The single biggest shift in payments in the past decade is in moving payments services from being a utility-oriented cost centre to that of a state-of-the-art centre for innovation, and a profit centre for banks and financial institutions. The concept of a payment hub enables a centralised, standardised and coordinated payment model for person-to-person, business-to-business, micro, commercial and treasury payments.

The role of the treasury has evolved from being a centralised liquidity management function, to that of a comprehensive payment, supply chain, liquidity and forex management function. Treasury management has undergone a tremendous change spurred on by the improving technology. A new-age treasury now involves a more interactive eco-system around corporate treasury and banks involving payment hub factories, cloud offerings and outsourcing.

Unsecured lending, powered by the advances in AI, is expected to grow by more than 960% in the next four years. Whether it is risk assessment to check creditworthiness, or intelligent automation to reduce processing time, AI is having a profound impact on the whole lending landscape.  The challenges, potential benefits and the future outlook of this new AI led era of lending are expounded in this insightful article.

As the world enters the age of Siri and Alexa, the emergence of machine learning has new implications for the financial services industry. Whether it is fraud deductions, cyber security threat reduction, automated origination, preemptive collections, virtual assistance or algorithmic portfolio management, almost all areas of a financial institution will be impacted by machine learning. Hence it is critical to get the machine learning implementation right and this article provides a roadmap of how it can be done.

Robo-advisers are disrupting the wealth management industry and their use is only growing. It is fair to assume, they are here to stay. Banks will need to ride this disruption in order to enhance their customer reach, particularly among the millennials and mass affluent. Drawing on the balanced scorecard framework, the article provides the implications of robo-advisory for the wealth management industry.

The world is going digital and on-boarding of wealth customers is no different. The article gives a perspective on the digital on-boarding solution, benefits the solution provides and the steps to be taken for a bank to be ready with this offering.

Banking as we know it is undergoing a significant change and robotics is at the forefront of this change. The inefficient and labour-intensive back office landscape has been transformed as new technologies such as robotics, automation and artificial intelligence get more mainstreamed in driving higher efficiency, better risk control and lower costs. Identifying the right processes to be automated, measuring the impact and selecting the right partner are the critical elements of getting the robotics strategy right. The article explores these elements in greater detail.

Being a digital-ready bank is no longer an option, but a market reality if the bank wants to survive. Every digital transformation within a bank is looking to address a fundamental shift, both from the customer’s perspective, and also with the internal processes and organisational models. Laid out here are the four key success factors that banks need to be mindful of while designing a successful digital-ready bank.

The top 20 global banks have reportedly paid more than €211 billion in fines, while there have been at least 40 new measures that were proposed by the European Commission since the 2008 crisis. The cost of compliance can prove to be prohibitive unless managed pro-actively, and efficiently. The article illustrates the three key imperatives that a bank needs to watch out for.

A core banking implementation is no different to open heart surgery. Hence a digital transformation project needs to be undertaken without disrupting business-as-usual. So, the issues and challenges you need to mitigate in order to have a successful project are looked at in a greater detail in the article.

How does one present the best-fit solution for a Bank in the most effective manner? How does one ensure that the selection process is made objective, transparent and focused? CedarIBS has conducted several Core Banking Selection and implementation exercises. Based on our experience, we present 10 steps for effective selection of Core Banking systems.

So what does a typical core banking implementation typically entail? What does it take for a program to be successful – or at least ensure that the most common mistakes and pitfalls are avoided? Where do implementations tend to go wrong and how does one pre-empt it? While the questions and answers may be quite unending, this article looks to identify the seven phases of a typical core banking transformation

Building a digital strategy for a bank is not just about getting the mobile banking app going or rolling out a marketing campaign. The true success in building a digital bank is in the ability to have the right proposition for the customer, building internal capabilities that can help in delivering the right digital experience – ensuring the transformation is embraced both internally and externally

IT outsourcing and offshoring is imperative for organizations due to rapid changes in technology, diverse skill requirements and the scale of teams required to deliver large programs. The business case for IT outsourcing has moved far beyond just labor arbitrage. Businesses can no longer hope to deliver all the required services in-house. We look at the factors that are likely to drive the next wave of adoption of IT outsourcing, business process outsourcing and shared services

While bank performances tend to get typically measured by the growth of asset book or net profit, a holistic assessment of the bank’s performance needs to be based on measuring both, financial and non-financial performance – which is the true essence of a Balanced Scorecard

Why do IT projects tend to face difficulties through its implementation life cycle? Is it because it is too technical? Is it because we don’t have the right people? Is it because the solution itself is not what a company should be looking at in the first place? It is important to define the foremost objective from a return of investment standpoint. The article analyzes the various determining factors that govern a serious IT investment

It is estimated that over 60% of technology transformation projects fail to meet budgets or timelines. Good program management is an integral part of a successful transformation, and this is not an area that banks can afford to ignore. After all, there are projects that are always ongoing, and each one of them has a cost and a benefit embedded. So what are the five key tenets of a successful program management framework?

What are the priorities for CIOs and CTOs these days? What are the technologies to invest in today and what are the ones to keep an eye on for the future? What do new buzzwords like cloud, digital, analytics, mobility and big data mean to the new banking technology architecture and where is the impact mostly felt?

Across the globe, banks and financial institutions tend to focus much of their energy on selecting multiple service or solution providers, and these selection processes are governed largely by two important principles: the degree of detail required in the solution/service that is being procured and the timeframe in which the selection needs to be accomplished. A bank’s choice of vendor typically falls into one of four models, and the article looks at these models in greater detail

Good management is about 90% planning and 10% execution. As they say, if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. A plan to be implementable has to be both comprehensive and comprehensible