CNBCTV18 Presents Financial Services Cloud Symposium Powered by AWS

With the rapid adoption of digital across the ecosystem, the financial services industry in India has begun to self-disrupt through fintech using accelerators like the IndiaStack and cloud. The AWS Financial Cloud Symposium aims to highlight this transformation amidst the disruption of financial services in India.

The event saw participation from India’s leading financial services organizations with 18 senior executives sharing their insights on technology-led business transformation.

Puneet Chandok, President, India & SAARC, Commercial Sales operations, AISPL, in his welcome address, stressed that financial services were going through a tremendous amount of invention and reinvention in India and the cloud is driving the democratization of technology.

Scott Mullins, MD, Financial Services, AWS, pitched in next with his expert insights on the recent events in the financial services industry. He highlighted, “The technologies that are going to enable financial institutions to respond quickly to changing customer needs, to scale them in changing conditions and to operate more efficiently are allowing the industries to get better in serving customers.” He noted that in just a few years, cloud has moved from being a newcomer to being the new normal.

Next, Vaishali Kasture, Head of Enterprise Business, India & South Asia, AISPL, came forward with the Indian financial services perspective. She highlighted use-cases where financial services enterprises in India have adopted the AWS cloud and gave examples of three levers through which AWS has helped enable change: Modernise, Transform and Innovate.

An enlightening boardroom roundtable followed with discussions focusing on disruption in financial services with esteemed panelists Bhargav Dasgupta, MD & CEO, ICICI Lombard, Zarin Daruwala, CEO, Standard Chartered Bank, India, and Rajeev Ahuja, Executive Director, RBL Bank. Regarding adopting digital in banking Zarin Daruwala, CEO, Standard Chartered Bank India elegantly highlighted that “digital is not a destination, rather an enabler for greater customer experience”. The discussion revealed interesting highlights on how going digital has become imperative to survive the competition and customer expectations in today’s world.

Olivier Klein, Chief Technologist for AWS Asia-Pacific, delivered a keynote on innovation. He took the audience through the key guidelines at AWS as they innovate, that by breaking things down and letting teams handle them autonomously, by automating everything possible and managing the important aspects, disruption is not impossible.

The symposium then moved on to an in-depth fireside chat with Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO of HDFC Bank and Kiran Jagannath, Head Financial Services, AISPL, discussing the client’s perspectives on technology in banking and its synergy with FinTech in the modern setup. They also discussed how HDFC bank navigated the FinTech space with the help of AWS and other technological offerings.

The next session from AWS’s Charith Mendis, Banking Industry Specialist, Worldwide Financial Services focussed on data-driven banking and how banks are leveraging technologies like AI and ML for fraud and risk management and innovating new products and services.

The schedule then moved on to a panel discussion on Banking 4.0, involving industry leaders from AWS and the Indian banking sector with Sameer Shetty, Chief Digital Officer, Axis Bank, Charu Mathur, Chief Digital Officer and Head - Business Strategy & New Initiatives, IndusInd Bank, Topendra Bhattacharjee, Chief Digital Officer, RBL Bank and Naveen Chaluvadi, Chief Digital Officer, Yes Bank. The highlight of the discussion was that banks in India are constantly trying to evolve through digital transformation. The panel also discussed the importance of cloud in driving digital initiatives of banks, going virtual with banking, creating hyper-personalised experiences for consumers and building end-to-end digital journeys.

The stage was set for an industry solution showcase led by Gaurav Sharma, Global Lead – Technology Consulting, Infosys Finacle. He discussed the steps and techniques, the key factors necessary for scaling banking transformation over the cloud using Finacle and AWS services.

Insightful fireside chat between Parvez Mulla, COO, HDFC Life and VG Sundar, Lead- Modernization, Digital Innovation, Specialist Products, AISPL navigated the digital transformational journey of HDFC Life, earning this brand a name of its own in the insurance niche.

The symposium moved on to a session with Unni Pillai, Head, Financial Services Technology, ASEAN - AWS, as he talked in detail about the modern data strategy that comprised of scalable data, price-performance metrics, the democratization of data, unified governance and deployment of AI and ML for business challenges.

The panel discussion on Innovation in Insurance - accelerators and opportunities, Involving leader from Indian insurance sector with Anubhav Rajput, CIO, Head - Digital and Operations Cholamandalam MS General Insurance, S Ganessan, Executive Vice President & Head – Technology ICICI Prudential Life, Goutam Datta, Chief Information & Digital Officer, Bajaj Allianz Life, and Suhail Ghai, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Max Life and Akshath Balachandra, Leader - Financial Services (Greenfield), AISPL. The panel revealed valuable insights on adapting insurance to customer expectations and the changing data landscape. How cloud and technology can assist insurance, and how security and regulatory compliance fit into this entire digital insurance picture.

Joydeep Sarkar, Program Director at TCS, presented an industry solution on Insurance Digital Transformation.

The discussions began with a fireside chat between Shrini Vishwanath, Co-Founder, Upstox and Kumara Raghavan, Country Manager and Head - Startup Business, AISPL and they navigated through the capital market scene with respect to growth in retail investing post-pandemic. Many angles on the market and technology were discussed during this session.

Brian Cassin, Capital Markets specialist at AISPL, proceeded with the global leader session, highlighting the transformations in the capital markets. He presented case studies where AWS and cloud helped in transforming the market.

A discussion on next-generation investing platforms followed, with an esteemed panel of specialists. It featured Shiv Kumar Bhasin, Chief Technology and Operations Officer, National Stock Exchange, Raghunatha Reddy, EVP and Head – IT, UTI Asset Management Company, Jyotiswarup Raiturkar, Chief Technology Officer, Angel One and Pankaj Purohit Group EVP, Technology & Business Operation Head, Motilal Oswal Financial Services. The panel discussion focused on capital markets, customer journeys and innovation through technology in the sector. The boost in investments recently was also a matter of deep discussion.

Following suit was Rohit Kumar, Vice President, Head of Business Development – Index and Data, National Stock Exchange, with his industry solution showcase on data analytics. He spoke in detail about analytical products offerings, fixed income valuation and analytics. He also stressed that the way ahead would be to launch market data products and implement AI/ML in the market for Indian customers.

The first session focused on how intelligent document processing assisted by AI could influence the banking and insurance sectors in tasks like loan origination, risk management, policy issuance, claims authorization and much more. Talking about how manual processing is expensive, time-consuming and error-prone. Ramanuj Vidyanta, AI/ML Specialist, AISPL, described how tools like Amazon Extract could help with template agnostics, recognizing handwritten text and much more.

Next session was on Recommendation models of cross-selling using personalisation. Further, they focused on how businesses in India can leverage cloud computing, like AWS Fargate, to manage seasonal variations in server traffic load and go server less with innovations in the capital market. Praveen Jayakumar, Trushant Vasudeo and Tapan Hoskeri (Principal Solution Architects, AISPL) took lead for each of the topics.

Brief sessions then followed with the discussion on regulatory compliance, AWS security, and designing resilient apps using chaos engineering. Chaos engineering helps to build a robust system by identifying problems through calamity simulation with the objective of preventing these troubles from blowing up into outages. Swati Sharma (FSI Compliance Specialist) AISPL, Lalit Kumar (Security Architect) AISPL and Satheesh Kumar (Solution Architect) AISPL have thrown light to the audience for each of the topics.

Bringing up the topic of implementing Graph Databases through Amazon Neptune in the realm of financial services in India, Ramanan Kannan, Solution Architect AISPL, took the viewers through a couple of use-cases and displayed various approaches to create a graph database where the data was deeply connected. He also highlighted the challenges associated with implementing these solutions, such as querying graphs, inefficient graph processing and inflexibility.

The event also had a partner showcase, with 18 leading organizations that had cloud-enabled innovative solutions targeted for the financial services business.

To watch the entire event, please click here.

To visit the AWS Financial Cloud Symposium Website, please click here