Page 95 - ASR_Forewords

EDITORIAL

1
Dr. A. S. Ramasastri

In the past decade, disruptive technologies have shrunk the world leading to location-
agnostic production and consumption of services. This has transformed the banking
industry to a great extent, altering the way the business is conducted.

Banks have created digital infrastructure to offer various solutions like mobile
banking, e-wallets and virtual cards, for successfully fulfilling the changing needs of
the modern-day customer. Wholesale banking is also catching on this trend of
designing and delivering the right mix of products and services to corporate
customers, harnessing digital technologies.

Banks have adopted the SMAC technologies – Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud –
very innovatively. While the SMAC technology developments will continue to be
exploited by banks, there are several new technologies emerging in the realm of
quantum computing, high-speed networks, biometrics, machine learning, robotics and
smart wearables.
Among them, the four key technologies that we consider to be having a great impact
on banking are FABS – Five G, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and Smart things.
We feel that in the next decade, banking will witness a continued trend of reinventing
itself, riding on FABS in addition to SMAC. Each of these technologies has potential
to challenge the present banking sector and change it to the benefit of all stakeholders.
These trends are highlighted in the three research articles in the current journal. In his
article titled “The Rise of Machine Learning and Robo-advisors in Banking”, Chaman
Lal Sabharwal highlights the use of robo-advisors, which relies heavily on the
machine learning techniques. “Sustainable Co-training of Mixture-of-Experts for
Credit Scoring of Borrowers in Social Lending” by Jae-Min Yu and Sung-Bae Cho is
an illustration of the use of semi-supervised learning in an important area of banking
like credit scoring. Alan Megargel, et al., in their article “SOA Maturity Influence on
Digital Banking Transformation” discuss how Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
is clearly an enabler for digital banking.
The two contributions from practitioners are on open APIs and Framework for
Technology Controls. Hans Tesselaar, et al., present the perspective of “BIAN on

Dr. A. S. Ramasastri ( )
Director, Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology, Hyderabad, India
e-mail: asramasastri@idrbt.ac.in