Helping banks to break down silos

An interview with Madhur Jain of SunTec Business Solutions

Madhur  Jain leads Sun-Tec’s Pre-sales team, which addresses the clients’ business challenges through aspects of solutioning, product mapping, and business process definitions. With over 20 years of experience in pre-sales, solution architecture designing and client engagement, Madhur brings strategic thinking and global vision into this role. Before joining SunTec, he worked at Oracle Financial Services. Madhur holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Post Graduate Diploma in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, with a specialisation in finance and international business.

What is the problem that SunTec solves for banks?

Madhur Jain: Banks tend to be product-focused. Too often, long established institutions consist of a number of silos, each of which is focused on a particular product. However, banks’ customers are increasingly thinking in terms of multi-faceted solutions rather than products.

Consider what happens when a bank’s customer buys a new house. A traditional bank will see the customer as a potential mortgage borrower. The customer, on the other hand, will be thinking about the mortgage, insurance, a credit card and possibly other products. Together, those products will deliver the solution that the bank’s customer wants: however, the bank will not necessarily understand this.

We can help the banks to overcome the constraints of legacy systems. We can make it easier for banks to understand their customers and to think like their customers, with the result that they can provide complex and tailored solutions. The consequence of that is that the banks are better placed to cross-sell products and to meet the ever-increasing demands of clients.

In short, we help banks to break down their own silos. In doing so, we help them to reduce risk and to boost revenues.

Can you bring us an example when SunTec helped the bank to address these problems?

Madhur Jain:  In retail banking, Maybank would be the best real-life case example. SunTec signed a deal for multi-country channel implementation two years ago with Maybank, a Malaysian universal bank that has substantial operations in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. 

The bank wasn’t able to do deliver cross-channel solutions alone to its customers on its own due to the complexity of the systems environment. Xelerate™, SunTec’s innovative product suite, is designed to maximise revenue while minimising risk. The deployment in Singapore took place in a record time of 3.5 months, integrating multiple legacy systems with Xelerate™.

With Maybank looking to extend its client-focused business model across the region, SunTec’s Xelerate™ helped automate and improve its processes to satisfy the needs of its large customer base. It has also enabled Maybank to enhance its customer proposition by offering an extended range of products and services.

At the same time, financial advisors who are working with Maybank  are better equipped to offer their customers more relevant deals based on accurate customer data available across multiple business lines and channels.

In addition, Maybank uses Xelerate™ to provide exclusive interest rates, credit card deals and promotions to match the needs of different customer segments. Such offers allow Maybank to grow their deposits and increase card spend, fee income across various customer segments. Xelerate™ provides greater visibility into customer credit, debit and savings transactions which improves product offerings to customers, prevents revenue leakage for the bank while enhancing customer experience

What in general is the biggest challenge in applying the solution?

Madhur Jain:  From the technical side, I would say the most challenging factor is the readiness of the client and the preparedness of top management to make the mental shift from product orientation to customer orientation. It’s obvious that the old model that has existed for 30-40 past years is no longer effective in the modern world. With the PSD2 regulation in Europe, it’s obvious that banks have been forced to innovate and partner with fintech providers in order to stay competitive in the market.

We see PSD2 as a game changer, because it democratizes data, easing collaboration between industry players (banks and PSPs) and creating the best customer journey. If banks won’t innovate, the customer might just choose PSPs and their services that are more agile, easy to use and, in most cases, cheaper.

Did SunTec build the system from scratch or integrate the existing product with the banking system?

Madhur Jain: SunTec is not building the solution from scratch, given that we already have our universal product - Xelerate™ for different areas such as corporate banking. retail banking, core banking etc.

SunTec is attending Sibos 2017. What are you planning to showcase at the conference?

Madhur Jain: We are going to talk this year about platform-banking and ecosystem banking – in other words, the evolution of a new model of banking, which is centered around collaboration between fintechs and banks.

SunTec Business Solutions is the leading provider of revenue management and business assurance solutions to financial services and digital and communications services industries. With deployments in 58 countries, an end-to-end revenue management solution and an award-winning product suite, SunTec is a trusted partner of the world’s leading service providers like HSBC, ING, Mashreq, Cable One, Bakrie Telecom and Arval. SunTec has its headquarters in India and offices in USA, UK, Germany, UAE and Singapore.

SunTec’s highly functional and technology-agnostic product suite Xelerate™ empowers the clients to create real-time personalised offerings to improve profitability and customer experience while optimising customer lifetime value. The product suite enables service providers to develop, launch and monetise innovative offerings quickly. Xelerate has helped create products and services for over 300 million end-customers today.