Management consultants Ranga Reddy, P Venkatesh, NN Subramanian and VN Mahesh founded Maveric System in 2000. The Chennai-based company helps banking and fintech leaders accelerate business transformation through effective integration of domain, technology, future-ready strategy and high-velocity execution. Today, the company has expanded to the US, the UK, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and APAC.
In an exclusive interaction with Analytics India Magazine, Swaminathan Srinivasan, Senior Vice President of Data and Analytics Business Unit at Maveric Systems, spoke about their journey, challenges, and the fintech landscape.
Excerpts:
AIM: What’s Maveric Systems’ Raison D’être?
Swaminathan Srinivasan: As financial institutions grapple with the challenges of decreasing revenues and increasing costs, the ability to maintain leadership and retain competitive advantage is the challenge. Added to this, the disruptions caused by digital-only banks and fintechs call for re-engineering business models, adopting newer technologies and platforms, and integrating them into existing business processes.
Achieving these at speed is a game-changer for effective transformation. As a banking technology transformation specialist, we enable our customers to accelerate digital transformation by bringing the necessary domain, technology expertise, and high-velocity execution.
We help banks with:
- Experience engineering coupled with next-gen digital solutions aimed for rapid digital transformation.
- Precise decisions which empanel domain-led data models, real-time data integration and three-layered accuracy assertion to offer conscious contextualisation.
- Connected core blended with product stack mastery in Temenos.
- Continuous quality supported by transformative quality engineering solutions engineered for accelerating the development of defect-free software.
AIM: Tell us about the technologies Maveric uses.
Swaminathan Srinivasan: Maveric uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud, Big Data, and RPA for building and offering its core service value proposition. We partner with leading providers of such technologies like Leapworks, HVR Software, Talend, and Matillion.
In several cases, our customer’s choice of technology platforms determines our focus areas as well. For instance, we are working with several banks using hybrid environments with a mix of Open Source and Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, etc. We invest in developing these skill sets and accelerators in our labs and training academy.
AIM: What are your flagship services?
Swaminathan Srinivasan: Our flagship services include:
- Data and Analytics
- Digital Transformation
- Core banking (Temenos Suite of Services)
- Quality Engineering (QE)
AIM: How does Maveric leverage AI and ML?
Swaminathan Srinivasan: Maveric has been at the forefront of leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning-led tech stacks across its service horizons and solutions in data, digital, core banking and quality engineering practices.
- Intelligent Quality Engineering (IQe) platform is a low-code domain-led solution for engineering quality at speed and scale. The cognitive powers embedded within this platform offers 95 percent QE automation to speed up quality cycle journeys, thus enabling rapid digital transformation.
- VoCAL is a next-generation ML and AI framework that deciphers and connects customer feedback for unearthing concealed improvement areas and deriving actionable insights.
- Maveric uses analytics derived from our recruitment and talent sourcing data to identify trends and patterns for better identification and targeting for hiring.
AIM: How did Maveric deal with the pandemic?
Swaminathan Srinivasan: We adopted a pronged strategy to scale up our digital infrastructure to deal with the pandemic:
- Strengthening the core: We made significant investments in scaling up the core infrastructure (network and server capacity) with robust security controls. We set up automated systems that enable monitoring, tracking, and backup of the server and network capacity by over 25 percent at any given point in time.
- Dual-layered security with 100 percent data privacy: A dual-layered security approach was institutionalised for data privacy.
AIM: What’s the latest in banking and fintech space?
Swaminathan Srinivasan: Open Banking is accelerating digital transformation across the global banking industry. Banks are focusing on delivering customer-centric solutions using new business models and open services. Micro services and API are driving agility along with innovative ways to collaborate. Analytics and artificial intelligence have a significant impact on the banking and financial industries as banks focus on hyper-personalisation at scale while transforming customer experiences. There is also steady progress in the adoption of the cloud in the banking sector.
AIM: What’s your advice for traditional banks looking for a digital revamp?
Swaminathan Srinivasan: Technology adoption has witnessed an unprecedented surge in our country over the last decade. With affordable smartphones and data, people have started using or considering alternative banking systems rather than the traditional bank. The pandemic has only accelerated the move towards digital banking and payments, forcing traditional banks to speed up digital transformation.
Transformation involves integrating data, advanced analytics and digital technology into all areas of a bank, including how they function and deliver their services. It is more than just a technological upgrade; it requires a cultural change and disruptions in legacy processes.
But this journey is bound to be gradual. In many cases, a significant impact can be achieved by understanding the customer journey through consumer lending and deploying these new technologies in those high impact areas. This is where data and analytics help immensely, and given that traditional banks have a wealth of data, this could be a big differentiator. Conventional banks should leverage their existing technology strengths while aiming for quick wins as they start the digital transformation journey.
AIM: What’s next for Maveric?
Swaminathan Srinivasan: As an IT Services organisation, we compete with several big players in all the markets. But Maveric has always carved a niche for itself through its unique customer-centricity approach, domain, technology focus and a differentiated talent pool that customers have come to appreciate. Our goal is to emphasise each of these and execute at scale to become real transformation partners to our customers in the years to come.
The original interview has published in Analytics India Magazine
