Vikram has authored several white papers & articles on FinTech domain, and made key contributions in Financial & Investor Strategy, Business Intelligence, Balance-sheet Management, and Business Development & Technology Solutions.

Holding an extensive decades over experience, Vikram has authored several white papers & articles on FinTech domain, and made key contributions in Financial & Investor Strategy, Business Intelligence Balance sheet Management and Business Development & Technology Solutions.

Gone are the days when usage of technology was optional, today we have technology integrated across all the aspect of business and commerce. In this article, we are going to understand importance of digital methodology as a key attribute to management decision making and culture. Let’s start with dissecting digital methodology into its core components Data lifecycle management, digital design thinking and process automation/ transformation.

We all have heard that data is new oil, however, seldomly organizations plan around the data lifecycle management. Most of the times, when companies think about data management it is already too late and untangling the mess is often very time consuming & costly. Given, the personal data protection regulation like GDPR and PDPA companies can’t neglect & ignore the data life cycle planning anymore.

Traditionally ETL management needs to be combined with data policy broker where each data source and the flow of data should be governed by policy metadata. This will ensure that data storage, retrieval, sharing and disposal is as per the preset compliance policy. This also enables easy PSD2 and Account Aggregator compliance. Creating proper Data

lake and allowing role based access often enables quick and secure Application Programming Interface (API) implementation. Process mining enables management to frictions and inefficiencies in the digital processes. Based on this, management can focus on restructuring and reengineering the processes to ensure smoother & efficient workflows.

Everyone in business world knows the importance of Design Thinking. Traditional design thinking refers to the cognitive, strategic and practical processes by which design concepts are developed with a customer centric view to make the product or service intuitive, cost effective & efficient.

RPA reduces back office operation time and blockchain/DLT platform allows all the participants to view updated and synchronized status of various documents & events

However, with most of the business processes and solutions going digital, digital design thinking is of utmost importance. Digital design thinking primarily revolves around usage of technology to create customer centric, data driven, scalable, flexible and cost effective products & services. Tools like wireframing, A/B testing, Mouse flow tracking, user journey mapping and responsive design are popular.

Process automation and digital transformation is also very critical in creating cost-effective scalable solutions for both internal & external customers. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is rapidly transforming the businesses and making them more competitive. While earlier ten people used to oversee one process, today one person is able to supervise ten processes at fraction of cost and time.

Role of emerging technologies can’t be ignored as well. Powerful Machine learning models are able to analyze complex data structures thereby helping management in robust decision making. Blockchain technology is allowing users to operate with trust in distributed decentralized environment. Let’s take an example of trade finance where RPA and Blockchain have transformed the traditional workflow. Today, banks like Kotak, ICICI, Axis and Yes Bank are able to offer trade finance product with settlement time of few hours, rather than days. Behind the scene RPA reduces back office operation time and blockchain/ DLT platform allows all the participants to view updated and synchronized status of various documents & events. It further ensures that the documents can’t be used to avail financing multiple times from different parties. Using Internet of Things (IoT) all the parties can track shipment and quality of goods. As we all know what we can’t measure, we can’t control. With growing dataset and volume, tools like Hadoop can help management analyze the data & make informed decisions.

To conclude, next generation management needs to adopt the emerging technologies and adapt themselves with dynamic environment to stay relevant & ahead of the competition.