The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted business in many ways. However, the pandemic must be viewed by IT professionals as an excellent opportunity to push for digital transformation and innovation. What earlier used to take months or years to implement is now being done in a matter of days. This will greatly impact the future of enterprises and work. To survive, organizations must leverage technology to maintain business continuity, timelines and productivity. Muqbil Ahmar (DC), Executive Editor, Grey Head Media caught up with Sunil Peter (SP), Head IT SecOps & CISO, Maveric Systems during which the tech leader spoke about how exactly they bring innovation to the digital transformation agenda of enterprises. They spoke on a range of subjects ranging from business continuity in organizations to how technology can help enterprises overcome challenges and what enterprises should do to accelerate the pace of digital innovation? Here are some excerpts.
DC: How is digital transformation modernizing the enterprise IT space?
SP: Enterprise IT is the back bone for any organization to achieve greater revenues at lower cost by increasing market share, with a strong brand recognition. Strategic and operational coherence has to be established between goals of the organization and the expectations from enterprise IT. This is where I believe being in a technology savvy enterprise IT company, leveraging the best of digitisation with the right choice of technology transforms enterprise IT into a greater engine. This way, it enables the organization to lead a culture dominated with superior tech-driven performance and streamlined processes for operational excellence. Furthermore, your organization stands to gain a strategic and competitive advantage through modern IT capabilities.
Success in the age of digital disruption belongs to organizations that digitize their core businesses, and apply the state-of-the-art technologies, launch new businesses and initiatives that are possible only with highly digitized and modern IT infrastructure. In order to extract maximum value from digital transformation, companies can tie-up with expert IT-service providers. This allows them to think beyond their internal capacity and technical know-how.
DC: What are a few upcoming trends in the tech landscape?
SP: In my opinion, there are four technologies which would dominate the world. These include Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Data Science, Edge Computing and 5G. These technologies can be harnessed to build your future enterprise. Organizations would bet on these technologies to improve customer experience, make better decisions, combat security vulnerabilities, maximize revenues, lower costs and operate efficiently.
DC: How do you view digital transformation in the finance and banking space? This is a space which is already one of the frontrunners in technology adoption and digitization? Why do you think this is essential?
SP: Digital transformation in the banking and finance industry is of utmost importance. Fintech brought this revolution with many inventive thought-provoking use cases, which banks started following. It has become the biggest differentiating factor for banks to succeed tomorrow. Having had the privilege of working in this industry over the past decade, I believe and understand that successful digital transformation focusses on simplifying processes to offer frictionless customer experience journeys.
DC: What is the essential proposition behind Maveric Systems and how is it trying to drive greater transformation in the finance and banking space? What is your vision for the coming years?
SP: Maveric is a solution led banking technology transformation partner for many global and regional banking leaders. The solutions we propose are highly contextual for every unique banking transformation journey. Our service value proposition cuts across the banking value chain of retail banking, corporate banking and wealth management. We help the banking community accelerate their digital transformation journeys through our inherent banking domain coverage, impact-led delivery model and high velocity execution. Our 2025 growth mission has many exciting chapters as part of our 4.0 outlook. This mission carries a very focussed strategy and plan of action, which will enable us to triple our revenue margins in the next four years. These include as follows:
- Being recognized as Top-3, niche Bank-Tech transformation specialist
- Gaining leadership through proven solutions in the areas of Customer Experience, Regulatory Compliance, Digital Operations, Customer Analytics and Cloud Enablement
- Becoming a partner of choice to seven out of the top fifteen global banks and fifteen out of the top fifty regional banks and select FinTech companies.
- Enhancing and continuously innovating our delivery model, talent nurturing process, and customer-centric culture
DC: How did you deal with the uncertainties during the pandemic?
SP: Our business continuity plans (BCP) were designed with the ability to constantly adapt, reflect and improvise, this cyclic approach worked in tandem by keeping the customers and employees interest at heart in all the planning and decision making scenarios. This worked in our favour to quickly adjust to the changing environment which made it easy for us to implement several protocols across our daily processes with seamless governance.
Pivot for facing such a challenge was digital technology to connect and collaborate with clients and associates. This was the first and foremost step taken by our team, in order to track our associates, their well-being and client project delivery. Secondly, system security controls were enhanced to a greater level in order to comply with client requirements and evade cyber security threats. Continuous communication was another key focus for reassuring our customers and associates. This was facilitated through daily catch-ups, leadership talks, stakeholder engagements, video calls and more.
Functions such as HR & recruitments, learning & development etc had to remodel their approach. Virtual hiring and on boarding saw a great success followed by continuous e-learning programs introduced by L&D teams. All of this was made possible through modern digital technology.
Original interview published on “Dynamic CIO”
