Collaborations, digital eco-systems, and the likes!
For a long time, consumers have had to live with the slow pace of technology found at traditional banks. However, with fintech taking centre-stage, banks are being challenged to spruce up and offer customers the innovation they desire. Almost similarly, throughout the debit card era and well into the digital, banks held a virtual monopoly over the payment ecosystem. Even this landscape is changing with the rise of UPI and other payment options emerging.
So, will they compete or collaborate to join forces to build financial services that modern consumers are looking for?
Well, as we have seen it is a bit of both with a lot of excitement thrown in from traditional telecoms, start-ups, e-commerce players & of course tech companies.
Let me elaborate with some examples
A leading payment bank – telecom – tech – a retail conglomerate that we partnered with in 2015, today onboards over 400 million subscribers, many of them who are also their retail & payment banking users. Hailed as the world’s largest start-up, this entity came into the market to increase its digital footprint in India. But, that wasn’t the only thing happening. With an entire digital ecosystem consisting of devices, free Wi-Fi, broadband, and other services distributed to every house in India, this triggered a Data Revolution. They collected data, captured insights, usage patterns to create customized business/subscriber plans. The ambitious project created greater digital adoption resulting in a bigger user’s digital footprint, giving the TSP unprecedented access to the country’s untapped ‘Big Data’
Within 83 days of its launch in India, the TSP reached a subscriber base of 50 million very much enabled by Intense Technologies’- Digital Customer Onboarding solution. Leveraging AI, ML & RPA we were able to cut down the customer acquisition cycles from days to hours and then to minutes without compromising on regulatory mandates.
Further, using our robust data/communication management solutions & they also send over 73 billion digital communications relying on our customer communication management solutions.
In yet another of our joint implementation with a tech company for a leading Bank, our partnership opened up new market segments, business models, and areas of growth that didn’t exist before. For instance, the Industry Intelligence team from our partner team gave us an in-depth analysis of banks that we could explore for our CCM / Onboard solution/ AI Analytics / Customer Insights Solutions – a significant value add-on.
In the past, Customer Communications Management (CCM) was mainly focused on generating documents or pdfs, today they play a key role in providing meaningful conversations and improving customer experience. In this aspect, Intense has been agile enough to understand changing market dynamics, adapt and respond better to customer needs.
Through our partnership, we could scale our operations, understand legacy systems, and we could easily integrate customer communications management tools with other key pieces of their technology ecosystem.
Tweet ThisEventually, this partnership helped the bank/our client grow their digital services with speed and scale. The client could meet their SLA’s, with customer-centric, tailored messaging, notifications, automated responses all of which led to enhanced customer experience and improved performance.
The outcome the leading bank got with this partnership, was enhanced technical depth, industry expertise, best-in-class technology, and the right-fit digital solutions, ranging from digital customer engagement, and onboarding, to self-service portals, and customer communication management.
The digital ecosystem widened our reach, helped us connect to more opportunities. Most often we have the capabilities but do not have the bandwidth but with an extended partnership or a start-up ecosystem, we could bring together cross-industry experts in mutually beneficial ways.
Ushering the digital revolution
While 2020 brought some very unprecedented changes, the opportunities are huge as to how we can become true partners to digital ecosystems.
“India currently houses the world’s third-largest start-up ecosystem, with 38 firms being valued at over $1 billion, or what is known as unicorns. In 2020, the country minted around 12 such unicorns despite the disruption to the economy caused by the pandemic.”
Collaborations that matter
It’s only when start-ups and established corporates collaborate that they create an environment for long-term growth. These ecosystems allow start-ups to scale, expand the market and geographic reach, and for more established enterprises, partnering with start-ups can fill gaps in technical expertise that can help carve out stronger positions in new markets. Most large organizations especially in the technology domain are extensively collaborating with start-ups and other players to leverage capabilities, explore new business avenues and accelerate innovation.
Build together, build better
Eventually, digital ecosystems will bring together enterprises across industries and domains. Ecosystems exist across industries—we have voice assistants, banking, and digital payments, amongst others. Unlike the old-fashioned one-customer-one company relationship, every player in a digital ecosystem has something to offer and gain.
Even the COVID-19 pandemic saw the rise of testing laboratories, new technologies integrated with healthcare to tackle the pandemic blues.
Every ecosystem or partnership is built on trust, mutual dependency, and a common vision. If these are taken care of, the value delivered can be immense, and opportunities to explore are limitless. We’ve always believed in creating an environment that can foster innovation, which is why our partnerships with SIs have been extremely valuable.
Whether they form through a start-up or a large enterprise, ecosystems bring together companies and offer access to a common set of content, analytics, datasets amongst other things. When we capitalize on a robust ecosystem of partners it accelerates value creation and it’s again a win-win for all the players.
