Beyond digital transformation

JMR Infotech’s innovation adds value to the digital transformation journey of banks and financial institutions in the Middle East and Africa region

The classical banking world is in a state of radical change. Interest rates are low and revenues are dwindling. Challenger and neo banks are dominating the customer interface. Traditional players design their digital opportunities primarily from their viewpoint, focusing on their banking products, and becoming financial superstores for customers. With open banking and open finance, financial institutions are now required to work more closely with nonbanking players, often outside the world of finance. Digitisation of key spheres of a customer’s lifestyle provides a plethora of opportunities for both banks and non-banks to create value services across shopping, housing, recreation, and healthcare. A winning strategy will be to surround endcustomers with convenient digital services with easy access and the right pricing.

Customer expectations are quickly adjusting to a digital world where products and services are recommended based on past behaviours and preferences, and where location-based offers are provided instantaneously on their mobile devices.

Banks have powerful inherent advantages – they have their customers’ trust along with the data on their financials and spending patterns. Additionally, they have the brand recognition to attract partners to shape digital ecosystems. These ecosystems enable banks to embed themselves into their customers’ lives and influence behaviour patterns – enabling them to buy their new home, next car, or shop for home appliances via their mobile.

China’s ICBC has launched a B2C mall in Argentina to provide a wide range of lifestyle services and white goods. Russian bank Sberbank has also attempted to surround customers with services with their ecosystem including groceries, entertainment, health, auto, travel, and even logistics.

In the MENA region, an Egyptian fintech named valU, backed by EFG Hermes, has shaped a new digital marketplace with embedded lending. ValU, supported by its platform partner JMR Infotech, has gained significant traction via its ecosystem approach and ability to link everyday lifestyle needs alongside lending. ValU has won three fintech awards and is growing much faster than the market.

ValU is powered by JMR’s Genie De Banca (GDB) – an agile digital platform that enables banks to function as a value aggregator, enabling fulfillment of customer’s life-needs. It enables banks to explore the digital economy and ensure that they meet requirements in a customer’s daily life, delivering all products and services through E2E digital channels. Apart from banks, GDB can also be seamlessly adopted across diverse businesses like real estate, automobile, consumer goods, education, and travel and tours, among other business verticals.

JMR Infotech has recently signed a strategic joint venture agreement with the Seed Group (UAE), a company of The Private Office of Sheikh Saeed bin Ahmed Al Maktoum, to enable value-based, technology solution offerings for banks and financial institutions in the MEA region.

Jayafar Moidu, founder and CEO of JMR Infotech says, “The key focus of the joint venture will be to create opportunities for banks and financial institutions to shape digital ecosystems for customer digital engagement and fulfillment journeys. These ecosystems will be future ‘game-changers’ with re-imagined customer journeys through automated processes, combining digital e-commerce with embedded finance including payments and lending.”

A winning strategy will be to surround end-customers with convenient digital services with easy access and the right pricing

around the world, including Kiala in the UK with more than 7,000 locations, or Cainiao in China with over 40,000 locations. In many countries, the majority of deliveries happen via the PUDO model. In the Nordics for example, more than 70 per cent of all deliveries happen via pick up and drop off locations,” notes Benturquia.

Delivering en masse to one location ticks several boxes – parcels are delivered to a single place already frequented by customers, while the host partner receives increased footfall which would lead to potentially incremental revenue. It also grants service providers and e-commerce companies the bandwidth to handle increased orders during peak times without compromising customer service.

“Fodel’s scalable solution helps improve logistics bandwidth at all times, and especially during peak seasons such as Ramadan and other festive seasons when logistics partners get overwhelmed with demand. In that regard, our solution can multiply the capacity of an e-commerce or a logistics partner. On top of solving this problem, the supply chain also benefits from the significant reduction in return to origin (RTO) deliveries, an issue for shippers and e-tailers which is especially poignant in the GCC markets where last-mile delivery failure rates are high,” adds Benturquia.

Best mix

Since several factors such as convenience and sustainability come into play, different delivery models may work best according to the layout and requirement of each market. On-demand services may propel home delivery and delay the adoption of peripheral business models in some locations, while in others, providers may be compelled to widely offer pick-up services and collection points. Alternatively, a combination of delivery solutions may work in concert, drawing on their individual strengths to best serve the diversified needs of consumers.

Given the GCC’s e-commerce ecosystem, which solutions are best suited to this region?

“Home delivery services will continue to stay due to the increase in demand of online grocery and food products,” Frost & Sullivan’s Sivan T J says, adding, “With advances in technologies such as delivery bots and drones, cost of home delivery services is expected to decline significantly. Further, as the digital infrastructure improves, localised delivery networks will play an important role in the last-mile delivery chain. This will favour the adoption of delivery solutions supported by digital locker boxes and micro-distribution centres. In summary, a combination of home delivery solutions and collection points are more suitable for the GCC region.”