Welcome to Celent's Cloud King series. This video continues our program on Core Banking in the Cloud. And today, we speak one of the leading global providers in this space. I'm Daniel Mayer, a Principal Analyst on Celent's banking team and pleased to be joined by Subrato, a Senior Product Manager for TCS BaNCS, a global provider of core banking platforms that has been doing some interesting innovations in the cloud. Subrato, can we start by giving us the elevator pitch of what TCS BaNCS is doing in the cloud? 
Thank you for having me here. So TCS BaNCS is a kind of service offering, which is a specialized industry cloud, which is carefully curated to elevate digital transformation journey of a bank. TCS BaNCS Cloud is a robust, future-proof combination of application software, cloud infrastructure, and managed enterprise services. A cloud platform tailored to the specific needs and goals of banks across segments and geographies. So, in other words, what you get from TCS BaNCS is the world's largest set of components for banking available as 22 strong business solutions powering banks in 16 countries from our five global and regional cloud command centers, which are set up across hyperscalers as well as private cloud settings. So, with TCS BaNCS Cloud, our customers gain access to continuous updates, resilient, high-performance, scalable solutions with state-of-the-art security controls to meet the evolving needs of the banking industry. It enables banks to stay competitive, drive innovation, and deliver superior customer experiences. 
Right, I mean, for banks considering working with providers, I mean, what would you see as the key factors that differentiates you in this space?
OK. So, one of the key differentiators which we offer to the industry at large are from the bank's perspective is our full enterprise service capability across retail, business, and corporate banking, right, and delivered with cloud-agnosticity and which makes us a very unique in offering a very trusted integrated software-as-a-service. So that is the full enterprise service capability which gives us that unique value proposition to our customers. Further, the unmatched configurability of the solutions in itself where our customers have created 10,000 plus unique variants of, let's say loans and deposits products itself with 1,000 plus APIs, our customers are able to drastically reduce the modernization cost, the complexity and risks, and dramatically accelerate the trying to value. So, our customers tend to benefit from our continued investment focus on the realization of the functional richness on a next-generation architecture with the data and the AI schemes powering experiences and the customer engagements. Very, very impressive. And, but just thinking about the, the industry, when you think of the industry today lean, where do you see the greatest opportunities for them for rethinking their approach to core and leveraging some of these capabilities?
OK. When I look at the current industry landscape at large, right, and technology transitions or transformations that are happening across the globe, our customers have significant opportunities for rethinking their approach right around core. So essentially all such opportunities are around the evolution of banking itself and how banks should ideally respond to the customer needs. The customer needs are right now around convenience, speed, and choice, OK. So essentially, if I look at there are five key areas which banks should look at as the greatest opportunities. With the advent of GenAI, AI, and the cloud, the immense computing power that it has or it helps leverage hyper personalization of banking experiences to the individual customer needs and preferences through data analytics, AI-driven insights, like product recommendations, robo advisory, and tailored, very tailored customer support, right? That’s one area. Second happens to be seamless omnichannel banking, right? There are plethora of channels for a customer or a client of today. You’ve mobile app, you’ve ATM, physical branches, social media apps, and what not, right? So the need of the hour is a consistent experience across all these channels and which basically, is a very personalized delivery of services consistently across all these channels. So that matters. Third happens to be the transitions that we are seeing from open banking to open finance constructs, right. So, these frameworks, as I call, help the banks offer comprehensive banking ecosystems, right, which is basically serving the needs of the customers and enabling them to offer wider range of products and services, sometimes collaborating across and delivering to the needs of the customer. That’s one area where open banking to open finance transformations will bring in. Fourth happens to be the enhanced privacy and security related aspects which are picking up across the globe. Prioritizing cyber security measures and data privacy protection to ensure security of customer information and transactions. We see opportunities around revolving around those, the PII information and how I secure that to gain the trust of the customer. Last, but not the least, is the sustainable and ethical banking practices. Customers of the banks are increasingly valuing banks that demonstrate a commitment to sustainability, ethical banking practices, and social responsibility. So, in a nutshell, the bank should embrace these five key topics or any of these whereby the customers can benefit from a more personalized, convenient, and secure banking experiences. 
And to pick on one of those, you mentioned open banking in collaboration, what's your approach to partnerships and working in ecosystems? 
Pretty interesting question, actually leads on from the previous one itself. So essentially what we have tried creating in this TCS BaNCS cloud, as I call it the industry cloud itself. So, the partnerships are working at multiple layers. So, the key layer where we operate in terms of partnerships happens to be through the TCS BaNCS Marketplace program, right. So, essentially, we offer a collaborative approach, we take a collaborative approach towards partnerships, and we have created a very carefully curated ecosystem of partner solutions to enhance the complete offering set such that to a bank can offer a comprehensive solution to its end customers. So TCS BaNCS Marketplace is an avenue to collaborate, innovate, and scale businesses. We help them accelerate innovation by providing rapid prototyping, leveraging the power of the fintechs, insure techs, aggregators, and industry-leading solutions. We have close to around 100 plus partners on the TCS BaNCS Marketplace, which is a repository of partner solutions contributing to the entire value chain of the bank, ok, so thereby Marketplace serves as a launchpad for banks to co-innovate along with our partners and serve as an accelerator to develop, validate, or monetize new solutions through these APIs. The next level which is pretty important from a cloud perspective is the layer of partnership or the strategic alliances that we have with hyperscalers, like AWS or Azure or Google for that matter. 
No, I mean just to make it real, can you give an example of a success story of a bank you work with, kind of in the cloud, and what made it so noticeable? 
Ok, so essentially each of our customers on TCS BaNCS cloud have a very unique story to tell, ok. So let me tell you a story about a bank which is on the app world called as M Bank. It is a digital start up bank in the UAE. It was born on TCS BaNCS Cloud. So, M Bank is the first fully integrated digital bank in the Middle East. So, what we offer TCS BaNCS Cloud with the TCS Bank solution and its partner ecosystem which helped them to create and launch the bank along with the value proposition licensing everything put in five months flat. So, the bank right now leverages the state-of-the-art technologies of AI, blockchain, and a very modern cyber security command center provided by TCS BaNCS Cloud to offer a fully integrated digital bank. And with this comprehensive enterprise solutions or services from TCS BaNCS Cloud, this bank right now in its second or third year, is right now scaling to around 200,000 customers with 100,000 daily transaction volumes. On the same very platform, there are couple of more digital banks lined up for launch. So essentially, for any startup for example, that is a very, you know unique use cases where a startup does not need to bother about what is there on the cloud. You have everything from what is required from starting up of a particular entire bank operations for that matter. Now, that’s from a startup perspective. There are multiple use cases where mature banks in multiple countries have offloaded the entire, or rather on boarded their entire, workloads on premises workload onto TCS BaNCS club. We have a large Tier 1 bank in Canada, which leverages our cloud-native solution, which is offered as SaaS to plug in into their entire payments processing ecosystem, delivering scale on demand. So instead of migrating their entire workload on to the cloud, they just plugged in the service offering from TCS BaNCS Cloud into their scheme of things. Yeah, so based on your experience then, what advice would you give to banks thinking about their next steps in respect to kind of their cloud strategy and core banking? Ok, so essentially there are a few, you know, five steps I would say again. So essentially, immediately what the bank should start if you're thinking about journey to the cloud, first, assess and plan to identify the infrastructure, applications, the data workloads which can move to the cloud. Second, select a small set of applications, workloads to migrate and evaluate things like performance, scalability, cost effectiveness. Identify the security measures, data protection capability, the regulatory compliance requirements, and ensure that you are in alignment with the industry standards or the regulatory needs of that particular bank. Fourth, invest in training and upskilling the staff and relevant stakeholders within your order. And fifth, in case you find all these four steps, you know, time-taking, select an industry cloud like TCS BaNCS, which offers end-to-end service for the banking industry and helps you cover all the previous first steps as I said. 
Well, thank you, that was really insightful, and thank you Subrato for your time today, and, for joining our Core Banking in the Cloud series, thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me here.