Embracing Technology in Financial Services

"The risk function is being challenged by industry changes. There are digital threats and enablers. Customers' expectations have significantly changed. Concerns around data privacy and data protection continue to intensify. Australia's financial services organisations face a huge number or regulatory compliance obligations. Also, compliance costs are on the rise.

Join our experts as they explore the role of new technologies and new infrastructures, such as Cloud, in building the future risk function. Also, they discuss the growing expectations around risk, culture and conduct risk."

Innovation has changed and evolved over the years. It's one thing to have an idea, but the greater challenge is to successfully execute, test, and scale. There's no shortage of ideas. Australia is a nation that can generate great ideas. We've proven that over and over again. How do you take an idea, see it through, implement it, scale it, and derive benefit?

Join our experts as they discuss how different industries in Australia are taking ideas to execution. They look at what this means looking through a financial services lens in view of the rise of FinTechs.

Whether it be internet banking fraud, identity fraud and identity theft or criminal elements to monetise, cyber-attacks of all types seem inevitable. As cyber criminals become more sophisticated in the methods they use, companies affected by ransomware are on the rise. There are several ways to get infected and many attacks go unreported. Prevention techniques can only help so much. The real answer seems to lie in how we respond. Join our experts as they explore the topic and some interesting insights around how many companies are unprepared to recover their IT systems from backups.

As technology continues to disrupt the financial services industry, the cybersecurity challenge takes center focus as companies invest in protecting their business and consumers. Our host Tim Broome tackles the matter in-depth with security experts Dave Powell and Mark Leadbetter in our latest Embracing Technology in Financial Services podcast. Their conversation touches on a wide gamut of topics, from the evolving nature of cyber threats to new vulnerabilities created by the arrival of open banking. More importantly, they discuss how innovations with technology can enable companies to outsmart their cyberattackers while staying ahead of the security curve.

It's been reported that contact centres will be killed by bots, but can humans still thrive in this new age of technology? Contact centres are a large part of interacting with customers at scale and have typically been a necessary cost for organisations offering a service. Modern approaches to support customers involve interactive voice response, virtual agents and robotic process automation, but do these approaches benefit the customer or the organisation or both? The best of organisational intent focus on Customer Experience (CX), but how close do we really get to treating customers as individuals? How should organisations think about interacting with their customers, and how does this impact their employees? It's been said that AI will be the contact centre killer, when in fact it might be the reinvention of the industry, taking the customer and employee experience to new levels. Tim Broome talks to Kelly Owens, Accenture's Customer Insights and Growth lead for Australia and New Zealand to explore this concept further.

DevOps, is it a tool, or a process? Or, are we actually talking about a culture? It's all the rage right now, but is it useful, or just another set of tools and techniques? It is typically applied when Cloud technologies are used, but how does it move past being a tool and start delivering value for the organisation? How do you ensure its fully utilised and measure its benefit? Tim Broome is joined by Accenture expert guests Ajay Nair and Harshu Deshpande to discuss where DevOps is currently, and where we see it going in the future. They investigate the key learnings that help make using DevOps useful and range of factors required to ensure its success. Noting that, behind disruption there's people, and unless an organisation's people have the right mindset they won't adopt

Companies within the financial services sector are looking for opportunities to simplify their technology landscape. This can often be extremely complex, leaving them the choice between addressing either revenue and/or cost. It's far easier to start by reducing cost, but how can they do this without losing sight of the customer? How can they use technology to support that agenda? A good place to start is to consider what can be done in relation to mainframes and the use of platforms, how to leverage Cloud and remove the need for data centres. Work can also be done around DevOps and more broadly, operations automation. Tim Broome is joined by John Harris, Accenture's Technology Consulting lead for Asia Pacific, to explore the cost pressures on the financial services industry and how technology is really helping to alleviate some of those concerns.