Banks’ CIO Forum and EY to host forum on ‘Navigating the Digital Transformation Journey’ on 5 March

The Banks’ CIO Forum and Ernst & Young will jointly host a forum on ‘Navigating the Digital Transformation Journey’ on 5 March at the Hilton Colombo. The discussion at this forum will swirl around practical aspects of the banking and finance ecosystem transformations and shed light on some use case best practices. 

The keynote on ‘Powering digital through FinTechs’ would be delivered by Sachin Seth, Partner – Digital, Fintech and Tech. Transformation Leader EY Advisory (Africa, India and Middle East). The forum also features two tracks, ‘Intelligent Automation – Delighting the consumer’ and ‘Creating a Data driven Bank with data, analytics and Machine Learning’.

Commenting on the forum, Seth said: “With Sri Lanka understanding the true potentials of FinTech in the Banking and Financial Services Industry (BFSI), now the industry must get to embedding Fintech to create value in its own value chain. For a CIO, it is not about merely deploying a project, but understanding the ‘what’ and ‘how’ digital can comprehend and complement to unify the many functionalities and business units and, how it all could be stitched together.”

Intelligent automation presents a great opportunity to enhance customer experience by allowing smoother and faster interactions with their bank. Further, this allows employees to focus on more value adding work which requires human intervention. 

The track on Intelligent Automation will be led by Anant Gupta – Partner Advisory Services Ernst & Young, co-lead Digital Operations and Finance Transformation practice in India together with Sachin Seth – Partner Digital, Fintech and Tech. Transformation Leader EY Advisory (Africa, India and Middle East), Conrad Dias, Non-Executive Board Director of LOLC Holdings PLC, Director/CEO of LOLC Finance PLC as panellists and Nisthar Cassim, Editor/Chief Executive Officer, Daily FT Sri Lanka as the moderator. 

On the flip side, banks across the country look at data as an asset. Harnessing the true potential of data to become a data driven organisation has been a challenge for most. Creating a data driven bank requires more than technology enablement. 

Nidhi Sinha – Director, Enterprise Intelligence and Analytics in Financial Advisory, EY India will lead the parallel track on ‘Creating a Data driven Bank’ together with panellists, Yasith Fernando, Senior Manager, Digital Transformation, Data and Analytics, EY Advisory Sri Lanka, and Virendra Perera, Chief Strategy Officer, Hayleys Advantis Ltd. Nisala Kodippili – Chief Information Officer, Union Bank of Colombo PLC is to moderate the track. 

The financial system in Sri Lanka, primarily dominated by the banking sector, consisting of 26 Licensed Commercial Banks and six Licensed Specialised Banks, accounts for nearly 60% of the total assets of the financial system totalling to over Rs. 10.9 trillion as at end of 2019.

Saman Samarakoon, Chairman of Bank’s CIO Forum/DGM – Technology and Operations, Sanasa Development Bank PLC, said: “Banks could play a key influential role to strengthen the stagnated economy growth in Sri Lanka. Amidst many financial inclusion initiatives discussed at length today, including banking the unbanked and the under-banked and increasing financial access to Micro, Small and Medium Entities (MSMEs), we realise, Sri Lanka could gain tremendous progress with technology-led solutions to facilitate services to each of these segments in our society.”

As digitalisation becomes more widespread, opportunity will emerge for financial services and fintechs to build an exceptional level of convergence between technology and finance. Opportunities will also emerge for other industries such as retail to work with financial services companies resulting in the convergence of industries.

Arjuna Herath, Partner Advisory EY Sri Lanka and Maldives, stated: “The pace of digitalisation in the Banking and Financial Services Industry (BFSI) is accelerating exponentially whilst playing a pivotal role in the service sector. Banking has way surpassed the branch and mobile devices and in future may even be obsolete. With advanced data analytics allowing the creation of personalised offerings/services, banks must make vast investments in talent and tech to keep apt with meeting the modern-day customer demands and requirements.”

Event registration is by invitation only and further inquiries may be directed to either of the organisers.