that these discussions prove to be very fruitful it terms of crisis intervention like data breach or cyber attacks.
“We all witnessed that how demonetisation challenged us undergoing quicker changes in our IT systems to facilitate the banking services in a robust manner to the customer. When the currency changes were observed and calibrating the ATMs faster and several other issues were resolved through the exchange of ideas,” he said.
Speaking in terms of “ Digital India “ campaign and exponential transformation of the country into a cashless economy, he suggested the need to organise such discussion based platforms in rural areas also.This will help in addressing the demands of the banks and financial institution working in the remote areas.
Being a technology head of the largest public sector lender in the country, Bhasin said that there are several challenges in terms of technical upgradation such as Security issues, digital transformation and talent acquisition.
“Security will continue to be the key challenge for us. As the newer technologies are evolving, the newer security landscapes are getting presented to us,” he added.
“Another challenge that the technology head always faces is the digital transformation.All of us are trying to undergo a digital transformation for the various business processes whether they are customer facing channels or staff facing channels.The completion is high,” he explained.
“The third most key challenge is the talent acquisition. So, when we are carrying out large technology changes in the organisations. We cannot recruit so many personnel from the market using the usual channels. It is important for us to get the right quality with some level of domain knowledge.”
Explaining about the innovations initiated by the SBI, he said, “ The banks are going to get transformed into technology companies. At present a lot of Indian banks especially the SBI is at the stage where are the software financial services company. So when we want to build a software financial services company, we have to have a tremendous requirement of talent. As we are digitising our systems, consequently we are gathering more data and we are trying to capture every financial movement of our consumer to ensure relevant services.”
