Good morning,
I’m delighted to greet and welcome you on behalf of Republic Bank to Tech Hub Islands Summit 2023.
We are honoured to be this Conference’s title sponsor for the fifth consecutive year, and especially value our partnership with AMCHAM and our fellow sponsors. In just a few short years since its inception, Tech Hub Islands Summit has advanced both the national and regional discourse on digital transformation, an area which we at Republic Bank fully support and emphasize.
We’re delighted you could join us at this forum, where we can be assured of thought-provoking, insightful, solution-oriented discussions from expert thought-leaders, around the theme CATAPULT, a most appropriate choice which speaks to propulsion, lift-off, setting in motion the holistic movement necessary for readiness for a rapidly evolving future.
The International Development Bank’s 2021 Caribbean Quarterly Economic Bulletin on Digital Infrastructure and Development in the Caribbean confirmed that COVID-19 sped up technological adoption across many sectors and placed them years ahead in terms of digital transformation. Overall, investments in innovation and advanced technology, are certainly accelerating.
At Republic Bank, we’re closely aligned with technological transformation both as a strategy and a journey. Over the last decade or so, we’ve experienced significant wins, growth, and lessons that characterize the tech evolution. We’ve transitioned through various stages and levels of technological change - including the adoption of new digital tools, processes, and systems; and the introduction of new digital banking channels and communications - all with the strategic goal of enhanced internal and external customer experience.
We recorded for example an over 350% increase in acceptance of our E-commerce solution and 94% increase in sign-ups for our Corporate Online Banking solution to date, as both businesses and individuals navigated around lockdown measures and accompanying restrictions with digital preferences continuing into the post-pandemic period. More recently, we’ve partnered with Cybersource, a subsidiary of our fellow Caribbean Premier League Sponsor VISA, to become the exclusive acquirer for CPL online ticket sales, using our EPay e-commerce solution. In fact, the CPL is one of over 300 companies already utilising EPay to process digital transactions in a user-friendly and secure manner, another win enabled by digital transformation!
Notwithstanding, as McKinsey’s 2018 research report titled “Unlocking success in digital transformation” highlights, digital transformation initiatives are often challenging to implement, in both high and low technology sectors, and are often marked by very low success rates and little to no improvement in overall organisation performance.
Which brings us to this Forum. How do we catapult to overcome the challenges, to where performance, success and future-readiness are all aligned?
Technology in isolation does not offer sustainable solutions. The rapid pace of change in systems and features; and the equal pace of obsolescence push us to be ever aspirational in our approach to becoming a tech hub. Decisions must be centred on where we aspire to be versus what we can do to catch up with the technology of the future.
In our Keynote address at this Summit last year, Republic Bank called attention to the five essential components of digital transformation: - people, competition, data, innovation, and value.
At our media launch earlier this month, I highlighted the importance of people, as any organizational transformation must first be accepted and driven by people. Right mindsets, skills, knowledge, and dedication are critical for successful digital transformation.
A recent McKinsey study of the region highlights the following core set of factors necessary to catapult us into a state of improved tech transformation:
i) having the right, digital-savvy leaders in place
ii) building capabilities for the workforce of the future
iii) empowering people to work in new ways
iv) giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade
v) communicating frequently via traditional and digital methods.
These factors are foundational for a proper transition towards a digital society, but they need to be coupled with the institutional framework that makes the transition possible. A framework guided by leadership decision, and enabled and sustained by the right people skills.
As we consider the Republic Bank experience and current aspiration, we recognise three core skills that are necessary for future proofing our business.
1. Agile Project Management and Mindset: The ability to lead and deliver change effectively is a capability that keeps on giving. The rate of change across technology, market expectations, and regulations, compels the organisation to maintain a constant state of change. This not only includes framework, process, and technology but a mental agility and flexibility in our workforce for sustained effectiveness.
2. Data Management: Data and analytics play a critical role in all strategic decisions. A 2023 BAI special report on driving customer growth states, data is merely a starting point. While data is a critical ingredient, it requires a disciplined approach to harness its power. Like any valuable asset, we must inventory, secure and organize the data and make it accessible to the analysts and decision-makers. Then, we simply answer three questions: what, so what and, most importantly, now what.
Managing data requires skilled data architecture(s), data analysts/engineers and data scientists. With the mass of data we create daily, while this brings an obligation to ensure we’re focussed on appropriate data governance and architecture, of critical importance is also having the right skills and collaboration to turn that data into forward-looking insights, trends, and new digital products remain for success.
Let’s take ESG data incorporation for example. In the Financial Brand’s Summer 2023 insights they’ve noted the global priority placed on issues such as climate change, business ethics and corporate governance. With ESG playing a central role in Financial Institutions’ efforts to identify long term opportunities and risks, banks face several data and technology challenges in incorporating ESG. Banks are therefore required to build capacity to ensure full ESG data, build proprietary ESG analytics and integrate ESG workloads into workflow applications and tools.
3. Digital Experience – Core banking products are commoditised with the differentiator being quality of our service and the ‘stickiness’ of the user-experience as guided by our customers’ expectations. There should, for example, be as few layers as possible between us and the customer; and yes, we use technology in the form of mobile applications, web sites, kiosks, and ATM(s). However, those experiences and designs are driven by people with skills in customer experience design, user interface design and experience, mobile application development, API development and cyber security to ensure we strike the right balance between customer experience and security.
Lemonade’s Leader Experience report on Driving Customer Loyalty with Superior digital experience, noted this is a vital component of lasting customer loyalty. Providing an exceptional digital customer experience leads to a host of benefits for a financial institution, from gained efficiencies to customer loyalty. However, creating exceptional digital customer experience isn’t just about good tech.
Safraz Catz, Oracle’s CEO once said, “The hardest thing about these transformations isn’t the digital technology, it’s the sociology.” Employees are the bridge between the human and digital sides of banking. The key to delivering an exceptional digital customer experience comes down to your people. Hiring and training to improve or remove related impediments to success is imperative. Apart from foundational knowledge, digital fluency, advocacy and supporting staff and customers on demand are essential.
Coordinating and managing the required skills’ sets suggest the need for strong, focussed, “digital savvy” leaders to understand, influence and execute. Simply put, our leaders must lead change. Change has become the current business as usual, and our leaders must become “builders” as well as “managers”. Paradigms in technology and cyber security risk are changing too fast to “try and manage” within the current status quo. We’re instead required to re-examine our operating models. Do our models fit the world we live and operate in today? Do our strategic plans adequately prepare us for a future of tech success? Leaders are expected to challenge assumptions regarding risk, organizational structures, and skills.
In our view therefore, building a cyber-security-minded culture is also a critical people-driven imperative. As there will never be enough candidates with the required depth of experience, we must look towards managing cyber security as a technical capability and equally important, embed it into our culture - in every role - and inspire, educate, and drive awareness with risk mindsets and behaviours. In part this calls for continuing awareness and education as well as addressing the blockers from achieving the required behaviours.
World renowned philosopher and historian, Yuval Noah Harari, recently provoked widespread global debate when he opined in a guest essay for the Economist magazine, that “Artificial intelligence has hacked the operating system of human civilization”. In his view, the rapid emergence of a variety of new artificial intelligence tools threatens the survival of human civilization from an unexpected direction with AI gaining remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, words, sounds and image.
Further, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in their 2023 Report on Artificial Intelligence Tools and the impact on public relations practice noted, AI technologies have advanced significantly in recent years and are now being used in almost every industry, from healthcare to finance, transportation, manufacturing and many others. The report noted that within a week of the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT, it gained one million users, which by the end of January 2023 had risen to 100 million global users. As we know this has continued exponentially. Interestingly enough, the report notes, ChatGPT is just one of a whole raft of new generative AI and related technologies that have arisen in the blink of an eye. Talk about the need to CATAPULT.
But can technology by itself take over? The fact is, these tools produce a statistical average of what has been fed into them - they’re built to refine data. So while AI tools are built for “SMART” support (Smart TV, smartphones, intuitive data), here again, people skills are needed for original thought and creativity to develop and sustain the tools and to determine their most advantageous use. Our perspective is therefore that without people with the mindset and skillset to understand, lead, coordinate and innovate technologically, we will not achieve true progress.
In closing, I take this opportunity to acknowledge our fellow sponsors and thank AMCHAM for their keenness and foresight in developing this year’s bold agenda, as we challenge ourselves to address critical issues, brainstorm solutions, collaborate and chart a clear, actionable and sustainable path to get us to the desired level of innovative readiness…and keep us there! Wishing you all a most productive Tech Hub Islands Summit 2023!
THANK YOU.