Category : Mobile Technologies

Mobile Technologies

The right app metrics and other hallmarks of a good app analytics framework

May 18,2018 / By / No Comments

There are approximately 5 million apps in App Store and Google Play.

With over 1.2 billion mobile users worldwide, it is predicted that by 2020 the app economy will reach $189 billion, an increase of 270% from 2016.

While these numbers look promising, the truth is, though there are millions of apps out there in the app stores vying for users’ attention, the apps which get downloaded are abandoned in an eye’s blink. Almost 77% of users never use an app again 72 hours after installing. Time spent on apps is also low with 34% of mobile app engagements lasting less than one minute.

So, how can enterprises ensure that they course correct before it is too late?

While in a digital world, there is an avalanche of data available, this data deluge is precisely the problem. App creators often get overwhelmed by the availability of the information at their disposal and choosing to ignore what is not relevant can be a tasking job.

But this is a job that needs to be done.

Tracking the right metrics is the most critical aspect for determining the success of an app.

‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” – Peter Drucker

However, to ensure the success of an app, it is essential that for app creators, analytics is not an afterthought – not something to be thought of after the app release; they have to be clear of metrics which they want to measure when planning.

Not all metrics are created equally

Fundamentally, an app needs to help users accomplish whatever they set out to do, faster and better through delightful interactions. At the core of it, all are human emotions.

At Robosoft, we believe that mobile solutions need to strike a chord among users and engage them emotionally.

And, that is the most critical factor to ensure the success of your mobile app. However, even to get to a point where we are course correcting basis consumer engagement and interest, we need to track the right metrics. But more often product teams waste their precious time and money chasing useless metrics, which do not provide any real value.

Often app metrics are divided into four broad buckets

  • Performance metrics: these metrics focus on how the user is experiencing the app.
  • User and usage metrics: these data points provide visibility into the user and their demographics
  • Engagement metrics: these metrics highlight how the user is engaging with the app
  • Business metrics: Focus on business (revenue etc.) flowing through the app

Though there is no one-size-fits-all approach to measuring metrics for your app performance, it is different for individual businesses. However, for ensuring that you are tracking the right ones, it is important to look at these app metrics from a different perspective.

For instance, today, almost 22 percent apps users download on their smartphones end up not being used ever. So, if an app owner is concerned with mainly tracking downloads, they are chasing an empty metric.

Here are some tips on how app creators can approach tracking of the right metrics:

Identifying Vanity Metrics and Clarity Metrics

While there are a plethora of metrics available, app creators should move away from the broad categorization, which is mentioned earlier.

Not all apps are the same, so defining the right metrics for your business puts you a step ahead.

Our suggestion would be to divide these metrics into vanity metrics and clarity metrics

Vanity metrics

These are surface-level metrics that define macro-level trends. While we can use vanity metrics to support a high-level narrative, we can’t use these to make tactical product-level decisions.

Vanity metrics can measure baseline performance. However, vanity metrics cannot provide insights to allow for better product management decisions.

For instance, while tracking the Monthly Active Users (MAUs) may help us understand if overall engagement with the application is increasing or decreasing – it doesn’t help us understand the value of a specific feature to the business.

Example of vanity metrics include – number of downloads, monthly active users, and ad impressions.

Clarity metrics

These are product-level metrics that define micro-level usage trends. We use clarity metrics to inform decision-making around product modifications. Clarity metrics underpin competitive advantage.

While both vanity and clarity metrics will be used across operations, design, product, analytics, quality assurance, and marketing for team-oriented data, it is essential to have an organization-wide transition from purely using vanity metrics to adopting clarity metrics.

These are metrics used by engineering teams, product teams, and business teams to monitor the performance of the application. Clarity metrics provide insight on the performance of the business. Recommended clarity metrics include – feature adoption rate, feature abandonment, and goal-oriented conversions.

Progressing from clarity metrics to KPIs

To define clarity metrics, we need to start with high-level vanity metrics and apply more granular filters that are feature-specific and/or goal-oriented. However, to make use of these clarity metrics, it is crucial to progress them to KPIs.

KPIs are the clarity metrics which are connected to the business targets of an organization.

Converting clarity metrics to KPIs will ensure that app creators can make better product decisions faster and with a higher degree of confidence. Defining clarity metrics as KPIs will also ensure that the key stakeholders can take the right decisions and make product improvements in real time.

Typical issues faced and recommendations for setting up a result-oriented analytics framework

Here are the most common issues faced by the analytics team while setting up an analytics framework to measure app metrics

App Analytics

Collecting the right data

As mentioned earlier, often app creators are confounded by the flood of data available to them through various metrics, that they miss the important ones. At Robosoft, we take various measures to ensure that the data we collect is relevant and helps in achieving business goals.

Here is what we do:

  • Proper event tracking implementation

Events are a useful way to collect data about a user’s interaction with interactive components of your app, like button presses or the use of a particular feature in a game. We help businesses in identifying the clarity metrics while tracking an event.

  • Well defined event tracking specification (‘Event Taxonomy’ specification)

In this step, we define parameters against any action that a user takes and derive insights accordingly. For e.g., if a user is using the mobile wallet app on their phone to recharge their mobile, then parameters like – amount recharged, the name of the operator etc. might be useful for the business owners to make product based decisions.

  • Comprehensive event tracking within the application

Our event tracking is aligned to insight-driven analysis. Funnels track the user’s behaviour starting from acquisition to conversion. We include conversion event tracking and campaign tracking as well.

  • Allow for quick modifications to tracking

Most analytics tracking measures are archaic and hard coded. However, we use tools like Google Tag Manager; it helps is real-time tracking and modifications.

Collecting data you can trust

Identifying the data to be collected is just the first step. It is important to format this data in a manner so that it can be used right.

Here is what we do:

  • Clean and reliable data through the setup of proper filters

We add appropriate filters while collecting data. We also use the method of cohort analysis, which helps us in deriving insights related to user behaviour. Cohort analysis allows businesses to derive actionable insights. For instance, for an e-commerce app, data points like – in how much time did a group of users checked out, how much money did they spend, etc. may be helpful in making product level decisions.

  • Verify and augment analytics with back-end application data

Relying only on analytics data might not give businesses accurate understanding of the performance of the app. Especially, in case of any glitch in the analytics tool or if the tracking hasn’t been set up properly. So it is important to verify this data with the back-end data as well.

  • Implement back-end performance monitoring

While insights that are derived from analytics data can help app owners can enable app owners in customizing the user experience, it will be a pity if the app performance isn’t up to the mark. When an app crashes on a user’s device, app developers need to know about it. Users who experience severe performance issues aren’t going to write in and inform—they’re going to leave bad app store reviews. Hence, we implement performance monitoring metrics to keep a track on how critical features in an app are performing. We track the time of logging of an API request and its response time.

Access data quickly and efficiently

Like mentioned in the earlier points, it is vital to specify event taxonomy. Doing it right is important.

Here are is what we do:

  • Detailed and descriptive events taxonomy

While creating event taxonomy we make sure that we define the purpose of tracking a particular data point. For instance, if after the sign-up process the users are expected to update their profile, defining why tracking how many people update their profile is important. Or defining which information that is a part of the profile update process is important for the app owners.

Basis this analysis, app owners can take decisions like making some critical data points a part of the sign-up process instead of adding it to the next step.

Access to data across the organization

Sometimes different teams in an organization depend on the app metrics data to take decisions. For instance, product teams might be relying on this data to take feature level decisions at the same time marketing teams will depend on this data to take consumer-facing decisions. Hence it is important that everyone is looking at a unified format of the data.

Here are is what we do:

  • Real-time analytics

While most app owners track periodic data (weekly/monthly), tracking real-time data for some critical app features is important. It helps app owners in taking right decisions at the right time.

  • Standardization of data

Sometimes the data that is captured by the analytics team is in a raw format. Further, different analytics tools will have a different method of collecting this data. It is important to standardize the data visualization process across all divisions.

It will help every stakeholder derive and understand the data in a unified manner than leaving a room for ambiguity in the insights. It will help all decision makers take unified, informed and data-driven decisions.

Make data-driven decisions

Understanding your audience, their in-app behavior, and the natural screen flows are necessary for iterating and refining your app for better results. You can use these engagement insights to launch app marketing campaigns, redesigns, UX changes, and stronger funnels that boost ROI and make your app a profitable channel in your brand’s overall marketing strategy.

Here is how we aid app owners to achieve this:

  • Rapidly deploy the best performing features to optimize KPIs

A lot of times the product team is blind without feature level insights. Hence it is important to define the critical features and track them on a real-time basis and optimize them according to changing user behaviour and performance metrics.

  • Understand your user and use data to prioritize features

Only tracking performance data isn’t enough. It is important to capture user’s intent with analytics-driven features. Further prioritizing features basis, this data will help app owners in getting higher rates of user engagement.

In conclusion:

Most app developers pay heed to setting up an analytics framework after the app is developed and released in the market. Sadly, it is often too late to course-correct. It is critical to identify the clarity metrics that a business wants to chase and then define an analytics framework to capture that data. And, all this needs to be done before the app is released in the app stores.

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Mobile Technologies

How Design Thinking helped me understand the customer in a digital world

May 7,2018 / By / No Comments

As long as businesses have existed in the history of humanity, customer has been king. However, with the advent of digitization, customer is not just king but an empowered one, fortified with the armor of information.

Digital economy has brought about a profound change in the way customers make their purchase decisions. In the past decade, this change has accelerated faster than businesses have evolved.

It is no longer a world where the customers need to be ‘told’ by the businesses about their products; rather customers have a plethora of options to find out about any product or service. The circle of word-of-mouth for today’s customer has expanded from just family and friends to the entire online world, where thousands of reviews about a product are available at a click.

It is easy for businesses to find out what their customers ‘need’ given the vast amount of consumer data that is available today.

But do businesses understand what customers really want?

Until enterprises find this answer, they will continue to push products and services that they think customers need, instead of fulfilling the latent or unsaid needs of the customer.

And, data alone wouldn’t serve that answer to organizations on a platter.

Empathy is the key to innovation

As rightly said by Steve Jobs:

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Customers cannot always articulate what they want; they can tell you their pain points but meeting the latent needs of customers from those pain points is where real innovation happens.

To understand these latent needs, it is crucial for entrepreneurs and product innovators to empathize with their customers. This will only be achieved when we step into the customers’ shoes and live with them, and that cannot happen inside an air-conditioned office, looking at a heap of data.

I call this GOOB – go out of the building, and live with your customers.

We will have to move out of our comfort zones, observe the customer, understand how they behave, their challenges & pain points, derive insights and then develop a product.

This is where Design Thinking becomes extremely important. It is critical for organizations to approach innovation from a Design Thinking perspective.

Learning Design Thinking – my journey

With this realization of how critical it is for any executive to have the knowledge of Design Thinking, I started my journey of learning the concept.

While there were institutes like Standford d.school and MIT which were offering courses on Design Thinking, they were doing it predominantly from an academic perspective. However, for an executive like me, it was essential to find out something which was flexible yet detailed enough to fit into my schedule.

During my stint with Nihilent Technologies, along with overseeing the growth, profitability and expansion of the company in 5 continents, I was responsible for the creation of new products and services in the areas of strategy, digital transformation and IT alignment. To fulfill this role successfully and deliver value to customers it was critical for me to apply the concepts of Design Thinking.

This was when I was introduced to Interaction Design Foundation (IDF).

It was without debate the best online portal available, and to my delight, IDF had over 25 online courses on design.

When I enrolled, I intended to do a course on services design. However, in just a matter of 5 months, I ended up doing six courses:

The fact that these courses were exceptionally well designed and the entire process was enjoyable helped me take up six courses in such a short duration. Moreover, I not just finished them but also was able to excel in all because of the structure of these courses. Recently, I was delighted to receive this email from IDF on my performance:

‘’One of our developers did a database extract of the top performers (1%) in our courses, and your name came out on that list!’’ – Mads Soegaard, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Interaction Design Foundation

Learning Design Thinking – my journey

 

Learning Design Thinking – my journey

That was not the end – I continue to take various courses on IDF. In fact, I am doing three more courses on the portal currently!

All the concepts that I learnt through IDF have had a direct impact on my work and the way I design solutions for my customers. For e.g. in one of my earlier roles, I was responsible for designing balanced scorecards and CEO scorecards for my customer. Some of the learnings from the course – what certain colors mean, how people perceive colors, what a specific design element can mean for the audience, etc. helped me immensely in the successful completion of the project.

In fact, applying these concepts helped me deliver these projects with minimal iterations and with utmost proficiency. This was the feedback I received from my customers while working on this assignment using the principles of Design Thinking.

‘’Ravi, you get the deliverables right in the very first time.’’

I also use these concepts in my day-to-day professional life. Any element that I use in my presentations, documents, website, etc. has a specific connotation that connects with the end-user. Further, the importance of the concept of ‘less is more’ was something which I learnt from IDF. A concept that I have used while designing dashboards, mobile applications, software solutions, and even for a presentation.

Prudent entrepreneurs and product innovators understand the business implications of applying Design Thinking to solve real business problems. They take measures to implement Design Thinking at an organizational level. At Nihilent Technologies; I had the opportunity to work with LC Singh (Executive Vice Chairman, Nihilent Technologies) who understood the value of Design Thinking for business solutions and had set up a ‘Design Lab’ in the very initial phases of starting the company.

At Robosoft, our founder, Rohith Bhat realized early-on that Design Thinking is a practical and creative method for problem-solving that has evolved from fields as varied as engineering, architecture and business. And, to apply the principles of Design Thinking while creating products for customers a Design Lab was set up in 2013.

Today, at Design Lab, we have a robust and talented team of designers spread across Udupi and Mumbai. These designers are crafting delightful digital experiences for our customers by bringing the concept of ‘emotional engineering’ to life, day in and day out.

Democratization of design education

I believe that any professional should be a student for life. Digitization has transformed the landscape of education and training. In this digital era, we have to learn and unlearn continuously, and for that to happen portals like IDF are extremely helpful.

At Robosoft also, we do not call ourselves a bunch of engineers – we are a bunch of designers and above all ’empathizers’. And, this is where Design Thinking becomes extremely critical at an organizational level. Portals like IDF are helping in inculcating designing thinking process at a global level by democratizing it and making it easily available for professionals across the globe.

Three tips for learning online

With the digitization of education, the online world has opened up a plethora of resources for professionals to learn and keep updating their knowledge base. However, given our busy lifestyle, it requires dedication and commitment to benefit from these

3 Tips for Learning Online

Here are few tips to make the most out of portals like IDF:

  • Find 1-1.5 hours every day as soon as you wake up or before you go to bed to go through the courses, and stick to that routine.
  • Pick up courses that offer certifications – it will motivate you to keep going and also build your professional profile.
  • Gamification – have a healthy competition with yourself and peers who are taking up the course… it will keep the excitement going.

Design Thinking has become an extremely critical skill for any professional irrespective of the field they are into. And, portals like IDF are helping in building a talent pool of design thinkers across domains.

IDF has been an enabler for me in my professional journey, and it continues to help me upgrade my knowledge and skills. As Henry Ford said:

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.

I hope this account will help and inspire professionals across the industry in starting their journey of Design Thinking.

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Mobile Technologies

How Design Thinking can accelerate Digital Transformation

Apr 30,2018 / By / No Comments

Technology is part of a consumer’s everyday life, as it keeps our world connected. Thanks to technology we have come to expect all value providers – from businesses to government, to deliver personalized solutions on any device, anywhere in real time. It has also changed the way customers and businesses consume goods and services. It implies that the ways in which companies design and build their services must evolve to keep pace with the digital world.

In that context, Digital Transformation is imperative for all businesses. This message comes through loud and clear from every keynote, presentation, panel discussion, article, or study related to how businesses can remain competitive and relevant as the world becomes increasingly digital. What has thrown business leaders in a tizzy is a common understanding of what exactly ‘Digital Transformation’ means.

It is impossible to derive a single definition of ‘Digital Transformation’ that applies to all businesses. Digital Transformation will look different for different companies. We at Robosoft define Digital Transformation as:

The incorporation and unification of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in positive changes in how businesses operate and deliver value.

Also, it’s a fundamental change in culture that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo and experiment often.

But, why should Companies have Digital Transformation as a priority in their strategy? Pragmatic syllogism dictates- “because they have to”. It has become a survival issue for businesses in a digital savvy world. Howard King, in a contributed article for The Guardian, puts it this way:

“Businesses don’t transform by choice. Why would they want that? It is expensive and risky! They transform because they have no other alternative.”

The term ‘Digital Transformation’ is also often misunderstood as the application of ‘hyped’ or trending technology as the first step to solving any problem. At Robosoft we understand both the necessities as well as the risks surrounding Digital Transformation. That’s why when we work with our clients to implement Digital Transformation in their organizations, we do it based on the principles of a holistic problem-solving framework: Design Thinking.

The principles of ‘Design Thinking’ can be of great help to anyone trying to solve a problem or looking for better ways of getting work done. Design Thinking is a practical and creative method for problem-solving that has evolved from fields as varied as engineering, architecture and business.

Why Design Thinking?

The Design Thinking approach is especially useful for solving problems that require innovative solutions since it’s a powerful tool to tackle tasks that are unfamiliar or have never been done before. Problems and therefore innovative solutions seem to be apparent when you look at them from a distance.

“Design transcends innovation. It speaks to the politics of optimism.”
– Paul Bennett

How Design Thinking helps

Design thinking is a tool that helps to better conceptualize the tasks involved. It is a tool that helps us understand all the hidden loopholes and lets us have some measurable assessment while approaching a big project. It is a framework that lets us challenge the scope and narrowness of our thought process, and to push its boundaries. That is the key to transformation itself, and the basis upon which we construct our Digital Transformation strategies.

There has been considerable research around the process of adopting a Design Thinking approach to solve each specific kind of problem.

Define, research, ideate, prototype, choose, implement, and learn. These are the seven steps involved in one of the renditions of the Design Thinking process.

The steps aren’t linear – they can occur simultaneously and be repeated. A simpler expression of the process is Robert McKim’s phrase “Express–Test–Cycle”.

Another, five-phase description of the process is described by Christoph Meinel and Larry Leifer: (re)defining the problem, need-finding and benchmarking, ideating, building, testing.

Yet another way to look at it is Shewhart’s “Plan-Do-Study-Act” PDSA cycle.

PDSA Cycle

Image source: NHS

All the above approaches have their own merits and are applicable within various contexts. But the Design Thinking method shares a common, universal set of traits, mainly: Empathy, Iterativeness and Collaborative Approach.

3 Traits of Design Thinking

Empathy:

Organizations approach users with empathy, understanding about user’s troubles and grievances. The key here is for organizations to be able to put themselves in the user’s shoes; think what they think, feel what they feel, understanding the various pain-points for the users and be able to map these pain points in accordance to magnitude and scope of each.

It is not only about making things more efficient but about understanding people. Conventional research methods, like focus groups and surveys, can be useful in pointing towards incremental improvements, but those don’t usually lead to breakthroughs because these techniques simply ask people what they want.

It is important to understand that users may not always be able to fully comprehend their own needs or demands, because of their limited understanding of viabilities and feasibilities of possible solutions.

Therefore, the key is to put oneself in the user’s shoes and think from their perspective while also holding on to the knowledge and insights about the technologies that could make the solutions possible.

Henry Ford understood this when he said:

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said ‘a faster horse.”

No one would have asked for a car.

Iterativeness:

Once the organization is done with understanding the pain points of the users, it formulates problem statements and works through them to think about solution ideas. When the best ideas generated during ideation are crystalized, the implementation process begins.

At the heart of the implementation process is incremental and iterative prototyping: converting concepts to realities, turning ideas into actual products and services; which are then tested, iterated, and refined.

With the Iterative approach, a manifestation of the Agile Development process, first the organizations do ‘just enough’ planning to get started with building the minimal feature set, formally called the ‘minimal viable product feature set’, which they go on to build.

Next, they test and review that small set and get it ready to ship. When that cycle is complete, we end up with a potentially shippable product.

Through the planning process, organizations are doing just enough planning to complete the next incremental release. Thus, one ends up with several incremental releases, and one just keeps repeating these incremental releases until the product is feature-complete.

Collaborative approach:

As discussed earlier, Digital Transformation looks different for every industry and every organization since each of these companies has unique operating procedures and standards and unique needs. Therefore, providing each company with customized Digital Transformation solutions involves a fair bit of innovation from digital advisors, as they must figure out how to tailor and personalize technological tools to satisfy unique customer problems.

Hence, the “collaborative approach”, advocated by the Design Thinking principle becomes essential. Collaboration is a philosophy of interaction-based, process-oriented problem-solving which emphasizes a collective work process for problem-solving, as opposed to cooperation, which emphasizes just interaction-based goal-oriented problem-solving. It should be understood that, in principle, cooperation is a subset activity of collaboration.

Understanding the innovations required in the Digital Transformation process of any company, the collaboration between technology providers, the client organization and the client’s end customer becomes very important. This is primarily because the notion of ‘lone innovator’ is a myth.

Innovation happens when people marshal their collective knowledge and insights to the process, working together as a creative group.

Secondly, most of the great solutions to vexing problems come from the edges of a domain. That is when knowledge domains conventionally thought of as ‘independent’ speak to each other, contributing their offerings to collectively solve some problem, the probability of innovation to occur increases significantly.

A classic example in respect to the principle that states, “Innovation happens at the intersection of disciplines” is that of Charles Darwin. Darwin was a geologist and collected a number of bird species from the Galápagos Islands. He kept poor notes of his collection and returned the birds and notes over to John Gould upon his return. Gould was an expert ornithologist and initially dismissed the birds as being normal. Gould later discovered that each species was in fact distinct. The example shows how Darwin, without the knowledge of ornithology, could contribute to the field without having the training or knowledge. Drawing analogies from this classic example, in order to get innovative solutions for Digital Transformation of companies, Design Thinking advocates that people from multiple disciplines should put their heads together and collaborate.

Based on work with over 300 clients, Robosoft specializes in deriving value from Design Thinking by being focused on analyzing the changing Digital Transformation needs of our clients and providing solutions for complex problems for small to large organizations. By using Design Thinking and Agile, companies can define and solve their Digital Transformation problems, by incorporating new functionalities using an iterative approach, which is transparent and minimizes risk. Whether the transformation is for business development, administration, operations, finance or marketing, whether you are trying to improve a process that simplifies the lives of employees or customers, or whether you are trying to make progress on a strategic initiative, Design Thinking is your answer to accelerate this business transfiguration. As the contexts change, organizations need to evolve faster than ever and keep redesigning themselves… everyday.

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Mobile Technologies

5 Key Takeaways from LendIt Fintech 2018

Apr 17,2018 / By / No Comments

Last week’s LendIt Fintech event was a great gathering of Banking, Fintech and Lending professionals from across the globe.

Industry experts covered everything from the future of the banking industry in a digital age, to blockchain and the application of AI and machine learning in the financial services domain.

Here is a roundup of some of my key takeaways from the event:

Banking in a post-digital age – being always present for the always-on customer

The banking and the financial services industry is going through a pivotal time. The most critical reason is the changing digital preferences of the always-on customer. Owing to the changing customer preferences and innovations happening in the industry, financial enterprises and banks are compelled to re-imagine the conventional way of connecting with their customers.

Digital is where today’s generation spend a vast majority of their day and the vast majority of their time. An average adult spends about 4 hours a day on the digital platform, checking their smartphone 150 times a day. And, smartphones are not the only connected devices customers are present on – there are wearables, smart speakers, smart cars, smart TVs and the list goes on. It is expected that by 2020 there will be 30 billion connected devices. It is no longer about being present on the digital medium; it is about building a personal relationship with the customers.

As Avid Modjtabai, of Wells Fargo, points out in her talk:

‘It is about developing a profound level of insight into every customer and connecting with them when and where they need us — with experiences that make a difference in their lives.’

Today’s customers share a great deal of information about themselves with enterprises, with the trust that these enterprises will manage and leverage this data to make their lives simpler. This gives enterprises the opportunity to go beyond the transactional relationship with their customers and make it personal.

Banks have to make sure that they are innovating at the same pace as their customers see in other walks of life.

Here are the few ways banks can achieve this:

 

Image source: Lendit.com

Smarter Data

Enterprises have access to over 375 petabytes of data on customers’ behaviour and preferences. To put that into context, one petabyte can store the DNA information of the entire US population and clone it two times over.

With bigdata, we can make this data work and work harder on behalf of the customers.

According to PwC – 46% of the banking customers are digital-only. This is a huge opportunity for the industry to deliver a contextualized, hyper-personalized experience at the moment wherever they are.

In the future data and AI together can:

  • Enable customers to manage their money with just voice.
  • Give intuitive tips that would help customers plan their finances.
  • Help in underwriting and fraud management.
  • Look at the cash flow patterns of customers and give relevant in-the-moment insights.

Next-Gen ID management

Customers trust banks to secure their assets. Identity management is a core component to manage that trust. With customers linking their IDs and financial accounts to a lot more apps and devices, ID management has become more and more complicated and important.

There are about 60 records that are lost or stolen every second, and that adds up to a humongous 5 million records every day.

With a growing number of security and identity breaches, it has become essential for banks to verify every customer at each and every interaction. Today, financial institutions are moving away from knowledge-based authentication to more advanced processes like biometrics, geolocation tracking, device finding technologies, leveraging AI to look at patterns, etc. This combination of technology is making the process much simpler and secure for customers.

Frictionless payments

Technology has transformed the commerce and transactions landscape. Today consumers want their transactions to be integrated and seamless and expect the payments’ process to be done in the least possible steps.

Technology has reinvented commerce. For instance, in Sweden, cash accounts for only 2 percent of all the payments and half of Swedish bank branches are cashless today.

It is imperative for industries to develop simpler and fast-moving money movement capabilities and experiences. Banks have the capability of being pioneers in this area, and some are raising the bar higher, e.g. Zelle P2P payments from Wells Fargo, helps customers transfer money between participating bank accounts in real time.

Transcending channels

Today customers are always connected, and they expect that from enterprises they deal with as well. Customers want to talk to their banks in the moment of their need – this model is changing the way financial institutions have been thinking about channel and distribution.

Also, banks have to make sure that they are not just available when the customers need them; they also give the customers the choice of communicating with them in the way they wanted, e.g., Apple announced Apple business chat with Wells Fargo. It enables customers to chat with their banks through the same messaging app in which they are talking with their friends and family.

Fintech collaboration

Today technology is not just an enabler but is a differentiator for enterprises across industries. And, hence Fintech collaboration is becoming increasingly important for banks. In the coming years, most product innovations will come from fintechs and banks working together.

Finding the right ‘Product Market Fit’ in Fintech is important:

In this digital era, Fintech is more about the ‘Fin’ and less about the ‘Tech’. A lot of financial enterprises build products with ancient infrastructure with a thin layer of UI on it. It is important to find out the right Product Market Fit in Fintech. Instead of looking for a market first, enterprises should aim at finding out the problem that they are going to solve, build a great product around it and then focus on consumers where the product is a right fit.

Here are few tips from Andy Rachleff, co-founder and executive chairman of Wealthfront, to make sure that you find the right Product-Market-Fit:

Understand the What, Who and How before building a product

Three crucial pillars of building a great technology product are finding the answers to these three aspects:

  • What – what are you going to build?
  • Who – for whom is it relevant?
  • How – what is the business model?

Most enterprises do not realize that they shouldn’t iterate on the ‘What’ too much. It is essential for entrepreneurs to identify an inflection point in technology and build a great product around it and then identify the market that needs the product.

Be unconventional

Trying to do better what someone else does is a path to mediocrity. In a technology-led industry, it is important that enterprises innovate and create differentiation for themselves.

Customer delight is the greatest form of advertising

In the journey of product-market fit, paid advertising and customer acquisition can mislead enterprises into thinking that their products are doing well when in reality they aren’t. Further, advertising is a fixed cost, and for small and medium-sized enterprises it means investing in that fixed cost hoping that the market is big enough to take care of that fixed cost. Enterprises should aim at exponential and organic customer growth and invest in infrastructure and build a robust technology first. A great product will delight customers, and that will ensure word of mouth and organic growth of customers.

Not every product idea will work

It is important for enterprises to realize that not every product idea works, some of them are bound to fail. However, it is critical to identify the ones that work and doing all that you can to make those successful.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – a vision for the future

In January 2009, the Bitcoin network came into existence with the release of the first open source Bitcoin client and the issuance of the first Bitcoins, with Satoshi Nakamoto. Since then, the number of businesses accepting Bitcoin continues to increase, and along with it, the industry expectations on the currency continue to be bullish. In fact, even the Mt. Gox fraud of Bitcoins, led to just a drop of 15% in the value of the currency.

How Bitcoin will change the future of banking

The transactions that happen beyond the medium of the banks mostly remain unbanked. Bitcoins can help in bridging this gap and make the unbanked transactions a part of the real economy. Further, Bitcoins help the movement of the currencies easily from one country to another without the need to convert it. Also, it is easier to catch fraud if a transaction is happening via Bitcoins.

Governments across the globe will recognize Bitcoins’ potential

There are a lot of regulatory issues around Bitcoin as of now. However, in the coming few years governments will make it easier for the people to deal with Bitcoins since governments compete for money, entrepreneurs and people, e.g. South Korea made Bitcoins illegal and then they realized that 40 percent of their population already has a Bitcoin wallet, so they had to ease out their regulations. Since the regulatory requirements are not so stringent in the developing economies, they are a potential market for Bitcoins.

Bitcoins will be the new normal

While established financial and payment enterprises aren’t supporting Bitcoins since they already have an established system, companies like Coinbase will become the banks of the future.

Applying AI and Machine Learning to Financial Services Using the Google Cloud

In 2010, Deepmind a start-up created a neural network that learns how to play video games in a fashion similar to that of humans and Neural Turing machine.

Google foresaw how neural networking and AI would change the future of technology forever and acquired the company in 2014.  They started experimenting with this technology and reinvented how Google works internally.  Initially, Deep Learning was used in image recognition through Google photos. In 2015, the technology advanced to not just recognize the targeted image but also the environment (or pixels) around it and further change it.

Deep Learning

Applying AI and Machine Learning

Image Recognition

Image Recognition

Image source: Lendit.com

In the coming years, the technology was used for reading and writing through an auto response to Gmail and voice recognition.Today Google is using AI and Machine Learning to identify user behavior patterns and give output accordingly on Google’s ad network.

User Behaviour Patterns

Image source: Lendit.com

How AI and Machine Learning can change the financial services landscape

Machine Learning can ingest a humungous amount of customer data, structure it, process it and convert it into tensors. These tensors can be then used to train a machine learning system and deliver customized results.

How AI and Machine Learning can change the financial services landscape

Image source: Lendit.com

Financial services can use these techniques of Machine learning and AI to

  • Analyze their customer lifetime value (CLV) better.
  • Define where enterprises can target campaigns to engage most with their customer set.
  • Prioritize customer interaction based on the CLV.
  • Build more efficient processes by using the technology see and fill forms; and also work on quality assurance processes.
  • Read documents and analyze compliance with documents.
  • Listen and speak to customers and shorten the time from enquiry to resolution.

The emergence of the Internet of Value

The Fintech space is evolving very fast. With technologies like blockchain coming up, the fundamental shift that is expected to happen in the coming few years is the emergence of Internet of Value.

This means that financial assets and money will start moving as efficiently as data has been moving in the last 25 years.

The biggest change that blockchain will bring is the complete inter-operability between all the money, systems and the ledgers of the world.

Correspondent banking will dissolve

Today, if someone wants to transfer money across the globe, they have limitations of taxes and time. This issue becomes more prominent when the transaction amount is smaller. Technologies like blockchain will bridge this gap.

Interoperability of data will fasten the pace of globalization

There are three main keys to achieving true Globalization

  • Interoperability of data
  • Interoperability of good
  • Interoperability of money

While we have been able to achieve the first two, we are still lagging behind when it comes to interoperability of money. Blockchain will help in achieving this. The interoperability of money will also be followed by the emergence of IoP or Inter ledger protocol, which is IP or standardization process for ledgers.

Convergence of technologies will make Fintech simpler

The number of smartphone users has been rising and will continue to grow in the coming years. According to the World Bank, in the coming few years every adult in the world will have a digital bank account on their smartphone.

Today, there is the technology and the device, however finding out a link that will wire all of this together is missing. In the coming years, the Fintech industry will figure that out through the interoperability of monies.

Regulators are supporting systems that make sense

Governments across the globe are working towards inclusion of the people and developing economies which are not connected to the world economy today. Digital currencies and enabling regulations by these governments will help in achieving that. Most payments will be machine to machine once the interoperability and developing world problem is solved.

Data security and privacy will be of utmost importance

As the demand for digital assets grows, governments will also make sure that data privacy issues are addressed. New and stringent laws will be introduced. California consumer privacy act is coming out this year and EU GDPR privacy laws etc. are some steps in this direction. We are in the best of Fintech regulatory environment right now.

Currencies will have more use cases and will be more liquid

ICOs are problematic because currencies need to be as liquid as possible and have as many use cases as possible.That will drive value and utility. The early beta of this is cross-border payments but this is just the beginning, and we will see more such use cases of currencies coming up.

Conclusion

The banking and the financial services is at a turning point right now. This year’s LendIt conference gave us a detailed view of the future the industry is moving towards. With changing customer behaviour, technology advances and innovations there lies exciting times for the industry ahead.

You can find more about the event here.

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How healthcare services are getting smarter in the digital era

Mar 19,2018 / By / No Comments

In today’s world ‘patient cycle time’ doesn’t start with a visit to a doctor’s clinic or a hospital and ends when the treatment stops.

It starts right from the time patients start researching on their ailments’ symptoms on the internet, look for doctors’ reviews online and book appointments on an app. And, this cycle goes on till patients get post-treatment consultations from their doctors via a chatbot or a chatting app like Messenger.

Digital technologies, especially in the area of Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC), are helping in transforming the healthcare domain into an efficient, cost-effective, transparent and customized service.

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Python is a deceptively simple but very elegant programming language. It is one of the go-to languages in the domain of numeric computing, scientific computing, data science and machine learning. Data wrangling libraries like Pandas, numeric computing libraries like Numpy and scientific computing libraries like Scipy are all written in Python. Also, machine learning libraries like Scikit-learn, Tensorflow, Keras etc., are in Python. Python data visualization libraries like Matplotlib, Seaborn, Bokeh, Plotly etc are also quite famous. All these libraries are open sourced.

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Feb 19,2018 / By / No Comments

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Augmented Reality – How businesses can make the most out of this opportunity.

Jan 29,2018 / By / No Comments

From Terminator to Iron Man, movies have kindled our interest in technologies like Augmented Reality for many years. While storytellers have used their imagination to show us an augmented world-view and implications of such technologies, many of that imaginary stuff which may have looked too advanced for the real world, have today become a reality.

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Beyond mobile trends: technologies that will shape the digital landscape in 2018

Dec 28,2017 / By / No Comments

Trends have been the hallmark of the fashion industry over the last few decades. Such trends are usually short lived – they probably last for a season or so. Now we live in a social media world, where trends last less than a day! But on a serious note, paying attention to game-changing trends in the mobile & tech world makes sense for enterprises lest they miss out on opportunities which impact their very existence. If Kodak had only paid attention to how photography changed through digital cameras and then mobile phones, the company would still be thriving in an era where selfies and point & shoot are common

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Chatbots: revolutionizing the future of customer experiences

Dec 22,2017 / By / No Comments

In today’s ever-changing business landscape, enterprises are not just competing on the products they deliver but also how they engage with their customers. Prudent businesses are already investing in new-age technologies to win at customer experiences. According to a report by Forbes, 56% of the top performing businesses are investing in AI to personalize and continuously learn from customer interactions.

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