Banking on cloud for customer satisfaction

If we say the customer is king, then businesses in Ghana need to transform their current business models. Ghanaian banks, for instance, need to begin to shift from customer-centric to customer activated models. 

All over the world, banks take pride in their huge investment decisions. As large, sophisticated consumers of technology, they invest in some of the biggest and most secure networks in the world. To maintain these networks, they also assembled armies of programmers to write code and maintain software programmes. 

This very scale of operations can actually hinder rather than help operational efficiency, as banks now need to create, deploy and customise new products and services in today’s fast-changing world of borderless financial transactions.

The good news for Africa’s banks is that they are relatively unfettered by legacy fixed-premise information technology (IT) infrastructure, while experiencing substantial and fast-growing market share – for now. 

However, nimble players from across Africa and outside it are already introducing cloud-based solutions that offer integrated risk management, predictive real-time analytics, core banking transformation, mobile money systems and more. 

Africa’s financial services industry can play to its unique strengths by leap-frogging competitors – including rivalries from global technology firms – with a “cloud-first” approach to services and technology innovation. But they must act now if they’re to provide flexible, mobile, and pervasive transaction touch-points that will win the hearts and minds of customers.

Banks in Africa have a unique greenfield opportunity at their disposal. Most of them are only now starting to ramp up their investments in IT infrastructure: they can, and should, skip the traditional servers and networks for far more flexible cloud-based architecture. 

A cloud-first approach helps banks avoid getting fixated on hardware assets performance and starts them focusing on how to establish and maintain access to the customer. Cloud-based services can be scaled, tailored, and rolled out to meet customers’ preferences in real time – or even anticipate them.

So, why is persistent, pervasive customer access suddenly so important? The mobile device, that’s why. 

With mobile transaction values in Africa expected to exceed US$160 billion by 2016, African banks need to build their business models and systems around the mobile device as the core access point for financial services. 

The cloud, as most chief information officers (CIOs) will know, is a fundamental part of mobile service delivery; it does not only power the back-end processes of any mobile app but stores the rich customer data which will increasingly inform banking services innovation. 

And if Ghana’s financial industry can master mobile financial services, even greater opportunity awaits beyond our shores – courtesy the three billion mobile devices currently in play worldwide.

Global opportunity does not come without global competition though. Consumer technology giants and service providers – like Google, Amazon, and Samsung – have major technical advantages when it comes to accessing customers via mobile and mining their data. The cloud removes entry-level barriers, allowing smaller banks to punch above their weight in the marketplace. Market share will only come to those banks and financial institutions nimble enough to keep up with the customer. 

As banks adopt “customer activation” concepts, they must develop intuitive products and services that connect with customer-preferred touch-points and access patterns – so they can easily anticipate user trends by analysing volumes of transactional and behavioural data. Success will hinge on two factors: how accurately banks pinpoint these trends, and how quickly they can roll out and scale new services tailored to them.

Cloud infrastructure underpins efforts in both respects: it offers the only cost-effective platform for analysing so-called “Big Data” and allows banks to provision, test, and deploy service innovations far faster than traditional IT systems.  

At one major multinational bank, it took up to 45 days to provision their 20,000 developers to code and test a new application. An IBM private cloud architecture, offering developers shared resources and a common platform from the get-go of any project, helped that bank cut that time down to just 20 minutes. 

Notwithstanding the tough economic and operating climate, most Ghanaians are socially aspirational folks and eager adopters of modern technology. For instance, Ghana’s last decade witnessed exponential uptake of mobile telephony devices, products and services. It is obvious that if future financial innovation is to be meaningful to the Ghanaian customer, financial institutions will have to rely on mobile and cloud technology. 

Combining mobile and cloud technology capabilities, they can better offer cost effective rural banking services to the “unbanked” sections of our population, and use their mobile usage patterns to develop tailor-made products that “speak directly” to them. 

Indeed, with cloud computing, the era of the customer has arrived. 

Source: Country General Manager, IBM Ghana.