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5 Marketing Mantras to accelerate in the New World Order

5 Marketing Mantras to accelerate in the New World Order

The pandemic has brought about unprecedented business impact across all sectors. Human interaction and behaviour is no longer predictable as the new world order has taken over. In such volatile times, marketers need to continuously innovate to keep their audience engaged.

Change was the only constant in the year gone by. The below points highlight key trends that will bring about systemic changes in the way marketing is going to be done in the future.

  • Digital – The Great Leveller: Going digital for marketers was no longer a choice. Since everyone was working remotely, marketeers had to find new ways on engaging with their audience, without any human touch. This meant that the winner was not the one with the highest dollar spend but the one who could break the clutter. Small and Medium Enterprises were more nimble and grasped this opportunity with both hands as they could now compete with the big names on a level playing field. This trend is likely to continue and drive new ways of engagement through the digital channels. This means that we will see a lot more innovation in the adoption and usage social media, SEO, email marketing, virtual events to name a few.
  • Efficacy and Efficiency Drive Marketing Technology Investment: Given the state of business, marketing budgets were also slashed across the board. Suddenly, RoI became paramount for marketing leaders. It also made them realize that technology adoption can achieve a lot more with a lot less. Investments in automation tools, chatbots, AI-powered and data-driven marketing became real. This trend will only get stronger post pandemic as marketing teams will continue to gain from revisiting their marketing technology investments.
  • Personalization will be the key: As customers started to become more careful with their spends, marketers realized they had to make an emotional connect in order to drive any message across. This meant fewer but highly personalized messages across multiple channels synchronized in a way that they feel compelled by a need. Thus, the use of technology backed by limited engagement options made marketeers focus on personalization a lot more. The trend which was more in talks is now a reality.  Further, Account based marketing will also see hyper-personalization as messaging becomes more important and marketing teams become more tech-savvy. The quality of interaction enhanced by higher customer intelligence will make the overall experience much richer.
  • Empathy will continue to be the key theme: The world has gone through a lot of pain. People have lost their loved ones, their jobs and all their life’s savings. A big change observed in corporate behaviour was that of empathy. This also reflected in the messaging that was used across customer channels. It was a much needed change from the ruthless selling that was being done in the past. Post-pandemic too, this theme is likely to continue as we rise from the ashes and move towards a world which is value oriented rather than ostentatious.
  • Content All The Way: With efficacy, efficiency and personalization being the focus, it all came down to content. Execution at content level was monitored across all management levels as companies realized the need for quality rather than quantity. Going forward, Content marketing — creating useful, relevant and credible content that benefits the user — will remain the core for marketers. Starting with the content or the message that speaks to our audience, then translating it to the relevant channels and formats, will be the only way to create consistent, effective user experiences. Moreover, interactive & visual content such as assessments, games, polls, interactive videos and surveys will become more prevalent as communication will change to bi-directional.

    In summary, in these times marketeers should :

    • Be nimble. Plan but be ready to change it.
    • Invest in technology as that will give you the edge.
    • Analyse buyer journeys before making investments.
    • Focus on visually compelling, interactive & quality content.
    • Lastly, bring genuineness to every moment.
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Identify Help Zones through Mind maps, Push your Boundary and Discover the ‘Queen’

Identify Help Zones through Mind maps, Push your Boundary and Discover the ‘Queen’

Oftentimes it is not the change itself that poses a challenge as much as our inability to seek help.  Whatever the change may be – ranging from as simple as moving into a different workspace within the same office to joining a new company – we may be reinventing the wheel by not asking for help!

H-E-L-P. It is a four-letter word – innocuous, universal, and a sign of our being human. And yet, sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to ask for it.  Asking for help is a scientific process and when mastered can accelerate learning and therefore, productivity.

In recent times, however, the waves of hashtag awareness campaigns on the social-media-seas, is thankfully reversing our attitude towards seeking help. We may not have turned into proactive-help-seekers overnight, but the criticality to do so, increases each day. We miss the interactions that characterized the pre-pandemic days, etching in our consciousness, forlorn memories of the cafeteria conversations, passionate debates, impassioned debriefs, celebratory events, and not to forget the heavily loaded smiles that we exchanged with our prank-mates even while rushing to take the crowded lift car so we may make it on time to office!

We are getting used to the new normal and learning cannot happen through real-time observations and classroom spaces alone, not anymore!

New situations call for new learning methods. It is time to seek help by asking the right questions and learning thus.

Inclusive leaders understand asking for help is an organic way of allowing team members to share their expertise and knowledge with each other. Getting out of comfort zones, is the first (and the toughest) step towards beating the forces of ‘negative’ gravity and ‘fear-of-failure’ inertia.

For those of you who are new to mind maps, here’s one coming your way… and yes, do watch the Queen’s Gambit, if you already have not. The power of the mind can bring to life even the boring ceilings of a dilapidated orphanage!

Mind Maps

And, the next time when someone pushes you, understand that they see your potential and want you to realize your inner power.

When you encounter an unknown terrain, start with tracing out a Mind Map. Mark out areas that you need help executing or even formulating. Articulate this to your team. You would have pushed your boundaries, acquiring the power of the proverbial queen!

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Accelerate Next with Reimagined Talent Management Practices

Accelerate Next with Reimagined Talent Management Practices

The only way out is through; because the organizations focussed on ‘accelerate next’ thrive on an internal culture that is best summed up as: The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.

In fact “accelerate next” is more than a catchy phrase. Here’s why.

Rapid digital transformation for decades now has enabled organizations to reimagine the way they work and manage talent: from video conferencing platforms, to digital collaboration software, to ubiquitous cloud-based connectivity, and a data-centric approach to strategic decision-making.

But it took a pandemic to truly accelerate this trend and transform. If you look closer, people aren’t simply collaborating today – they are educating themselves, they are visiting families, they are running virtual marathons, they are attending festivals, they are appearing for school examinations, and they are off course running businesses.

For millions of people globally, technology is upending the word collaboration and rewiring it as co-habitation

In this raging crisis, along with the difficult-to-define and the more difficult-to-achieve term namely, ‘Work-Life balance’, are a few trends that though appeared on the horizon before 2020; if mastered will accelerate the next.

  • Emotional and Social connections are now possible in sustained physical isolation
  • Adaptability is the new employee-productivity metric
  • Agile, Hybrid, and fluid workforce models are more than ever inviting digital nomads and the gig-economy workers.
  • Workplace is not determining Workforce anymore.
  • Talent as the new global currency is challenging how geographic borders, immigration laws, and government restrictions were perceived

Embrace uncertainty, Navigate Complexity, Harvest hyper-connectivity, Lead with empathy; be fast be bold and think people first – All these principles for many years were designed to be innovation behaviours. After 2020, they will become default.

Simply said, Organizations always knew that primary HR responsibility across decades was to prepare ‘people for the unknown’. And at no other time has this been clearer.

Reimagining talent management practices for the beyond still involves grappling with 5 core questions:

  • How do I understand the talent I need?
  • How do I understand the talent I have?
  • How do I develop talent for disruptive times?
  • How do I recruit the right top talent?
  • How do I prepare when the pandemic passes?

The answers however would all sound different tomorrow. Having evolved in a COVID year that accentuated technology as an enabler, and changed employee mind sets; Innovative HR’s are now brining focus to a beyond-pandemic world.

Reimaging Talent Management Practices – The beyond

A great takeaway from what has been a dismal year would be to start pandemic learning rhythms and mini-adaptability discussions.

Employees and Talent managers across cultures, and geographies, will gain manifold were they to examine:

  • What core-beliefs and company values were tested and how?
  • How has the crisis exposed weaknesses and surfaced resilience?
  • What are the new post COVID norms that can leverage these learning(s)?

The key in all of this is the, ‘purpose-of-life’ question. Since COVID happened, the answers to real purpose of life, how does work contribute to that purpose and what is critical to an individual’s happiness are all an integral part of the collective consciousness discussion!

Organizations that spend time and effort, and demonstrate intent to positively learn from the pandemic experience will have a head start in 2021.

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Banks Are Embracing Cloud & Open-Source

Banks Are Embracing Cloud & Open-Source

Founded in 2000, Maveric Systems is a software engineering services company that works across financial platforms, banking solutions, data technologies and regulatory systems. The firm has offices around the globe to serve their banking partners spanning across 15 countries, along with a dedicated offshore delivery and research centres in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Singapore.

The company initially offered testing services to banks and financial institutions but, by 2012, Maveric Systems expanded into other areas like software development, analytics and digital platform architecture for banking domain specialisation.

We connected with Muraleedhar Ramapai, Executive Director of Data at Maveric Systems to know more about innovations that banks worldwide are exploring, including data analytics and open-source machine learning frameworks. Here are the excerpts:

Analytics India Magazine: How has the company been impacted due to the ongoing pandemic?

Muraleedhar Ramapai: We have been growing despite the pandemic and that’s one of the key things. We are finding good takers from newer businesses as well as the older ones for our services, especially in software and data analytics.

Initially, we did functional validation of computerisation which used to happen in the banks, then, once the packages came in, we did their installation, testing, quality, and engineering for banks. Five years ago, we added three more businesses and are now implementation partners for a lot of banks in building microservices-based architecture and integrating it with most of the other parts of the legacy banking systems.

Data Analytics is the newest of the businesses. And within data analytics, we’re helping banks move from their traditional models to newer ways. So, analytics is comparatively a small footprint, maybe 10-15% of our business, but a larger thing is data engineering. And what we’re realising is that banks will have to redo their approach on how they have been managing data to be able to go multi-channel and move away from batch approach of data to streaming analytics approach.

AIM: What have been the biggest demands from banking customers during the pandemic in terms of software?

There is a lot of demand in terms of microservices and related aspects, and also related to content development — whether it is using any of the newer modern technology, or traditional ones to build web-facing assets. There is also a massive requirement of data integration and quick movement from across business units, sites and applications into data warehouses. Also, the central banks and governments are coming out with various consumer-friendly/ SME-friendly digital products. New systems are being set up with complete new workflows. Finally, there is a demand for data movements to support new regulatory requirements around the world.

AIM: What have been the biggest focus areas for innovation in the last year or so in the banking sector?

There is a lot of focus on how to lend to SMEs. Especially after COVID, the government is focusing on ensuring that SMEs return to their health. Another focus is fintechs. There is a lot of focus in Europe on open banking in collaboration with fintech innovation and open APIs. Finally, there is an emphasis on the use of data analytics as opposed to traditional methods, whether it is customer identification, prospect identification or using AI for KYC.

AIM: Maveric is involved in the whole technology ecosystem from IT to data analytics and software development. What are some of the main focus areas for Maveric?

Our traditional focus has been on banks where we implement large enterprise transformation programs in banking systems, which are getting upgraded and replaced. Enabling digital services is another area for us. Here we are building microservices architecture, which will help them to work with open banking.

When I’m talking about open banking, we are not creating those mobile apps for fintech, but data integration with the bank. We are focusing on data and analytics in two areas — regulatory and anti-money laundering & fraud. There are packages and algorithms on how to integrate and power such analytics systems.

AIM: In terms of exploring open-source and cloud, what kind of technologies are the banks looking for?

There is a lot of cloud adoption, at least in medium-sized companies in some geographies. It is less in America perhaps, but in Asia and Europe, companies are adopting cloud. Companies are moving more towards either cloud data warehouses, and even the non-structured data is coming into them.

The second is moving from the traditional way in which analysis was shared within the banks. There is more democratisation of data and data-enabled documents.

The third one is the adoption of open source, especially in advanced analytics space such as machine learning. Here a lot of ML systems are GPU-based running tasks like Computer Vision using open-source frameworks based on Python.

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There is immense value in using Python libraries for example, to do a machine learning model, even in regulated sectors such as banking. Banks are connecting with community support such as from academia and open-source ML products to carry innovations.

AIM: Do you also have an internal team of data scientists which help develop these models and deploy them? 

We do have a small team. We are working with one large bank to enable some of their data and analytics routes. But our work is primarily focused on enabling data scientists using engineering.

AIM: There are a lot of client systems running on legacy systems, how far do you think these banks are when you compare them to the state-of-the-art fintech companies? 

Not having legacy gives fintech an advantage for sure, but that does not mean that banks have poor technology. Banks, before releasing a product, need to ensure many things which a peer to peer lender may not. They don’t have to adhere to various norms. But we’re seeing a lot of banks quickly modernising. A lot of them are investing in technology, and a lot of them are also open to collaborating with fintech.

So the comparison of fintechs versus banks is, in my opinion, not right. It is more about what is in it for the customer and if the customer demands a good experience, banks will have to invest heavily to modernise. For example, when you look at North America, and even parts of Europe, there are still transaction systems which might be running in so-called legacy mainframes. There are many beautiful integration technologies which are available these days to upgrade banks’ digital offerings.

AIM: Are you looking to hire more talent at the moment?

Talking about talent, we have labs where our team members work on streaming data coming from stock exchanges to build signal mining from that data. We are also using social media data to advise banks on what they should build on their mobile apps, where they should focus and more. These tasks require high-end talent, and we are establishing sizable data science projects, and we are also expanding our data engineering team.

This interview was originally published on Analytics India Magazine website and is being reproduced here.

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Accelerate Next: A Maveric Banking Success Story in COVID times

Accelerate Next:  A Maveric Banking Success Story in COVID times

The century’s black swan event, Pandemic, continues to force deep changes in the banking industry – Governments have swung in with targeted interventions, customer preferences have been altered to favor digital channels, and technology is enabling businesses desperate for continuity and also powering game changers that seek advantages in the new next.

In all of the gloom and doom development, here is an encouraging story. It comes from Maveric, a two-decade seasoned banking sector technology services consulting and integration partner.

Within Maveric, the ‘Accelerate Next’ philosophy permeates deep into its brand promise, customer strategy, and operational rhythms.

Accelerate next is constructed of and evidenced when three vital enterprise-wide strengths coalesce: Conscious contextualization, Comprehensive competencies, and Core commitment.

This piece will elicit one of three mentioned pillars – Core Commitment.

But first the context:

One of Maveric’s customers – A Tier 1 global bank catering to consumer banking, with the largest credit cards customer base in the US, and a strong presence in the Mortgage Industry, collaborated with Maveric during the Pandemic. In addition to their current programs, because of COVID 19, all US banks were inundated with multiple COVID related programs which includes stimulus package rollouts, small business investments support etc.

The ‘new situation’ mandated for multiple programs to be launched, causing enormous workload for technology teams in Consumer Banking.

Clearly the stakes for the Bank was its brand image and customer’s business survival.

From a Maveric POV the challenges were new and numerous: From not being able to work from office, next to nil time face time for interactions, knowledge transfer or joining orientations. The logistics challenge aggravated further due to the Virus’s high exposure risk. This meant that work from home was fast becoming the norm. As the programs count steadily soared, the headcount for the project’s delivery remained unchanged.

In summary, despite the growing exigent situation, the need to continuous deliver programs with desired quality (without additional funding), meant re-wiring for the new normal.

Maveric Solution measures:

  • Focussed BCP initiatives (48 hours and workforce transited to Work-from-Home)
  • Stepping up Stakeholder Governance (Program wise leadership calls for reporting on delivery updates, employee well-being, productivity metrics)
  • Depth of Management attention for Stakeholder engagement (Consistent connects across Strategic, Tactical, Operational)
  • One on One connect with customer key stakeholders (Maveric’s sponsor director started weekly touch points with the client director for risk assessments and proactive resolutions)
  • Program and Progress Reporting (Real time dashboard reporting institutionalized along with a daily risk mitigation plan)

As one of the three levers of ‘Accelerate Next’, the Maveric Intervention exemplified ‘Core Commitment’; a partnership attribute that comes from high flexibility and stamina, and demonstrated through a culture of ownership and empowerment.

For more details, refer to the full case study.

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