Infosys Finacle: Leading banks across the GCC into a truly digital future

Sriranga Neelathali Sampathkumar, Head of Business - MEA, Infosys Finacle, shares his views on how the organisation is at the forefront of innovation in the banking space and some of its recent initiatives in the region.

Infosys Finacle comes with a 17 year legacy of helping drive transformation journeys for banks across the world. Today, the industry-leading universal banking solution provider has 550+ deployments across the world and is estimated to serve nearly 16.5 percent of the world's adult banked population across 94 countries in the world. In the GCC, Emirates NBD, Commercial Bank of Qatar to RAK Bank and HBTF Jordan, are a few names from the many for whom Infosys Finacle has become a technology partner of choice.
Finacle's state of the art banking solutions are helping leading banks of the region offer a truly digital banking experiences to their end customers. "For banks to stay relevant 10 years down the line, they will need to move on from merely adding new channels or more features to existing channels, to becoming truly digital. The word 'digital' has become an all-encompassing term and banks today are looking for the real and tangible meaning of digital in their business" says Sriranga. Finacle has committed extensive research on this aspect and has created multiple assets that explain the meaning of digital for banks and how digitization of the core is the key to survival for financial institutions in this rapidly evolving digital world.
"At Finacle, we always try to ideate and propose to our clients features that they can offer to their customers, even before they can sense a need for it. We are committed to co-creating with client banks to build tailored solutions that will help them stay ahead of the curve." explains Sriranga. United Arab Emirates, where Finacle is headquartered in the GCC region, is among the most innovation hungry countries in the world, let alone the GCC, and Sriranga credits its success to the progressive vision of its leaders. He believes that the growing appetite in the region for banking innovation has given Infosys Finacle the right platform to propose to banks a plethora of offerings that enable them to perform transactions across multiple channels, often without the need to visit branches. 
When the company began its journey 15 years ago, Finacle was primarily known as a core banking vendor. Since then much has changed, explains Sriranga, and adds how Finacle sensed that the market needed more than just the core and went on to build a full range of digital banking products. Today, Finacle has a solution set comprising of 20+ standalone solutions spanning online banking, mobile banking, Islamic banking, wealth management, robotic process automation, analytics, payments, treasury, origination and liquidity management, among others. Each of these solutions are pretty much stand alone, able to work with other, often competing solutions. "For one of the largest banks in Qatar running on a non-Finacle core, we are implementing the Finacle Enterprise Payment Hub, as a single point system orchestrating the bank's payment entities across 20+ countries. Similarly, Finacle powers the mobile and internet banking for National Bank of Fujairah, while the bank uses another platform for core" says Sriranga, picking two examples among many others.
Not only has Finacle's Core Banking solution continued to be rated as a leader by independent analysts like Gartner, Forrester, Ovum, Celent and CEB, for several years in a row, it has also topped the charts in channel solutions, including mobile banking and omni-channel.
Finacle has invested heavily into research and understanding from our global customers on what digital means for banks, and has articulated and created capabilities for how banks can transform into truly digital sustainable entities, amidst the ongoing digital disruption. The narrative seems to be very well received and many global banking majors like Emirates NBD, ICICI Bank in India, DBS Bank in Singapore, Bancolombia and Discover Financial Services, have become early adopters. Finacle is guiding institutions of all types and sizes along these lines and simplifying their digital transformation journey. 
"Five years ago, banks were more guarded and less receptive towards changing their codes, or replacing it. Today, we are successful to a very large extent to change that perception itself and explore phased transformation leaps. We have evolved to adapt to our client's preferences, and our intent is to work at a pace and manner which is comfortable for our clients." comments Sriranga
"Recently, we deployed 3 of our robots for automating back end processes, at one of the largest banks in the GCC. The robots use Artificial Intelligence and the machine learning experience of having automated 10000+ process across industries. Another client deployed our NFC based payment system - a first for us in the GCC. An Islamic banking core solution transformation project was also completed recently at Emirates Islamic bank in a 23 month express transformation program, designed along the #TrulyDigital paradigm." adds Sriranga.
Infosys Finacle garnered headlines recently when Emirates NBD launched the first blockchain pilot network on Infosys Finacle's Blockchain Framework. This initiative was hailed by His Highness Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, as a 'potential game changer' and received immense support from the UAE Central Bank. Emirates NBD, along with ICICI Bank, India's largest private sector bank built the network to route business transaction between the two entities for cross border remittances and trade finance transactions. More recently, the Commercial Bank, Qatar's first private bank, along with its subsidiary Alternatifbank (ABank) in Turkey and associates National Bank of Oman and United Arab Bank have formed a network, on the first ever cloud based blockchain for routing cross border business transactions across the India-GCC corridor, known as the busiest remittances corridor in the world. The banks now get to provide a real-time international remittance feature at significant reduction in cost per transaction, to their customers, along with a zero risk of fraud.
"In a span of under a year, we have over 10 blockchain POCs in progress and we are looking forward to having many more banks in the GCC on-board our blockchain test network this year" adds Sriranga.
"All of us at Infosys Finacle are excited about the challenging times ahead us in, in the digitally disrupted world we live in. We are optimistic of what the future holds and look forward to helping many more banks in the GCC and MEA region move away from their legacy based bank-to-bank focused model to a customer centric, insight driven one and ecosystem integrated model, providing cool and secure banking experiences to customers.", signs off Sriranga.