KUALA LUMPUR: Financial institutions must rise to the challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is posing challenges to the economy and financial markets, and address the changing market landscape and customer demands.
IBM Malaysia Sdn Bhd managing director Catherine Lian said banks need to invest in information technology (IT) infrastructures, such as cloud-based solutions and collaboration tools, to enable their workforce to work efficiently and remotely.
"Banks will also need to raise the level of technology and digital capabilities within their workforce composition, intensifying competition within this scarce talent pool," she said in a statement today.
Catherine said technologies like hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), automation and blockchain continue to be primary drivers to enable growth and drive prosperity within Malaysia and the ASEAN region's financial services industry.
Financial institutions would have to radically rethink how they serve customers due to remote work styles and rapidly reviewing business continuity plans, she added.
"Take contactless payment, for instance. Malaysia and Singapore have already standardised quick response (QR) codes that can be used for transactions.
"As a result, the need for contactless payment infrastructure continues to develop, and hence investments in new solutions and technologies may increase," she said.
Industry-specific clouds solutions promise highly regulated sectors like the financial services industry options that could be tailored to niche requirements and security needs.
"Enabling some workloads to remain on-premise or in a private cloud, while also taking advantage of the speed and flexibility of the public cloud, is critical and requires a hybrid cloud platform approach," said Catherine.
Catherine also noted that a public cloud could provide transactional flexibility and speed in a secure and compliant environment built specifically with the financial services industry in mind.
This proposition includes protecting customer data and compliance with privacy regulations.
At the same time, as financial institutions take an ecosystems approach to deliver services to customers, open cloud architecture is key.
This openness and the ability to run workloads in any environment - physical, virtual, and all public and private clouds–would accelerate innovation.
Catherine stressed that the right cloud model is essential to meet customers need post-pandemic.
"The IBM Cloud for financial services provides the technology and the ecosystem needed to keep data in the cloud secure and satisfy all of a bank's essential requirements.
"By investing in hybrid cloud and recognising the expectations and needs of employees and customers, financial industry players can stay at the forefront of the digital transformation landscape," said Catherine, citing Bank Islam Malaysia Bhd (BIMB) as a 'visionary Malaysian bank'.
BIMB chief executive officer Mohd Muazzam Mohamed said the bank constantly strives to be agile throughout the whole value chain when designing business models, thus elevating the experience across all channels, whether physical branches or digital channels.
"We became the first bank in Malaysia to deploy a mobile onboarding (MOB) channel for retail customers through end-to-end account opening experience.
"We also moved our human resource (HR) system into the cloud to allow employees to have access to their self-service portal during this pandemic. So we are not just digitalising customer engagement platforms but also doing it internally," he said.
The bank's digital transformation programme started in 2018 as a company-wide initiative called CODE21, named such, as it aspires towards culture, operational and digital excellence by end-2021.
To provide greater accessibility to the market by capitalising on digital technologies, the bank launched its Centre of Digital Experience (CDX) in early 2020.
"We have increased the digital engagement channels for our customers through the 'GO by Bank Islam' mobile app (MOB) and Virtual Account Opening (VAO) platform.
"Recently, we also developed our digital onboarding solutions, which will be available on our digital platforms, including CDX's all-new banking app that will be released soon."
Muazzam also said that BIMB could address the unserved and underserved target segments and optimise its processes and serve customers better.
These initiatives will also reduce the dependency on physical branches and documentation, allowing greater accessibility and branchless propositions.
"Essentially, these solutions will help customers save time and effort by providing access to a 24-hour service during public holidays from the comfort of their own homes.
The cloud-hosted HR system has also succeeded in enabling our employees to work from home or anywhere."
With a network of 144 branches and more than 900 self-service terminals nationwide, the bank is committed to investing in the best technologies to benefit employees and customers alike, Muazzam added.
"The bank will also continue to explore emerging technologies such as AI, automation and cloud to enhance the speed-to-market of new digital and digitisation solutions, while meeting the industry's regulatory and compliance requirements."
"Technology is at the core of our digital innovation, which will allow Bank Islam to provide customer-centric offerings and personalisation can truly take centre stage in our future strategy," said Muazzam.
