The year 2020 marks an exciting start of a new decade for the finance and banking industry in Asia — and possibly no better time than now for transformation.
The innovation momentum largely driven by favorable shifts in regulations and technology development has reformed the industry to open up new opportunities and challenges; what can banks and other financial institutions do to stay ahead?
With over 50 years of success as a leading innovation partner, Zuhlke works closely with its clients on digital transformation and solutions built for rapid business growth. Jonas Trindler, CEO of Zuhlke Asia, explains how Zuhlke drives innovation through technology, people and processes, supporting finance and banking clients in navigating the waters of the digital future.
From Business-Driven to Customer-Focused
Consumer needs in the region have evolved to be more intricate as compared to just a few years ago. Consumers in Asia are now much more financially informed and demanding in their needs concerning financial and banking services.
As Asian banks continue their push for digital transformation, they must maintain their agility to respond to rapid market changes. Financial institutions are increasingly competing to be customer-obsessed in offering seamless multi-channel experiences for end consumers. In a first among Asian banks, a Singaporean multinational bank was named the world’s best bank in 2019, further highlighting the fierce competition both regionally and internationally for traditional institutions to break new ground and stay relevant.
In doing so, these organizations look into building in-house innovation hubs and hiring talents from non-banking backgrounds to bring in diverse cross-industry expertise and know-how from other innovative industries. This ability to scale effectively and efficiently is also supported by a strong foundation of cross-functional teams working together for rapid innovation.
Widely Known
«Many of our global clients are now partnering with us to introduce DevOps practices into their cross-functional teams. They want to solve the problem of traditional units working in silos. By adopting changes to these processes, we can shorten the development lifecycle and achieve significant improvements in time to market for new features while maintaining high quality in software,» explained Jonas.
In Europe, Zuhlke is widely known as a leading solution partner that delivers quality results. Having supported businesses across diverse industries from banking and finance, insurance and fintech to machinery engineering, medical technology, and pharmaceutical, its global teams across 14 offices worldwide have built up strong cross-domain expertise with over 10,000 innovative solutions and projects delivered for customer success.
«Having built up a solid presence in Europe and now Asia, we see familiar trends happening now in the Asian markets. In Singapore, our teams are working closely on a comprehensive software project with local teams of a large Swiss private bank. This is an example of an international client that has successfully worked with us in Switzerland and now extended our collaboration in Asia to serve the local markets better,» Jonas went on to elaborate.
Read the case study: How Zuhlke worked with a Swiss multinational private bank on transforming the customer’s banking advisory experience with a new innovative fintech assistant.
Capabilities for Speed to Market
Staying up to speed as a user-centric organization proves to be an ongoing challenge as many organizations face difficulties in sourcing fitting tech talents locally and upscaling their teams.
Traditional institutions are looking to reinvent themselves as modern workplaces by building a strong engineering culture like tech start-ups and other tech giants. This image shift in employer branding is vital as attracting and retaining these top tech talents will continue to be key challenges in this war for talent.
Comprehensive Training
«For innovation to happen quickly, it’s key to build and cultivate a strong engineering culture centered around agile principles and technical excellence. Cross-industry innovation is vital to grow and develop the next phase of tech talents across software engineering, data science, AI, machine learning and more,»
Jonas emphasized, having built up the Zuhlke team in Asia since 2017, and currently employs over 100 agile software experts locally in both Singapore and Hong Kong.
In fostering this culture, Zuhlke invests more than 12 percent of their annual turnover into the training of employees — with a comprehensive training plan for each individual paired with paid training leave, personal training budget and annual overseas learning camp for knowledge exchange. Zuhlke engineers, as well as client teams they work closely with, are also supported by a global Zuhlke in-house training academy that promotes a strong engineering culture in areas like Agile development, test-driven development, working with legacy code and other innovative technologies like AR/VR and blockchain.
Opening up of Regulations and Security Challenges
Beyond developments in technology, people and processes, external forces like regulation changes governing financial services are also leading to rapid developments in areas like open banking and RegTech. Open-architecture platforms such as the API Exchange (APIX) by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) have also emerged to support rapid growth in financial innovation and inclusion in ASEAN and beyond.
The road towards open platforms comes along with its own set of challenges as there can be no standardized approach towards each conception and implementation. Many financial institutions face challenges in:
- Design and architecture of Open Banking and APIs
- Adaptation of their IT infrastructure for open banking and multi-channel integration
- Mitigating cybersecurity risks and protection of assets
Learn more about how banks can use a multi-layer defense system with cybersecurity experts at Zuhlke.
With Singapore topping Asia’s chart for open banking readiness index, both opportunities and challenges are presented for industry players to collaborate and tailor approaches that are appropriate to the local context.
They all point towards the eventual need to build a robust infrastructure that is scalable for interoperability and agile innovation. This requires consistent modernization of the legacy infrastructure into a high-performing architecture with automated processes – the core pillars for successful digitalization of a bank.
Read the case study: How Zuhlke’s Digital @ Scale solution helped an international financial institution in replacing an outdated data delivery application with a modern high-performance system.
Between Collaborations and Disruptions
Closing off the recent digital bank license application by MAS, a strong interest can be seen from diverse applicants including e-commerce firms, technology, and telecommunications companies, fintechs and lastly, the financial institutions.
On the fintech side, with a record-high investment of over S$1 billion in 2019 for Singapore alone, Asia is anticipating tremendous growth in this emerging industry.
What many fintech firms bring to the table is their speed and agility to prioritize market needs and adjust business models as necessary. Many fintech solutions are also built on modern infrastructure and open API technologies that allow them to grow and scale quickly to meet the needs of the markets. Furthermore, these new entrants are not burdened by the need to maintain legacy systems and have the advantage of delivering newly-built services fast.
Strong Partnerships
While potentially a powerful force against traditional banks that face rising operational costs, it is also important to consider the long-term viability of these players to ride out economic ups and downs, and turn profitable ultimately. To keep up in this race, established financial institutions must transform to be more like innovation start-ups.
«This means fostering strong partnerships with competent solution partners or collaborating with other ecosystem players to respond nimbly to market changes. To survive the long run, invest early in building up strong core infrastructure and sustainable technology capabilities that will reap significant cost and efficiency gains in the future,» Jonas explained.
Read the case study: How Zuhlke accelerated fast growth for Asia’s leading video on demand streaming service provider.
Swiss roots, global reach. Zuhlke is committed to sustainable growth in the ASEAN region with heavy investment in regional talents and involvement in the local community and tech ecosystem. Having supported previous fintech initiatives in Switzerland like the first F10 FinTech Hackathon and product scale-up coaching in collaboration with Venturelab, Zuhlke continues to actively explore partnership and collaboration opportunities with like-minded partners to accelerate sustainable growth in the region.
Looking for a partner to accelerate your digital innovation or having difficulties developing your next wow idea? Reach out to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to speak to innovation experts at Zuhlke or visit www.zuhlke.asia for more info.
