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Maveric Systems’ Co-founder and Director, P. Venkatesh tell TechGraph that, “AI and ML have already transformed the way the financial sector seeks to prevent fraud. With the help of these technologies, any suspicious transaction or intrusion is detected in real-time.”
Read the complete interview:
Could you help give a sense of how far Maveric Systems has come since its existence? From when it began to where it is now?
P. Venkatesh: Started in 2000, Maveric Systems is a niche, domain-led, BankTech specialist, that partners with global banks to solve their business challenges through emerging technology. Our 3700+ specialists use proven solutions and frameworks to address the most pressing CXO challenges across customer experience, digital operations, connected core, regulatory compliance, analytics, and cloud enablement. An unsullied track record of playing a pivotal role in 65+ banking transformation engagements is a true validation of our success.
Over the past 4 years, we have exponentially scaled our partnership with 4 of the global top 10 banks and multiple regional banking leaders through high-demand tech services across data, digital, core transformation as well as quality engineering. Our Customer Intimacy Model driven by insight, multi-layered engagement, and relentless focus on delivery impact, has created strong customer trust and helped scale the team from 900 to 3700+ associates.
Differentiated talent with layered competency – deep domain and emerging tech leadership, supported by a culture of ownership, energy, and commitment to customer success, further sets us apart from other industry players. Our global presence spans 15 countries with regional delivery capabilities in Bangalore, Chennai, Dubai, London, Poland, Pune, Riyadh, and Singapore.
How is Maveric Systems utilizing its sectoral expertise and technology to solve the unsolved tech gap in the Fintech & Banking sector?
P. Venkatesh: There are some underlying foundations to the banking business which would continue to remain while it is renewed with new tech. Two of them are Regulatory and Risk. Across these areas, new data platforms are emerging with AI/ML capabilities and on the cloud so that they can be real-time with the ability to scale quickly. Delivering value in these areas demand good banking knowledge, competency in regulatory and risk as well as adaptability to new-age technologies.
Revenue maximization and cost optimization drivers would continue to be prevalent in matured industries and banking is no exception. Across these, combining our banking domain knowledge, scanning of fintech solutions in various segments of banking as well as the underlying technology in them, we bring solutions that would effectively meet the bank’s demands.
How is technology transforming the Fintech & Banking industry? Do you think the trend had taken hold even before the pandemic-induced disruptions?
P. Venkatesh: Banking and financial services are becoming more streamlined and accessible as a result of fintech. Technology has played a prominent part in institutionalizing this change. Accelerated adoption of digital banking has enabled Fintechs and banks alike to reduce the time to market for new product releases. Exponential improvements in customer experience rather than only being paperless and cashless have further changed the contours of banking.
Newer ways of data aggregation, slicing, and dicing for actionable analytics, have enabled banks and Fintechs alike to hyper-personalized their offerings, bring in a sharper focus in terms of product targeting and effectively utilize a wide range of channels frequented by customers.
The adoption of AI and ML-based technology stacks have further accelerated operational efficiencies and upped the decision-making ability of banking players. Areas like robot advisory and chatbots have taken the load off front office teams enabling them to focus more on value-added initiatives.
Even in cases requiring human intervention, these emerging technologies can provide heightened levels of analytics, thereby exponentially enhancing the ability of customer-facing personnel to address customer challenges effectively.
The digital adoption trend had been in motion even before the pandemic. The pandemic has accelerated the trend. Research published by the deVerve group indicates that the pandemic has increased the use of Fintech apps in Europe by 72%.
What are the new trends in the Fintech & Banking industry?
P. Venkatesh: Most fintech solutions have an application, AI/ML, and analytics built into them. While in the past, these focused on a single service or function, they are moving towards a complete product. Buy now pay later is an example of that. Banks are also warming to adopt fintech solutions in their portfolio.
While it is most prevalent on the origination side, it is also becoming a staple one when it comes to a new product or new geography. Fintechs are also being acquired by banking infrastructure providers like card or payment networks such as Mastercard and technology companies FAGMA.
With the Blockchain adoption in the Banking sector is speeding up, How Maveric Systems is going to capitalize on the same?
P. Venkatesh: Banks are adopting blockchain for specific use cases than for a business segment. Contracts management is a use case and is being deployed in the capital market side where multi-parties are involved.
- Trade finance is another area where there is a need for document aggregation and collation involving multiple parties, and blockchain is being adopted here.
- Instant payments, especially cross-border payments, are another area where this is picking up.
- Distributed ledger serves well in those contexts where the parties are geographically distributed and there are multiple such parties.
Maveric focuses on retail, corporate, and wealth management segments of banking. Maveric is tracking blockchain developments in Payments, Trade Finance, and the securities side of wealth management. At this time, we are familiarizing ourselves with the tools and platforms that are available.
How do you see technologies namely Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning, with regards to their relevance across Fintech & Banking? What does the future look like?
P. Venkatesh: AI and ML have already transformed the way the financial sector seeks to prevent fraud. With the help of these technologies, any suspicious transaction or intrusion is detected in real-time. This allows financial institutions to take immediate action, helping to protect their clients.
Banks use AI-driven bots to provide better customer service through automated responses to queries and are now even automating some banking operations. This considerably reduces human error, saving time and money.
Banking leaders have been actively adopting AI/ML-based technologies across areas like fraud detection, regulatory compliance, wealth management, personalization, and customer experience. AI adoption is also prevalent in advanced levels of analytics for driving newer customer-centric products and profitability. Most of these have been accelerated on account of a pandemic. McKinsey estimates that AI has the potential to generate up to $1 trillion in additional value for the global banking industry annually.
Understanding the key role played by such technologies in banking business transformation, we have been building our capabilities across new age BankTech stacks for the past 4 years. Our high-demand tech services incorporating these tech stacks have been widely accepted by our strategic as well as key banking customers. We have also been actively adopting AI technologies across our accelerators as well as creating breakthrough business solutions on leading industry platforms.
Maveric Systems has been collaborating with different industry experts, banks, and technology partners to boost its digital presence. Going forward, do you see more such engagements?
P. Venkatesh: Typically, most associations have been specific to the industry. Now, ecosystem play across segments has become more relevant. At one level, instead of reacting to regulators, many have started proactively participating to align and work on the future state. At another level, banking, fintech, and technology players are coming around to establish partnerships on how they could co-work. At the backbone of every tech player’s entry into finance, be it payments or lending, is the banking aspect.
If banking is moving in this direction, we as specialist bank-tech players must be in this ecosystem to provide the leadership and insights to our customers and at the same time learn and be ahead in understanding how the key players are influencing its future.
What is the roadmap for Maveric Systems going forward?
P. Venkatesh: Having invested in the right partnerships and building contextual solutions across key areas of customer experience, regulatory compliance, digital operations, connected core, and cloud enablement, we are now focusing on building sales, and consulting as well as nearshore delivery capabilities in Europe and US. Acquiring new customers and driving transformation engagements with them will be key for us in this fiscal.
In line with our growth, we are increasing our infrastructure capability by another 1400 seats throughout 2022 across Chennai and Bengaluru as well as opening a new delivery capability in Pune.
We have been growing at a CAGR of 35% over the past 2 years and will be clocking revenues to the tune of 520 crores in FY 22. We expect to grow with a CAGR of 35% over the next 2 years as well, driven by robust growth across our strategic and key customers (global top 10 banks and regional banking leaders) that contribute to 90% of our revenue.