“The current situation has pushed much of the world to explore alternative ways to connect, and technology will be further integrated into our daily lives as we get accustomed to using it for much of our daily activities” commented Ahsan Rasheed Khan, Country Manager – Pakistan & Afghanistan, VMware, during an exclusive Q&A session with our editor in Chief while discussing the impact of COVID-19 on the landscape of financial and technology sector in Pakistan.
1. How do you imagine financial sector post COVID-19?
The financial services industry has always had to embrace new digital technologies and platforms in order to remain competitive. This has centered on its ability to collect and deliver insights to support decision making. Mobile technology has changed the way in which people interact with their financial services provider, with consumers turning to their numerous devices to access and manage their accounts. The drop in in-branch footfall during the pandemic has meant that banks now need to change their delivery of customer services, and look to modernize and mobilize their applications, whilst transforming the in-branch experience.
From the customer perspective, the pandemic has accelerated the move towards a fully digital ecosystem with an increasing number of transactions being made online. This is also catalyzing changes within the financial sector as more customer opt for digital banking at a time when everyone is adhering to social distancing. There is thus an urgent need for banks and institutions to modernize their infrastructure and applications to embrace the full potential of cloud environments so they can meet the demands of their customers who are all going online.
From the perspective of the workforce, businesses must ensure that they have the capabilities to support an increasingly mobile and remote workforce. This is particularly important for employers in the financial sector as they must be able to enable an always-on and secure remote work environment for their employees to access digital tools to remain productive and to ensure that the business continues to run with minimal disruption.
2. What are the challenges and opportunities for FinTechs in the current crisis?
We definitely see a lot of upside for FinTechs in this current situation, given the move towards cross border e-payment transactions and digital services being leveraged. However, this massive surge in data is also exposing players in the financial sector to an increased risk to cybercrime.
In order for FinTech players to seize the opportunity brought about by the momentum we’ve seen in the digital banking/ finance space, organizations in the industry must have an established cyber security strategy in place that makes security intrinsic to the enterprise to enable business continuity and success. By making security intrinsic, organizations will be able to shrink the attack surface, instead of chasing threats, gaining an advantage over potential attackers, while ensuring the integrity of customer data.
The momentum that we have seen in the development of the region’s digital economy also signals that applications have become core to the growth of businesses in this new paradigm. As consumers step up their use of digital technologies during this period, FinTech players must be able to harness the power of modern applications to accelerate agility, innovation and time-to-market to respond quick and deliver hyper-personalized experiences to their customers. This will help businesses build a strong digital foundation that will accelerate their growth in an increasingly tech-driven future.
For supporting the IT infrastructure i.e. (Infrastructure as a Service-IaaS, DRaaS etc) landscape required to propel fintech’s & in-general the startup eco-systems growth in Pakistan VMware has done its part by helping setup four public clouds in Pakistan which are certified to VMware cloud provider program (VCPP) an established international benchmark for cloud providers. Out of these four, three are in the private sector and one is in the government sector to serve specifically the government departments (G-cloud) across Pakistan including the WFH (work from home) VMware solution.
3. How are you observing the need of your clients during the lockdown and how are you responding to them?
As we navigate this new business environment, it is clear that the future of work has changed for both ourselves and out customers. In this new paradigm, the remote workforce has become the new normal and work has also become more distributed.
At a time when ‘business as usual’ is no longer an option, our focus is to help one another, assisting our customers as they respond and adapt. VMware is working closely with our partners and customers to ensure their employees are able to have continuous and secure access to digital tools and services they need to work remotely, maintain productivity and increase connectivity.
In order to enable businesses to implement their business continuity plans quickly, with minimal disruption, VMware, together with our partners have adopted a multi-pronged approach to enable enterprise mobility and resiliency:
- Connect and engage workforces via Digital Workspace solutions with seamless access to critical applications via organizational or personal devices
- Accelerate the performance of enterprise applications as remote connections increase
- Scale elastic capacity quickly as new remote users come online and service demand rises
- Protect all endpoints as workers securely access organizational assets remotely
We have seen an enormous interest spike in our WFH (Work from home) solutions since the crises began with the FSI & FMCG sectors leading this initiative. Our technical teams are constantly in discussion with our customers to help them develop their WFH strategies around their priority use cases. This acceleration on WFH solution starting from a discussion, moving to a demo at times directly to a PoC (proof of concept) and procurement to deployment is like going from 0 to 100 on a turbo charge.
4. In your opinion, how this pandemic will change the future of digital channels?
As we navigate this global pandemic, the future of work is changing – the remote workforce has become the norm as work itself becomes more distributed. At VMware, our focus is to continue to build infrastructure and technology solutions optimized for the workplace of the future.
In this new paradigm, digital channels will become more important than ever as a way for people to live, work and play. The current situation has pushed much of the world to explore alternative ways to connect, and technology will be further integrated into our daily lives as we get accustomed to using it for much of our daily activities.
As a result, digital user experience will be the critical competitive edge as businesses compete for customers in a digitalized business environment, and businesses need to digitally transform themselves today in order to win this race tomorrow.
5. How can you help financial institutions face the COVID-19 crisis?
VMware is committed to Pakistan’s innovation ecosystem; we are well positioned to help businesses here succeed along each step of their digital transformation journey. The strong partnerships we have forged across the ecosystem gives enterprises in Pakistan access to next-generation technologies while providing a robust digital foundation that is critical in meeting modern technology demands such as cloud, intrinsic security, intelligent networks, and digital workspaces.
VMware’s push towards strengthening the mobility ecosystem follows the company’s recent enhancements to its technology portfolio to enable businesses to Connect, Accelerate, Scale and Protect businesses as they cope with the new normal:
VMware Workspace ONE: provides all employees with a secure digital workspace on across any device, including personal mobile devices, desktops and laptops. Harnessing the power of our Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) cloud computing solutions to enable maximum accessibility. The platform will also enable Users without a Windows device to remote access their Window’s desktop at work using VMware Horizon. In addition, VMware Assist allows remote live troubleshooting of devices.
VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud enables organizations to rapidly deploy high-performance branch access to cloud services or private data centers, giving them the ability to scale their networks swiftly to provide the workforce with optimized access to critical resources anytime, anywhere.
VMware Pivotal Labs enables development of cloud-native apps that is fast and agile
VMware Carbon Black Cloud enables machine learning and behavioral analytics to empower security teams to harden, prevent, detect, and respond to any threat, vulnerability or risky system configuration in real-time. Thereby securing endpoints and workloads for businesses to provide a safe and secure digital workspace for their remote workforce.
Given the increasing importance of digital channels in a post-COVID-19 world, we are also assisting many of these organizations with digital transformation projects and enabling them on their journey towards improving their digital user experience on their digital channels, as well as embracing the shift towards modern applications.
