Security threats, data leakage risks, increasing workloads and many such challenges are evolving, demanding real-time actions from enterprises to prevent massive business losses in terms of money and customers.
A strong digital presence is an unsaid compulsion for businesses to grow today. Be it banks, fintech companies, e-commerce or other service enterprises, a secure and effective online platform inevitably draws more customers. Security threats, data leakage risks, increasing workloads and many such challenges are evolving, demanding real-time actions from enterprises to prevent massive business losses in terms of money and customers.
How advanced technologies can improve digital businesses
Latest solutions powered by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud and edge computation can be tailored as per individual business needs. For instance, customers are more inclined towards banks that provide end-to-end digital solutions, either Web- or mobile-based. To provide uncompromised security and swiftness with on-the-go platforms, banks and financial institutions need to look towards these modern technologies.
Faulty transactions is one of the biggest challenges banks face, which result in loss of customers. Subhasis Bandyopadhyay, general manager – BFSI, Mindtree, says, “The challenge comes from dependency on older static rules and legacy platforms. These need to be updated to AI-powered engines that have the ability for real-time analysis. Indian banks are yet to mature to understand how to reduce false alerts while detecting faults in real time.”
e-Commerce platforms were the early adopters of AI-powered solutions, using these for better recommendations, virtual trial rooms, flexible search options and so on—improving overall customer experience. Now most enterprises can improve internal productivity and transparency towards customer communication with advanced communication platforms.
While improving customer experience and process efficiency, and increasing business productivity are the direct benefits of AI solutions, other crucial application areas of AI are cyber security and data privacy. Sourabh Issar, chief executive officer, CloudSek Information Security Pvt Ltd, says, “In India, while B2C channels (like credit and debit cards, Aadhaar cards, etc) get breached the most, the real money is lost to hackers through B2B medium.
“The hacker community is getting interested in the Indian financial sector because of the high amount of money being put into circulation by our country. Sensitive data like user account information of various websites, employee and agents data, and so on, are available for sale on the dark Web. This can have catastrophic consequences on professional as well as personal lives.”
Technology as a solution
In response to these challenges, there are a number of solutions available in the market. Let us look into some of these.
Machine learning (ML)-powered platform for banks
In banks, finding the root cause of faulty transactions often becomes cumbersome because of manual processes. Automating this can exponentially reduce the time and effort that is invested in root-cause analysis (RCA).
One such platform, delivered by Mindtree on an ML engine developed by TookiTaki, provides an automated alert management and reconciliation solution. The inbuilt smart reconciliation management system provides quick adjustment recommendations in case of errors and resolutions for exceptions with high accuracy. The smart alert system detects suspicious activities or bad transactions, and raises caution in real time. The system increases RCA efficiency up to 50 per cent and reduces false alerts by 40 per cent.
Pankaj Choudhary, vice president – BFSI, Mindtree, says, “The post-authorisation tool goes through the databases, and learns the patterns of transactions and types of alerts that occur. Optimal efficiency of the system increases with time as the platform binds itself more to the dataset and studies more patterns of transactions. Software as a service (SaaS) follows a monthly or yearly subscription model that can be availed over cloud or deployed on-premise.”
As an example, Choudhary cites a mid-sized North American bank that gained 40 per cent higher business efficiency, while a large European bank was able to reduce 30 per cent operational cost on error control, damage control and RCA study using the platform.
Smart messaging platform for businesses
Businesses more familiarly use either Gmail or Outlook as their main emailing platform. The difficulty often faced by managers and team leaders is keeping track of email interactions, customising recipients, ensuring data privacy and having clear communication with clients.
New-age messaging clients solve these issues actively. For instance, IceWarp is an emailing platform that has a unique feature called TeamChat, in addition to the usual To, Cc and Bcc fields. Any message sent across TeamChat is represented in a group chat-like user interface.
The platform organises group emails along with documents and files being shared. More interestingly, any client who does not have access to the company network can be added to TeamChat through a guest session, where team members can directly share updates and files with the client. This kind of a solution boosts customer satisfaction through transparency and ease of access to vendors. Simultaneously, managers have clear visibility on their team’s official communications, internally and with clients, increasing awareness of the data being shared in the process.
Adam Paclt, global chief executive officer, IceWarp Inc., shares a use case, “A construction company that creates channels to handle projects and invites clients to communicate directly with managers adopted IceWarp platform. Its clients were happy to be able to have documented conversations with the whole team while putting forward their requirements. Managers were able to deploy and troubleshoot queries swiftly.
“Companies who adopted TeamChat have decreased email traffic by 40 per cent and improved problem-solving speed by more than 30 per cent.”
Digital risk management solution for enterprises
Data breach or a hacked network can potentially drive a company towards bankruptcy. The aim of the hacker community is to find vulnerabilities in enterprise networks and use those as entry points. While a fairly new concept in India, digital risk management solutions are becoming fairly important.
For instance, CloudSek provides such solutions, and is partnered with several banks and large IT enterprises in India. CloudSek platform can identify various potential network entry points of a company and point these out in real time, so that necessary precautions can be taken.
In addition, its AI-powered engine with big data capabilities can search thousands of sources in the surface Web and dark Web with 5000 keyword combinations in a matter of hours to detect any potentially leaked data across the Internet. The platform collects 10GB to 15GB raw incremental data each day—standard manual processes that would otherwise take weeks. Reports generated enable enterprises to take reformative actions.
This kind of a solution can be incredibly useful for large enterprises, financial organisations or high security networks, where a single data leak can be disastrous.
More solutions
There are numerous other solutions that provide great online business processes. For instance, Salesforce is a popular platform that delivers clear visibility of sales and marketing achievements along with the progress of a company.
Archer is another platform heavily used for secure online operations.
Indian banks have created a technical community called Bankchain, which is piloting blockchain-based solutions to improve the national banking infrastructure. ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, State Bank of India, Kotak Bank, Bank of Baroda and so on have joined the community. Member banks receive updated network infrastructure and upgraded tools for banking. Moreover, they are added to the currently under-test blockchain network to enable secure and error-free transactions.
Overall, Indian enterprises are on their toes to deliver secure, efficient and flawless online services to customers. Choudhary concludes, “If businesses do not keep their infrastructure up-to-date, it will create a lot of loopholes in their network, which can lead to massive business losses. This should become the focus area for enterprise auditors.”
