Wide adoption of technologically upgraded services is likely to spur IT spending by industry verticals, especially the Banking, Financial services and Insurance (BFSI) sector.
IT Spending for the Banking and Securities firms in India will reach $8.9 billion dollars in 2017, Gartner forecasts. That represents an increase of 9.7 percent from 2016.
This forecast provides total enterprise IT spending for internal spending and spending data on data center systems, devices, software, IT services and telecom services.
IT services will grow the fastest at 13.8 percent in 2017, as firms in the banking and securities industry invest more in business processes, specifically in business process outsourcing.
“The banking and securities industry in India saw a sea of change from earlier years in 2016 due to the sudden demonetization announcement,” said Moutusi Sau, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Banks are increasingly working to enhance their customer facing platforms and investing in payment tools.”
As the government press ahead with the vision of cashless economy, exponential growth is expected in the use of mobile phones for money transactions. Industry leaders believe that cash machines in India will be completely irrelevant within three years.
Recent IT related news from the banking industry show that the sector prefers to use robots to improve customer service.
The country’s largest private bank, the ICICI bank, had been using robots since September last year and became the first bank in India to deploy ‘software robots. Since then, the bank was able to reduce the response time to customers by up to 60 percent.
“Use of technology helps us to keep our cost of operations down,” Chanda Kochhar, MD, ICICI Bank had said at the time of deployment. “Even if we look at our cost to income ratios, we brought it down from around 40 percent four years ago to 35 percent now. The way our bank has used technology is one of the reasons why we have one of the most efficient cost-to-income ratios in the country.”
In January, HDFC Bank has deployed an interactive humanoid, Intelligent Robotic Assistant (IRA), at its Kamala Mills brach. IRA was developed in partnership with Kochi-based startup Asimov Robotics. IRA will be used for customer service.
These developments underlines Gartner’s view that by 2020, at least two-thirds of large Indian enterprises will have established an Internet of Things (IoT) center of excellence to drive adoption of efficiency-centric technologies and applications.
Other new generation technologies such as cloud and business intelligence are also highly used these days to develop targeted customer insights.
According to Zinnov management consultancy, layers like Kotak Mahindra life Insurance, Reliance General Insurance, IndiaFirst Life Insurance have adopted VMware based virtualization solutions to help improve efficiencies of their data centers.
IndusInd Bank has selected iCreate’s Biz$core Business Intelligence (BI) solution as a key component of its. Dhanlakshmi Bank has opted to move all of enterprise Business Intelligence strategy its non-core banking applications to Hitachi.
Over the years, India’s BFSI sector has proactively invested in IT to bring in technologies to improve overall operations and to meet regulatory requirements. Demonetization and digitisation are expected to further encourage this trend.
Arya MM
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