Companies Must Focused On Their Data Because Of the Democratization of Cloud Technology

One thing is evident when we track the progress of cloud product offerings, such as Oracle Flexcube over time: they are growing more innovative. Product managers at companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others take their jobs seriously, working closely with clients to fully grasp their requirements. As a result, they can identify solutions that banks can apply across a wide range of industries, thanks to the size of their customer base.

Thus, public cloud service providers today provide managed solutions for practically all common use cases, such as data collection and storage, online content exposure, workflow management, and team communication. They are a fraction of the expenditure their clients would normally make in setting up and operating these technologies from scratch, with the expense being shared by the cloud providers' whole customer base. Major companies no longer have an advantage over their smaller counterparts because of their larger IT spending when it comes to technology.

This has ramifications for the business plans of companies. The ability of companies to beat their competitors with identical goods like the Oracle Flexcube universal banking simply by being more efficient is being eroded by the development of low-cost managed services and the unstoppable march of automation. As a result, businesses in a wide range of industries realize that nothing sets them apart from their competitors.

Mobile apps with two-factor authentication are now offered by every retail bank, for example, and they all have the same basic functionality “ such as rapid payments, cash management, and so on. They race to develop innovative features to make their software stand out, risking crossing into gimmick zone by doing so.

In a broader sense, both the brand and price strategy and the customer experience are critical differentiators. While all of these factors are important, there is one that stands above and supports them all: data.

At this time, it is around 20 years since we first started stating "data is an asset," and we are just now seeing how important data actually is to market competitiveness. Identifying which product features people prefer and which may be abandoned is easier for a corporation with superior data (and the capacity to mine it for insights). Banks may target marketing channels and messages to specific categories based on how the company's brand is regarded. It is better able to forecast the impact of price changes on profitability. There are many instances.

When you can sell your data, it becomes an asset in a different context. Many of our customers have a lot of data that banks may monetize by providing APIs to the larger digital ecosystem (like the Flexcube software), subject to GDPR and other legal/reputational limitations. External parties might pay to use pricing and other statistical models that are made accessible to them due to sharing the obtained data. This is a common way to add value to the already acquired data. Traditional financial institutions and corporations may be transformed into actual digital product companies for the first time, resulting in an additional source of income to supplement their current business model.

To measure an organization's long-term competitiveness, such opportunities emphasize how well it manages its data. Again, using cutting-edge technology is no longer a competitive advantage. Big data processing, machine learning, streaming analytics, and more are now available as on-demand services from cloud providers.

This shows that a company's capacity to extract value from its data is ultimately dependent on the competencies of its people and their cultural acceptance of data as the "new oil" powering its success. There are a lot of organizations we deal with whose ways of working aren't optimized for quickly adopting new tools and methodologies or changing their business plans based on insights gleaned from their data.

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