Emerging and Disruptive Technology  

In one of my previous blog posts “ Technology Innovation in Banking Industry ”, published in October this year, I made a reference to virtual currency and Bitcoins. After that blog was published, my inbox was flooded with emails – mostly requesting me to write about Bitcoins and Blockchains. In this article, we are going to do exactly that.... explore this idea a little more. What is a Bitcoin? Wiki states,  "Bitcoin is form of digital money that uses various processes securing transactions between untrusted third parties, without the need for a central authority or bank. Bitcoin is anonymous, and completely transparent" .  Bitcoin is the first decentralized digital currency. It is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money. The other names for bitcoin are virtual-currency, universal-currency and crypto-currency. Bitcoins are kept in digital wallets and sent over the internet and authorized by digital signatures and verified by “miner” networks. The v...

The other day while sipping on my morning coffee, I was reading this article published on “The Economic Times” on Oct 14th, 2016. The article woke me up better than my coffee did. Simply put, the article highlights declining revenue in the Indian IT service industry. It discuses how the Q2-2016 earnings of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys led to financial pundits and analysts forecasting a negative growth graph for the once booming Indian IT sector. The article describes the second quarter as “unusual” – something that will soon become “usual”, if we all don’t see the reality for what it is and take initiatives at least now. Revenue Source:    For more than two decades, the Indian IT industry was seen as the main source of skilled resources. The foremost source of revenue was through outsourcing resources to the global market. Other sources of revenue were through services like infrastructure management, back office support etc., and software development s...

The digital technology revolution has changed the way we pretty much do anything these days. Consumers are being provided with new avenues to interact in real time with the providers and banking industry is no exception to that. Every day, we’re seeing new market entrants around the globe and for a financial institution, either small or large it, is critical to invest in innovation labs and make use of emerging/disruptive technologies to stay ahead of the competition. To put things in perspective, in the financial sector alone, investments in technology have grown exponentially in the past decade – rising from $1.8 billion in 2010 to $19 billion in 2015 – with 73% of these investments focusing on the personal and small business segments. (Source:  Whitepaper ) You’re probably wondering why this exponential increase in investments? Why invest billions of dollars in Technology Innovation? This is a simple cause and effect, the effect being  “ Increased Profit Marg...