DECEMBER 20198ince the advent of modern-day capitalism, one as-pect of business that has dominated the minds of every decision maker in every organisation across the globe has been profitability or to be precise `How to increase Profitabili-ty'. During the nascent stages of technolo-gy taking over our lives, this was primarily achieved by either focusing on increasing the salesforce thereby increasing the top-line or by controlling the expenses that reduce the bottom line or both. However, since the start of the current century, the entire paradigm has moved from getting humans to do more to getting technology to do more, better & with fewer humans. Particularly since the commoditization of technology by way of smartphones (everyone walking around is carrying a super intelligent computing device), the way Technology has changed the way businesses are run & managed or for the matter even conceptualized has undergone a fundamental change. In the beginning, technology replaced mundane every-day tasks by providing simple automation tools brining in efficiencies in process & improvement in productivity. As the graph of technological advancements became steeper, computing power & storage capacity becoming easily ac-cessible at low cost, businesses started getting access or capabilities to collect ever increasing data on human inter-actions but many not knowing how or what to do with that data. Subsequent advancement in Data Science & Machine learning led to businesses acquiring tremendous capabil-ities to not only synthesize large datasets but also glean deep insights into basic tenets of human behaviour thus enabling them to design their every interaction in line with their target customer. In the more recent past, one domain that has seen high levels of activity, particularly from the investor community, has been fin-tech ­ the convergence of technology with the world of Finance. Traditionally, finance has been a transaction-based business. But given the immense opportunities that technology opens, the world of finance has embraced it with open hands & technol-ogy has become the DNA of the thought process in board rooms globally. This can be witnessed as a global phenomenon to-day in way 1000s of new age finance com-panies who have & are building core busi-ness models with technology at its core rather than capital. Perhaps the most important phenom-enon has been the advent of blockchain technology as it im-pacts & if successful, completely changes one fundamental tenet of finance that is currency or in a more meaningful sense ­ `the medium of exchange'. Having gone through its own cycle of being looked upon as another tech fad to something that is destined to fail acquiring its evangelists to scepticism to excitement everywhere to early industry applications & adoption to now global institutions each try-ing out their owns POCs to make it a mainstay in at least some facet of their technology infra.Customer ServiceA key area which has seen massive disruption in the way customers are served, new as well as existing, is customer service. In less than a decade, chatbots have virtually tak-en over many of the tasks that were traditionally supposed to be performed by a trained customer service executive. It would be difficult to imagine any financial institution to be not using Bots to manage at least certain customer TECHNOLOGY AND THE CHANGING FACE OF FINANCIAL SERVICESBy Praveen Sinha, MD, PinCapPraveen's experience across different sectors and recent work has made him emerge as a prominent business leader, and is considered as a turnaround specialist in energy efficiency start-upsSPraveen Sinha, MDIN MY OPINION
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