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There is renewed focus and interest in the Lending Business globally, across ‘Consumer Assets’ if I may add, because that’s where the primary revenue opportunities are- it’s the money-generating side of banks/FIs. Traditionally, Lending functionalities and modules were packaged and sold along with Core Banking, and it was considered a massive transformation exercise for the FIs to implement a new Core or to change an existing one. With the advent of new-age platforms, no longer do FIs have to go for a complete Core transformation. Standalone lending solutions provide comprehensive coverage of all banking needs across the Assets platform and especially with a platform like iKredit360, which goes even further to curate niche and relevant solutions across products, channels, and enterprise verticals to change the paradigm of how we have visualised Banking transformations. Who needs a traditional Core when you can curate your credit requirements through iKredit360?

Over the last 18 months or so, the world in general, and consumer finance in particular has seen a considerable churn in the way they are operating- long-established traditional processes and way of working are no longer acceptable and are being removed to make way for faster, digital and straight-through processes- that economize on efforts and cost all across. One of the main influences of this approach has been to replace a traditional product focus approach with a more customer-centric one, leading to an eco-system based product proposition in which credit/lending/consumer finance gets intrinsically wedded to the ecosystem where the finance is being offered- so, a consumer finance proposition at a retail store X needs to differentiate itself from a consumer finance proposition at an e-com site Y, and still provide a superlative customer experience, and simultaneously be commercially viable for the FI. This is only possible if the FIs can raise the bar from being just product pushers to relevant ecosystem players. A great case study that comes to mind is Amazon, where I, as a consumer, can go and select a product, then a brand of my choice, and also avail a financing scheme suited to my needs, and my credit rating, all from the SAME PLATFORM - a perfect example of marrying POS Retail with Consumer Financing and Data Analytics!

This architecture paradigm is all about the assembly of a solution by bringing together various independent building blocks. When you take the perspective of an enterprise or a bank, it is all about curating solutions and experiences from autonomous business components. Gartner calls these business components “Packaged Business Capabilities” or PBCs relevant for a business user. These components can be accessed from a vendor, or from the bank’s internal eco-system, or from a marketplace that the bank has access to. When you take the perspective of an application or one business component, it is about architecting it with a microservices architecture. It's very important that each building block in a composable architecture is a self-complete black box that provides a well-defined capability in terms of Open APIs and events for others to interact with it. This also highlights a need for a composition platform that rapidly enables this assembly and orchestration. Maximum scale and agility are only possible if you have these components deployed as containers on a Kubernetes service on elastic cloud, follow cloud-native principles, and be available as a service.

There is a thin line between PBCs (Packaged Business Capabilities) and microservices. Architecturally they represent the same paradigm of composition. PBCs due to their enterprise context have a Go To Market focus, are granular enough to serve a business need that can be composed while designing an enterprise solution or composing a bank, and can be swapped easily with an alternative PBC from another source. Thus, they are apt for an independent GTM as a service on the cloud. Microservices are more relevant as application architecture and might not be practical for an independent GTM as it would increase the costs of integration and might make the change transformation unviable. Practically, one PBC will be architected as one or more microservices.

For banks and financial institutions, the primary driver for curation is to differentiate against comparable product offerings and deliver a superlative experience to their customers. On the other hand, of course, is the need to optimize investments and efforts to serve a certain segment or line of business. That the technologies and solutions align themselves to address these demands is imperative and therefore an obvious outcome.

I would like to change the Question to cover a more important perspective- Why go beyond lending or your core business activity anyway? The answer lies in creating stickiness. Imagine a small business entity that relies on its bank's experience and personalized advisory services across a range of topics like digital marketing strategies, tips for automation, cash flow forecasting, or tax planning. Won't the bank find it easier to sell its core products and services to such a customer on the back of such engagements? Similarly, mortgage lenders who provide real estate advisory, documentation support, and home improvement planning are more likely to succeed in winning over and retaining customers over the long run. The value-added services may be non-core and sometimes even seem to be a distraction but go a long way in creating long-term profitable customer relationships.

We curate quality solutions for our clients with their end clients in mind. Our sole objective for every delivery is to achieve "Customer Happiness" and that is the single lens used by our delivery leaders for any decision during the implementation promise.

• First, we welcome change. Contrast this with almost every technology partner pushing back any change during the delivery process. Our delivery design is wired to embrace changes.
• Most people talk agile but land up getting boxed in their process frameworks. It’s not that we are against processes. But we have very nimble processes that work very well for cross-functional, cross geographical team.
• For the third, let me quote our client, a Challenger bank in the UK. 'It’s refreshing to see your entire approach designed with not you or me in the center but the end consumer.'