June 27 (SeeNews) - The advent of new technologies enables banks to allocate more resources to meeting clients' expectations for quick and varied services available around the clock, a senior official of Bulgaria's DSK Bank told SeeNews.
"The development of IT technology has made it possible for banks to maintain the optimal capacity and make their clients happy without raising the prices of their services," Yuriy Genov, member of the management board of DSK Bank and an executive director in charge of IT and operations division, told SeeNews on the sidelines of a media event organised by global tech giant IBM in Sofia last week.
"When you have a variable load on your IT systems you need reserved capacity, which usually means twice as big infrastructure than the one required to support the average for an organisation with on-premises systems. By migrating to a cloud for example, you get a much more steady capacity and you solve the peak load problem," he added.
In 2017 DSK Bank completed the migration of its banking operations to IBM’s data centres as part of a long-term IT services agreement. Under the agreement IBM runs the complete IT infrastructure supporting DSK Bank's core banking environment and provides fully managed services for mainframe, servers, storage, end-user computing, help desk as well as software support.
The transition has resulted in 15% annual recurring savings for DSK Bank and 35-40% higher efficiency during peak times, Genov said.
"This decision allowed us to direct greater intellectual resource to solving business tasks. We stopped thinking whether we have enough disk space and capacity to perform our data processing tasks on a daily basis and focused instead on improving our products and on new business solutions," he commented.
In Genov's words, IT has long stopped being a goal in itself, as businesses are trying to incorporate IT solutions in their end-client products. "Businesses are no longer looking for IT solutions but are seeking IT-based business solutions," he explained.
It is actually clients who are driving digitalisation with their behaviour and their expectations that they will have services available to them 24/7, he said.
"People are becoming more and more IT-literate, they know about process decomposition and data maintenance, and they are thinking conceptually about IT services."
In regard to the possible application of cognitive technologies in the banking sector, Genov said they can enable a bank client to make the right choice among its products and services.
"Clients' choices are to a large degree emotional, but still, they are preceded by a rational analysis of the clients financial capabilities, their goals and the financial service, which a bank offers, and cognitive technologies can help clients make this choice as well-grounded as possible," he said.
DSK Bank, a unit of Hungarian financial services group OTP, was the second largest lender in Bulgaria in terms of assets at the end of March, according to Bulgarian central bank data.
DSK Bank closed 2017 with a net profit of 47.1 billion Hungarian forints ($168.4 million/144.4 million euro). Its net interest income totalled 72.3 billion forints.
1 euro=1.1656 U.S. dollars
DSK Bank EAD is among the biggest banks in SEE. You can download our SEE Top 100 ranking
here or subscribe to our free Top 100 newsletter
here