Oracle sees the future…, Venky Srinivasan, SVP & Global Head of Sales, Banking and Insurance, Oracle Financial Services

By Robin Amlot

Venky Srinivasan of Oracle Financial Services explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing banking

Banks have been known as custodians of money, but they are also custodians of data and AI has brought a set of tools and solutions that can effectively help banks take advantage of that information for better internal execution and enhanced customer service externally. Venky Srinivasan, SVP & Global Head of Sales, Banking and Insurance at Oracle Financial Services, offers a simple illustration: “For example, the bank always knew that John Doe comes into the branch on the 10th of the month and deposits a cheque. Now, if John Doe doesn’t come on the 10th, maybe the bank should call him and check in. That’s where AI starts to play a role. It brings efficiency and effectiveness for bankers and changes the dynamic of how they serve their customers.

“AI is also helping banks to better manage risk and mitigate fraud. AI enables us to analyse years of data, identify patterns, and flag anomalies – and those anomalies are where the risks and fraud often lie.”

What do you offer to the BFSI sector?

“We provide software, services, and cloud solutions for various aspects of the financial services industry in areas including retail and corporate banking that span from the bank’s core to the end customer. We work with 10% of the global banked population’s money for more than 1,400 banks and institutions, across 160+ countries.

“We provide our customers with an unparalleled bench and depth of expertise deploying in financial institutions large and small through every successive technology generation, from client-server to SOA, and now micro-services and SaaS-native solutions. Oracle has a broad offering. Our solutions are cloud-native and available for all types of deployments – on-premise, bring-your-own-cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Ultimately, we provide choice and flexibility to financial institutions based on their unique needs.”

What new capabilities do you need to provide to your customers to keep pace with AI?

“At Oracle, we don’t treat AI as a standalone product. We’re certainly not new to AI and we’re experts in financial services; we look at how AI can bring efficiency and effectiveness across the full lifecycle of banking products. AI is embedded into our applications rather than being a separate layer.

“For example, collection agents often make phone calls to customers, and certain phrases they use can raise concerns with regulators focused on consumer protection. Rather than having someone manually monitor those calls, AI can help by analysing conversations in real-time to help agents stay compliant. That’s one way we use AI in our collection services.”

How is Oracle using AI agents to fight financial crime?

“There are two ways we are using AI agents to help financial institutions fight financial crime: to prioritise alerts for financial crime investigators and automate investigative processes.

“With the traditional rules-based approaches, approximately 90% of the alerts generated are false positives. This percentage translates to a huge investment of time, resource, and expense for financial institutions. With AI models and generative AI capabilities, we can prioritise those alerts with higher probabilities of indicating criminal activity, which enables investigators to focus their investigative efforts more effectively.

“We can gather and enrich data from different sources through automation, and we can now surface key insights, collect evidence, and generate alert narratives, which provide investigators with more information about the entities and transactions under investigation.”

Are project timelines getting shorter?

“It’s less about shorter timelines and more about changing consumption patterns. We call this progressive modernisation. Banks now focus on delivering small pieces of business value, such as one product, one domain, or one customer segment, at a time. It could be a new origination process, a workflow, or a new product capability. The idea is to do things faster and more iteratively, rather than through large, monolithic projects.”

Do agile solutions for retail banking and corporate banking differ if so, how?

“There are both fundamental differences and similarities when it comes to developing agile solutions for retail and corporate banking. From a human-centric view, the same person might be
a retail consumer at home and an executive at work. Their digital expectations carry over.

“Retail banking is focused on managing individual money and supporting better financial choices. It’s more about following the customer’s life cycle. Corporate banking, on the other hand is more
complex, and clients expect services in cash management (like liquidity and forecasting), trade finance, and even real-time credit processing. It used to take 100 days to execute credit: now it’s instant.

“So yes, retail and corporate banking have different demands, but customer expectations across both are shaped by their lifestyle experiences.”

What is the biggest challenge facing the finance sector?

“One of the biggest challenges the finance sector faces is outdated technology. However, financial institutions have started to make investments in technologies that help streamline processes and
enhance productivity across many aspects of their operations. For example, our Oracle Banking Cloud Services portfolio of cloud-native solutions can provide real-time insights needed to make decisions, aid in streamlining processes, and cater to unique needs across retail and corporate banking.

“In retail banking, we support critical functions and provide a high level of straight-through processing for deposit operations and cash management services. For corporate banking, we simplify complex account structures and give your customers visibility into their global cash and liquidity positions so they can manage their working capital more effectively.

“Essentially each of our cloud-native, componentised, and composable services enable financial institutions to modernise and deliver faster time-to-value.”

What key trends do you see for the coming year and the longer term?

“We expect to see financial institutions continue to focus on improving efficiencies, reliability, and security, implementing hyper-scale technology and platforms to support true 24/7 payment capabilities, and delivering real-time, immersive customer experiences. Generative AI use cases will drive many of these new and optimised experiences.

“Open Banking and Banking-as-a-Service will enable banks to anticipate a retail customer’s wants, assist in life goals, and be cognitive of relationships to deliver new value and immersive banking
services. Seamless interoperability and APIs will help to power innovative partnerships and ecosystems.

“Corporate customers will look for banking solutions to improve visibility, forecasting, and better control liquidity in an effort to optimise credit, manage risk, and leverage assets more effectively.
Embedding cash management, real-time payments, and tailored financing within ERP or third-party systems and ecosystems will enable this. Financial institutions will turn to banking solutions and services that can support unprecedented agility and scale, speed to market, and continuous innovation.

“As financial institutions continue to modernise with cloud-based solutions, we will see a shift to a customer-centric approach, which will help them identify high-value customers, understand their unique needs, and tailor products and services to maximise revenue generation, increase customer satisfaction, and help improve profitability.”

Where do you see the biggest opportunities and the biggest challenges?

“On one hand, there’s the democratisation of financial services such as new organisations, often FinTechs, that are innovating in niche areas, while on the other hand, large traditional banks are rethinking their operating models. Cloud is shifting how institutions think about infrastructure, IT costs, and data centres. That shift opens new opportunities but also brings challenges like needing to re-architect systems from the database to networks to applications.

“Oracle is uniquely positioned because we provide end-to-end solutions across that entire stack.

“Financial institutions will need to continue to invest in innovative technologies to stay relevant. They cannot keep bolting on new technology if the underpinnings they run their business on are
outdated. Financial institutions will need efficient ways to access data more quickly and that data will need to have a higher level of granularity and accuracy to remain competitive.”