Riding the crest of the technology wave, banks today are making a beeline for tablets for the use of their customer-facing workforce. While most banks have acquired tablets by the thousands, quite a few have gone the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) way. This eagerness on the part of banks to portray a tech-savvy image has in turn fueled the need for ready-to-deploy solutions compatible with tablets. This has thrown up a slew of products, developed by both in-house developers and IT vendors; however, most of them come across as mobile solutions rehashed to suit the tablet.
Tablets offer some compelling advantages. They are light and portable and the long battery life allows for a full day’s uninterrupted work. Their built-in cameras make it easy to click photographs. Some tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Note and the Windows 8 come with a Stylus, which can capture customers’ signatures, eliminating the need for an additional peripheral device. Most high-end tablets have fairly good cameras capable of Remote Deposit Capture and come with scanning and OCR software, which allows the capture of documents with ease. Ruggedized tablets, which can withstand inclement weather or the rigors of travel, are already available. Biometric support can be incorporated if banks deem it necessary.
All things considered, the tablet holds out immense promise for being the one “do-it-all” device. A financial advisor can demonstrate to clients all the “what-if” scenarios pertaining to a particular financial product or plan. What’s more, clients can play around and conjure up a few scenarios on their own! Tablets bearing banks’ logos make for really impressive welcome gifts for high net worth customers who have had their fill of the more plebian enticements such as watches, ties, bags, movie tickets and so on.
For the executive on the go, a tablet is a better option than a mobile phone for reviewing exceptions and issuing approvals.
It’s more convenient too. Tablets can be fixed to any surface and turned into touch-enabled banking kiosks to ease up long queues in branches by offering a self-service option to customers.
Thus, tablets offer a great deal of scope to ideate and take banking to a different level. The challenge lies in designing the right solutions to work on this new medium. The existing ones show significant promise but none evoke the “WOW” factor. Also, while there are many applications enabling customer activities, there isn’t enough catering to staff needs. Ideas are hard to come by and transforming them into workable applications is harder still. However, there is no denying the potential for such solutions, and it is only a matter of time before somebody gets it right.

Does the banking sector really need more regulation than it already has coming? A UK IT trade body is proposing ‘enforceable infrastructure standards’ after an IT disruption in one of the country’s premier banking institutions financially excluded many customers for almost a week.
The process of regulatory introspection unleashed by the 2008 meltdown holds enough promise to have an ‘enforceable’ impact on banking IT infrastructure. The impending regulatory regime will be nothing but demanding and in that context the point can be made that existing banking infrastructure probably will not cope.
The average banking system today is a multi-layered composite of different eras – silos from product-centric days, medleys created by the M&As and the discrete bolt-ons of periodic modernization. Consolidating data from this archipelago of systems, processes and applications and presenting it in the unified, real-time format required by current regulations can have an adverse impact on the time and cost of compliance.
Note that a unified, real-time view is not merely an imperative for compliance. It is also a fundamental prerequisite for the customer-centric 360 degree model that almost every bank is attempting to build.
But creating a truly integrated enterprise architecture out of the existing patchwork of systems is a herculean task rife with operational hazards. Banks need a model that combines the truly transformative potential of rip & replace strategies with the peace of mind of phased rollouts.
The emergence of componentization as a motif in the banking solutions ecosystem might provide banks with the golden mean. The componentized approach allows banks to modernize in phases, and do so at a granular level.  It also enables the replacement of traditional silos with enterprise-level components that integrate systems, processes and data across LoBs and functions to create a unified view of the business. Banks can also design their component deployment strategies around their immediate business objectives, like the need to capitalize on emerging opportunities in specific customer, product or service segments. Most importantly, componentization minimizes disruption.
As long time perceptive users of technology, banks do not need a set of enforceable technology standards to ensure their IT systems are up to potential. What they need is a transformative model that delivers to pragmatic requirements of time, capital and continuity. Componentization has the versatility to tick all those boxes.
Read our previous blog in the “Simplified Banking” series

If unhappy customers are indeed the greatest source of learning, then the banking sector is sitting on a gold mine. Since 2011, the proportion of customers planning to switch banks has risen from 7% to 12%. Only 37 % are satisfied with their banks’ understanding of their needs and preferences and only 44% think that products and services are adapted to their needs. A majority is just not thrilled with their banking experience.
Since when did banking become about experience? Ever since the informed, empowered, connected customer took control.
Nothing is any longer simply a product or service; everything is a lifestyle choice. And banking customers are demanding the same kind of lifestyle experiences that they are used to getting at other businesses. Experiential benchmarking is now a cross-sectoral sport – if my retailer can do it, why can’t my bank?
Banks understand the business value of delivering choice, convenience, personalization, experience and value in every transaction to their customers. But existing technology infrastructures are simply too complex to deliver a consistent experience across multiple product/service portfolios, channels and consumer devices.
Experience design starts with an intimate 360-degree understanding of individual customer behaviors and needs. Then, this understanding must be constantly refined, using real-time insights, and applied in a way that is contextually relevant to the interaction. It is also imperative to ensure that the experience is seamless and consistent across multiple channels and devices. In an age where customer touch-points just seem to proliferate, banks need to be able to deploy emerging access options without diluting the overall experience. IT transformation is critical to deal with the sheer scope of the task at hand.  Traditionally, that has always brought its own challenges of risk, cost, timeline and complexity.
But it doesn’t have to be like that anymore. Phased deployment strategy leveraging componentized banking platforms promise a far less stressful journey to comprehensive transformation. This approach allows banks to progressively modernize by deploying components to address transformation exigencies, like customer experience or process or product/service innovation, with minimal disruption. It is transformation that’s both sweet and simple
Read our previous blog in the “Simplified Banking” series