Innotech

Innotech took part in the Future Banks Summit in Dubai (Verve Management UAE) !

The Future Banks Summit was held on the 21st and 22nd of February in the UAE. This massive event united over 200 experts and leading specialists in technology, business and finance. Guests and speakers showcased the latest innovations and practical case studies as well as participated in informative panel discussions intended to outline the best strategy for future industry development.

Safe to say, the summit is an obligatory place to visit if you are aiming to develop your business in the BFSI industry and want to stay in line with the latest trends.

The 2021 edition featured a number of high-ranking guests including CEOs and executive team members from the Emirates Investment Bank, Quatar National Bank (QNB Group) , Saudi National Bank (SNBAlAhli), National Bank of Kuwait (NBKGroup) and more!

Innotech was represented by Yuriy Blednykh (Director of Strategic Projects) and Oxana Kikot (Head of Corporate Communications) who shared their expertise and engaged in productive discussions with the summit participants.

We would like to thank the Future Banks Summit team as well as all the participants for an amazing event! This week we made a noticeable step towards prosperous business development in the MEA region. Our team is looking forward to future cooperation and mutually beneficial partnerships!

As much as 65% of banks globally recognize Open API as the key driver for payment system modernization. The number was revealed in the recent ACI Worldwide report.

Here at Innotech, we often talk about the critical role of digital transformation for banks who want to stay relevant in the market. It’s good to see the majority shares our conclusion and accepts new solutions and business partnerships.

We asked Anton Yakimov (Innotech CTO) to provide more insights on the report data:

“IT sector has gone through a huge leap over the last decade. It keeps introducing services, business solutions, consumer electronics and other products that are in high demand. Due to considerable profits, many startups have now grown into huge global corporations and are able to attract the most educated and talented human resource.

According to Hurun Research Institute, in December 2021 there was a total of 1058 unicorn startups, privately held companies with a value of over $1 billion. That’s a massive 80% increase compared to 2020. What’s interesting is that Business Management Solutions and Financial Services are the industries most disrupted by unicorns. Furthermore, 139 unicorns are in the FinTech business.

With funding and talents by their side, many companies are starting to take advantage of opportunities they didn’t explore before, including banking and payment systems, which clearly represents a threat to established banks. They have not been as flexible as their IT counterparts. In some instances, heavy government regulations discouraged them from introducing new services. Other bank owners simply preferred to retain their conservative business approaches.

COVID-19 introduced a number of unforeseen factors, such as social distancing. People were starting to look for user friendly online services as they didn’t have the ability to visit banks in person. Payment solutions offered by big IT corporations started to gain popularity.

By now it is clear that in order to survive the competition banks need to drop their conservative views. Essentially, they need to become IT-friendly companies, be open to integrating partner solutions and introduce flexibility in their operations. The ACI Worldwide report demonstrates that old views are starting to fade away with more and more banks fully embracing digital transformation”.

Being on the forefront of digital transformation, Innotech has the perfect product for banks who are aiming to adapt to the new era, the Digital Banking Platform. Anton highlighted the most important benefits:

“The Digital Banking Platform is a multifunctional solution that is able to interoperate with any core banking system out there, allowing banks to bring a better customer experience at a reasonably attractive cost. Banks can improve the quality of their services without the need to redesign the entire IT landscape.

Using open banking API, trusted partners are able to get authorized access to financial data of bank customers and provide them with value-added services. The Core Banking System integration layer presents a unique option to create a custom integration with any CBS available on the market. Furthermore, it allows to independently execute business processes tied to different CBS implementations. Additionally, Innotech’s solution accumulates demographics, product and application usage and other customer data into individual profiles for micro segmentation purposes. As a result, our partners can target these segments with highly precise marketing campaigns.”

Gathering insights from Big Data remains a challenge for most companies in 2022.

According to Sigma Computing, employees from 63% of companies say they can’t get insights from their data before it becomes outdated. Another Forrester report highlights the same problem from a different angle, stating that between 60 and 73% of all data is never used for analytical purposes.

Today market recognizes the importance of Big Data and its immense role in digital transformation. So why do companies fail to make efficient use of valuable data at hand?

Innotech’s expertise in Big Data is concentrated in a separate unit - Datatech. We asked Alexander Fridman, First Deputy CEO of “Datatech”, to explain why many market players are still struggling with this issue despite collecting large volumes of information:

“Today working with Data is critically important in order to stay on top of the continuous market changes. It is essential for any business to be able to make fast decisions and come up with the right products based on customer needs. Hence, companies need to be data-driven.

Society around the world continues to embrace digital era. This involves new ways of content consumption, active use of internet, new ways of shopping, etc. Our everyday activities generate an immense amount of data, which has potential to be used both by business and individuals for their benefit.

Estimates may vary, but experts agree that all industries combined generate over 2 exabytes (2,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) each day. An impressive number, however, when it comes to comprehensive data analysis, two key issues instantly emerge:

1. Lack of Budget. To effectively process all incoming information, you need to set up an appropriate data management architecture. It is absolutely crucial in order to receive analytical information, efficiently assist with decision-making and strategic planning. But such architecture, even though fully worth the cost, can be really expensive. Many business owners are not ready to commit to such investments.

2. Shortage of qualified data scientists and developers. You really want experienced IT specialists to run your data management. At the moment there are simply not enough of them for the entire market.

Despite these continuous issues, some industries seem to be doing much better than others. Online entertainment is definitely one of them. Take Netflix and Spotify. Due to efficient data management these services are able to offer instant and precise content recommendations to users. People are encouraged to keep paying subscription fees until they get bored (which may never be the case due to endless personalized recommendations).

A great example of what happens when a company fully commits to investing in Big Data management”.

So what about Datatech’s expertise? How is the company prepared to face today’s challenges?

“We are fortunate to have some of the best specialists in Big Data in Eastern Europe within our team, including data engineers, data scientists, analytics, developers and more“– says Alexander.

He continues: “Even though officially our company was recently born, our staff has years of experience within IT sector. Last year Russian banking industry reported huge profits. This would not have been possible without effective data management, an area where our team members have contributed to.

We combine and make the most of data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning to integrate a full management cycle, from corporate storage to unstructured Big Data analysis platform. We also develop industrial solutions involving modern analytical methods as well as ML and AI Technologies.

Datatech is very excited for new partnerships and is fully committed to providing industry-leading data management services.”

Replacing your back office department with machines. Is it worth it?

Every IT company has a back office team responsible for recurring and unexciting tasks. The technological development over the recent years suggests that much of this work can be automated, but is it worth it? Should you fire your back office team to reduce expenses? Has the digital revolution in team management already commenced?

Igor Kalganov, our CEO, shares his insights on Innotech's approach:

“At the moment we have about 7% of our team performing back office roles. I am confident we can eventually slice this portion in half without actually firing anyone. To achieve this, we plan to increase the company without expanding the back office team. I consider this to be the best way forward. We’d rather keep our team responsible for the “boring” work small, make them motivated by paying twice as much, and automate some of their processes".

At Innotech, we are keeping a close eye on the latest developments. We cannot wait to see what opportunities will be presented to us once we'll learn to automate the software developer tasks. At that point the digital revolution will truly be upon us.

Yet there will always be important roles for real people to take care of. It is essential for us to preserve and increase human talents. As a company, we will make sure our vast team stays motivated and keeps using its unique potential to the fullest.