Companies Must Focused On Their Data Because Of the Democratization of Cloud Technology

One thing is evident when we track the
progress of cloud product offerings, such as Oracle
Flexcube over time: they are growing more innovative. Product managers
at companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others take their jobs
seriously, working closely with clients to fully grasp their requirements. As a
result, they can identify solutions that banks can apply across a wide range of
industries, thanks to the size of their customer base.

Thus, public cloud service providers
today provide managed solutions for practically all common use cases, such as
data collection and storage, online content exposure, workflow management, and
team communication. They are a fraction of the expenditure their clients would
normally make in setting up and operating these technologies from scratch, with
the expense being shared by the cloud providers’ whole customer base. Major
companies no longer have an advantage over their smaller counterparts because
of their larger IT spending when it comes to technology.

This has ramifications for the business
plans of companies. The ability of companies to beat their competitors with
identical goods like the Oracle
Flexcube universal banking simply by being more efficient is being
eroded by the development of low-cost managed services and the unstoppable
march of automation. As a result, businesses in a wide range of industries
realize that nothing sets them apart from their competitors.

Mobile apps with two-factor
authentication are now offered by every retail bank, for example, and they all
have the same basic functionality – such as rapid payments, cash management,
and so on. They race to develop innovative features to make their software
stand out, risking crossing into gimmick zone by doing so.

In a broader sense, both the brand and
price strategy and the customer experience are critical differentiators. While
all of these factors are important, there is one that stands above and supports
them all: data.

At this time, it is around 20 years
since we first started stating “data is an asset,” and we are just
now seeing how important data actually is to market competitiveness.
Identifying which product features people prefer and which may be abandoned is
easier for a corporation with superior data (and the capacity to mine it for
insights). Banks may target marketing channels and messages to specific
categories based on how the company’s brand is regarded. It is better able to forecast
the impact of price changes on profitability. There are many instances.

When you can sell your data, it becomes
an asset in a different context. Many of our customers have a lot of data that
banks may monetize by providing APIs to the larger digital ecosystem (like the Flexcube
software), subject to GDPR and other legal/reputational limitations. External
parties might pay to use pricing and other statistical models that are made
accessible to them due to sharing the obtained data. This is a common way to
add value to the already acquired data. Traditional financial institutions and
corporations may be transformed into actual digital product companies for the
first time, resulting in an additional source of income to supplement their
current business model.

To measure an organization’s long-term
competitiveness, such opportunities emphasize how well it manages its data.
Again, using cutting-edge technology is no longer a competitive advantage. Big
data processing, machine learning, streaming analytics, and more are now
available as on-demand services from cloud providers.

This shows that a company’s capacity to
extract value from its data is ultimately dependent on the competencies of its
people and their cultural acceptance of data as the “new oil” powering
its success. There are a lot of organizations we deal with whose ways of
working aren’t optimized for quickly adopting new tools and methodologies or
changing their business plans based on insights gleaned from their data.