Shashank Srivastava

Shashank is responsible for TIBCO’s go-to-market strategy for Financial Services and Insurance industry. He brings in 17 years of experience, selling and marketing infrastructure technology software and solutions within FSI, Healthcare, Telco, and Manufacturing industries.


What Does Music Have In Common With Successful Banks?

April 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Symphonies and orchestras are the two things that come to mind when I think of banking operations. Today’s banks have to outshine competitors and provide exceptional customer services; that’s the path of success. In doing so, banks need to harmonize technology and IT services that run and monitor business operations.

Like an orchestra, organizations have numerous back-end systems and applications playing their own tunes. The complexity lies in creating harmony that eventually soothes business initiatives around revenue growth through customer experience, improving operational efficiency, and mitigating risks. The right set of technologies enable enterprises to derive more value out of back-end systems or applications, address the complexities around managing volume, velocity, and variety of data (or BIG data) and help organizations do more – easier, faster, and more cost effectively. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

What Does Hiking Have to Do with Innovation?

April 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Three friends and I went hiking last week in a dense forest. The objective was clear: to reach a small fortress about six miles from base camp. Without maps, or smartphones and no real clue how to get there, we were on our own. With  no rules, or parameters to validate our moves and literally no support or back-up, we had to make instant decisions based on events as they occurred. We were trailblazers, quite literally, and had to innovate in creating a trail for others to follow just to reach our goal.

Trailblazing is the process of leaving markings that follow each other at certain — though not necessarily exactly defined — distances, and marking the direction of the trail. The markings left by previous hikers help others follow the best trail.

This is essentially what today’s organizations have to face. They know the end objectives (mitigate risks and comply) and apply forensics to determine what went wrong so it can be amended the next time. If you’re lucky, you can isolate the event and put a mark up so others don’t follow that path in the future, but the ability to make decisions in real time or leverage trailblazing is what differentiate organizations from being average to becoming outstanding.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Event Processing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Traditional Marketing is Bad Marketing

March 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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In a survey report on customer experiences from a leading consulting firm, they discussed how to “convert opportunities from seemingly lost opportunities” by preventing early defection and identifying what causes churn. Last year the theme of “revenue growth through customer experience” was adopted as a primary initiative across many industries and companies, covering real-time offers and contextually driven real-time campaigns. Many organizations are already on a path to reap the benefits of technology platforms put in place to address customer retention and growth.

Same Old Strategies Lead to the Same Old Results

What are a customer’s immediate purchase needs? Are offers targeted to match customers’ requirements, especially when they want it? What is the conversion rate on an offer? Three out of 100? That’s a 3% offer up-take ratio. Marketing campaigns like this are obviously shooting offers from the hip!

That means 97% of employee resources and money get wasted. Spraying and spamming customers with a traditional marketing offer are hardly relevant to their needs. With enough failures to follow-up at opportune times, the frustrated customer opts-out. That’s just one aspect of customer defection; what about others? Why do customers defect even if the product or the service offered is relevant? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Automation, BPM Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Banks are Still Failing Because They Don’t “Get” Risk

February 5, 2013 by 3 Comments
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Global BankingBanks are still failing and will continue to fail into the future if they don’t take risk seriously and take steps to safeguard against failure.

In 2012, the Fed tested the banks’ ability to withstand a crisis, similar to the one from five years ago, that caused unemployment to rise to 13%, a 50% fall in share prices, and a 21% drop in housing prices. Some of the top banks once again failed to show they have enough capital to survive another serious downturn. A Bloomberg article yesterday discussed how Fed regulators and the Dodd-Frank Act have been historically at odds.

Even after the past failure, banks were either too exposed outside the U.S. or were planning to hand too much money back to investors. This means, they lack a “single view” of global enterprise-wide risk exposure, with various internal silos only concerned with their own priorities.

A single snapshot of risk

In a mandate from a global governing committee, top banks have been given three years to build up a single view of all their risk to help make the wider financial system more resilient. These global banks have many branches and subsidiaries, complicating the creation of a single snapshot of risk. They will have to get on top of this initiative as a temporary stopgap, but what about future updates, and/or further changes in regulation?

Banks need to assess risk whether a regulation or a law mandates it or not. The end-game is what efficient compliance enables – long-term strategic and operational improvements, not compliance for its own sake. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,