By Edwin Muhumuza
Eclectics International a technology savvy company transforming Africa through innovative, state of the art tailor-made software solutions for Banking, has advised business organizations engaged in electronic and mobile commerce to be customer focused in ensuring their needs are adequately met even as they integrate technology in business operations .
Paul Mbuga, the Managing Director of Kenyan founded financial technology firm, Eclectics International, while Interfacing with Ugandan bank executives says that growing income through traditional means is no longer sufficient and thus the need to engrain technology.
However introducing technology will require collaboration between vendors and banks. This leads to the question of what revenue sharing model both parties are comfortable with.
‘Majority of our organizations are appreciating that just doing what they know best is not sufficient and therefore they are saying may be 20,30 or 50% of their income line will be generated out of their traditional revenue model.’
In a bid to generate revenue Banks have been doing asset financing for quite some time including cars, machinery, equipment and others and yet software is an asset but it was difficult for them to accept .Mbuga said
Today with the advent of mobile enabled banking technology, that has gained popularity and is customer friendly ,financial Institutions have found out that they are not excellent in that line and that it is expensive to obtain operation licenses. Therefore the way about this is to partner with tech savvy companies .
‘Technology is so radically changing and so frequently that if you buy a license for one business, you will be required to pay a similar amount in order to implement it down the line or change or even upgrade the business model. So partnership comes in handy in a sense that a bank can continue to offer the responsibility line while a company like Eclectics embarks on offering technology, adaptability, continuous research and product support and so the easiest way is to partner on the long term revenue share. The bank does not need to book a depreciating asset in their book because it is more of a long term partnership. ’Mbuga noted.
With technology the question of user friendliness and customer satisfaction is key and in response to that all main participants on the panel agreed that that there was need to put the customer at the centre in getting their experience correct.
Paricipants have been cautioned to make wise choices in regard to who they deal with on matters of personal data, ensuring they plan right at the beginning to defend, detect and recover data in cases of fraud and ensure ethics and transparency is upheld.
To modern Chief Executives, they were tipped that change is inevitable and they need to reflect on whether they will be the ones driving that change or not adding that different vendors represent different solutions and that there is need for participants to define their own solutions in the digital era while considering partnership.
Members on the panel were Jean Swart, Claudius Kurtna, Eclectics MD Paul Mbuga, Red Hat's Danie Thom and Silla Mulandi.
Eclectics International has been operational for over 10 years and enables financial institutions increase their efficiency and effectiveness by developing, deploying and supporting their proprietary custom made solutions.
Its key focus is in areas of financial inclusion where they partnered with a number of institutions to assist them reach the population at the bottom of the pyramid with financial products that suit them without asking them to conform to conventional banking modalities which are foreign to them. Through this, it boasts of the number of lives that have been reached and changed in the millions across the continent .