The Data Driver

By: Michael Fettweiss, Sales Manager in Financial Services at Red Hat & Andreas Neeb, Enterprise Solution Architect at Red Hat
Due to the increasingly competitive nature of the market, it is clear that financial institutions need to bring new products and services to market in a faster, more efficient manner quickly. An increasing number of near and non-banks are already offering services related to payment transactions, the credit industry, and investment consulting and this trend will continue.

HDFC Life announced the launch of India’s first life insurance chatbot in collaboration with Haptik, India’s largest chatbot platform. The chatbot will act as a financial guide to help users choose the most suitable life insurance plans and solutions.

IT spending by banking and securities firms in India will reach $7.8 billion dollars in 2017, an increase of 8.6 percent from 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. This forecast provides total enterprise IT spending for internal spending and spending data on data center, devices, software, IT services and telecom services.

By: Emma Isichei, Worldwide Category Director, Capture Solutions at Kodak Alaris
Retail banks in the Middle East have done a commendable job of automating their customer-facing systems in recent years. Foremost examples are large ATM networks or a newly launched smart device app. However, there are hidden lingering problems that automation hasn’t fully addressed: a handful of manual, paper-based systems in the back office.

Renewable energy stakeholders across India including CLEAN recently welcomed the RBI's recent decision to accord priority sector lending status to the industry. As an industry association for the off-grid renewable energy sector that works to improve the quality of life of around 400 million Indians living without access to modern forms of energy, CLEAN held an exclusive event in the capital for around 70 partners and member organizations to specifically discuss the issue of debt financing for small scale, off-grid energy entrepreneurs. The workshop, organized in association with GIZ India and SELCO Foundation, facilitated a two-way dialogue between entrepreneurs serving energy poor consumers in remote areas and bankers working in these areas.

Participating in an Exhibition, organised with the support of Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India, under the aegis of 'National Conference on Harnessing Technology for the Empowerment of person with Visual Impairments', Oxigen Services India Pvt. Ltd, India's pioneering payment solutions provider launched an initiative to support people with visual impairment to enable them to avail banking services that they otherwise till now have been eluded from.

In order to reduce the payment settlement headaches of marketplaces and online aggregators in the country, PayUPaisa has announced the launch of its new offering - ‘All-in-One’payment settlement solution.This solutionaddresses all the problems related to money settlement and help marketplaces achieve higher efficiency by providing better control over fund disbursements mechanisms.
A marketplace or an aggregator sells to buyers from its website and in turn settle money to thousands of sellers for every transaction that happens on its website. However, the payment settlement happens through standard sources of payments like- cash, cheques, NEFT transfers etc. This typically leads to tiring manual reconciliation of large data, tedious dispensing of accurate individual payments to sellers which often leads to delays and there is lack of transparency between both the parties.  This creates serious problems for a marketplace when it comes to maintaining account history and running balanc…