Fintech market in India, valued at INR 2.30 Trillion in 2020 and expected to reach around INR 8.35 trillion by 2026 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of ~25%, has been one of the highest-growing technology segments globally. Among the most significant innovations in financial services that emerged is - lending and payments. While conventionally these two areas were only dominated by established players, they are now the battleground of over 2/3rd of the world’s fintech companies which are valued at over $1 billion, also called ‘unicorns’.

Speaking specifically about India, the country is now among the biggest markets where structural enablers to set up and incubate fintech have joined hands strongly and at the right time. India has the highest FinTech adoption rate globally of 87% which is significantly higher than the global average rate of 64%. So what has driven the digital engine for the financial sector of the country? Deloitte’s report says, ‘Internet data access, smartphones along with utility infrastructure including Aadhaar based authentication and India fintech stack capabilities are likely to provide the impetus to India’s FinTech sector.’

To improve operational effectiveness and better customer reach, the Indian financial service industry and fintech companies have adopted cutting-edge technology, but the pace of technology adoption has not been proportionate to its potential, which has led to gaps in the penetration of financial services. Some of the key challenges that the FinTech industry faces today include data and payment security, compliance, lack of awareness of end-users, working alongside legacy systems like banks, and ensuring user retention and user experience.

In this insight, we talk about the challenges of the two top FinTech companies- CRED and RazorPay and tech and business solutions to these challenges.

Before we survey these companies, we must understand what is a fintech?

Fintech companies are the ones that offer applications of technology to financial services or products in a way that is economically viable. India’s fintech companies can be categorized across six segments- Payments, Credit, Investment Management, Personal Finance Management, BankTech and InsurTech.

The opportunities for fintech companies in an expanding market like India lies in shaping their customer behavior and addressing challenges in the financial industry with the right technology solutions. There’s a threefold opportunity for a fintech company in India which are-

1. Fintech startup can reduce costs and improve financial services quality because it is not burdened by IT systems, legacy operations, and physical networks. Therefore the advantages of sleek operating models can be passed on to the customers.
2. Fintech industry can develop innovative models for risk assessment by leveraging unique fintech technology like AI/ML, big data, and alternative data for underwriting credit or developing credit scores for customers with poor credit history. This will improve financial inclusion in India.
3. FinTech can create a stable, secure, and diverse financial service landscape since fintech companies are not so homogenous as compared with the incumbent banking system. These companies offer to learn templates for improving culture and capabilities.

By learning to adopt best practices, a FinTech startup can stand the test of time. But what defines best practices? In an interview with PCI Security Standards Council, Adelia Castelino, Co-founder Managing Director, In Solution Global Pvt Ltd. says, “The four main areas of innovation that are responsible for this growth are: Hyper-personalized customer service, tokenization, cloud-native payment platforms, and e-converse through e-commerce. The common theme among these innovation drivers is the security of data and convenience for the consumer.”

Top FinTech companies in India, CRED, and Razorpay work proactively to provide a secure ecosystem to customers, thus becoming popular unicorns in lesser time.

What does CRED say about the FinTech ecosystem, challenges & solutions?

CRED was founded in 2018 and is pitched as a reward-based credit card bill payment platform. CRED became a FinTech unicorn in 2021. Himanshu Kumar Das, Head of Security, Risk & Compliance, CRED states, “The recent innovations in Fintech which help ensure safer, securer and lightning-fast transactions with enhanced user experience have completely transformed and modernized banking and financial institutions.”

The challenge: There is more data available in digital format now. Payment providers and financial services face a key challenge of securing customers’ personal information considering their digital footprint and personal data is their identity appendage. For this reason, Software Supply Chain Security (SSCS) has become a strategic focus area for organizations. Critical security challenges in the payment ecosystem include ransomware and account takeover.

A lot of security threats and cyberattacks are attributed to factors like cracked application installation on devices, unpatched operating systems, multiple data interference which causes API exposure to the untrusted interface, and lack of security focus on third-party vendors.

“Building a secure and robust Fintech application or product is an extremely challenging and complicated and moreover a very expensive and time-consuming task,” says Himanshu. So, how does CRED ensure safe and secure transactions for customers?

The solution: As an effective and essential security solution, CRED uses tokenization and encryption in the FinTech space. CRED suggests using complex encryption algorithms such as 3DES or, RSA to protect critical data. Tokenisation has emerged as the latest trend for implementing security solutions associated with credit card numbers and payment data. The technology uses a generated number called ‘token’ which replaces credit card numbers, so as to protect sensitive customer data.

CRED also suggests designing and implementing robust frameworks for cybersecurity. Identification of ‘crown jewels’ and protecting them from Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS), Phishing, Malware exploits, Social Engineering Methods, Application vulnerability exploits, Identity Thefts, Spam, and Merchant Frauds.

Rapid innovation in technology has revealed multitudes of new enablers which include API-driven composable micro-services, Cloud Native Architecture, AI-ML powered data analytics, risk and fraud management, and Public-Private sandboxes- all of which enable support innovation, security, and also regulatory reform. Multi-factor authentication using trusted devices, and the use of biometrics for authentication have further enabled FinTech companies to stay a step ahead of criminals.

With the rising number of online transactions, providing a secure payment gateway becomes mandatory to overcome other challenges like user retention and user experience. Razorpay is another exemplary B2B fintech startup that provides APIs for payment gateways.

What does Razorpay say about the FinTech ecosystem, challenges & solutions?

Founded in 2014, Razorpay started off as a payment gateway, but soon entered other spaces like payments, lending, banking, and SME payroll management. It joined the unicorn Fintech club of India in 2020. Razorpay is the converged payment solution that enables merchants to accept, process, and disburse payments with the help of its product suite.

In 2021, the company says that Tier-2 & Tier-3 cities recorded noteworthy growth in volumes of online transactions, 45.56%, and 54.33% respectively. This FinTech company has earned the trust of over 5 million small and large businesses for payments. Razorpay hails as the most valued, privately-held fintech company and has also recorded an impressive 3X rise in its transactional volume, logged at 400% in September 2021.

The challenge: Despite being a success story, Razorpay’s recent cybercrime story speaks volumes about security challenges. According to the PCI Security Standards Council, India ranked very high on the list of countries that are a target for cyber-attacks. A key reason for this is the lack of awareness of end-user devices. “CERT-In publications show that, between 2019 and 2020, reportage of Phishing and DDoS grew by 40%, while identity theft, merchant fraud, malware, and cyber espionage grew by 20%,” says Adelia Castelino.

The second challenge that Razorpay speaks of is collaborating with legacy financial services like banks. “A fintech startup intervening with the banks’ legacy systems can cause the emergence of new, unforeseen risks like strategic risks, compliance risks, operational risks, cyber risks, and more,” says Razorpay.

The third challenge that Razorpay highlights is maintaining customer relationships and retaining customers. “If you want your customer base to stick with your product and keep coming back, you need to make sure you retain your customers for the long run by building long-term customer relationships.”

The solution: Fintech at the early stages of adoption in a disruptive economy must focus on educating people about the concept, says Razorpay. To make the app more secure, solutions like real-time notifications and alerts, data encryption and obfuscation, two-factor authentication, and behavior analysis are suggested.

Speaking of working with legacy systems, the FinTech company suggests that the most innovative solutions will emerge from collaboration. One example of such tech collaboration is the company’s neo-banking platform, RazorpayX. “We started our neo banking journey by creating a whole new platform on which we could build products and integrations. We created an entire API and dashboard payouts platform over a virtual account setup that merchants could use during the early access in 2018,” says Razorpay. It also built RazorpayX with Current Accounts in collaboration with RBL Banks to include standard banking services like accounting statements, debit cards, and cheque book.

As for user retention and user experience, Razorpay explains that the trust component in a building environment like India is still in infancy but the solution lies in not necessarily selling your product, but “making them understand what the innovation is, and how and why it can be beneficial for them to use the services.” Providing quality service, building great customer relationships by tracking customer journeys, and understanding how they interact with your product provides insights into what works and what doesn’t. User retention, thus greatly depends upon customer satisfaction and happiness.

Summing Up

India is amongst the fastest growing Fintech markets in the world and as of 2022, there are 6,636 FinTech startups in India. The future of fintech and industry 4.0 is emerging in the country. A FinTech company can thrive in a disruptive economy by overcoming challenges by partnering with engineering solutions vendors who help create a successful Fintech MVP platform. If you have a project blueprint or need a hand in solving challenges, touch base with us to learn how we’ve helped our FinTech clients overcome critical tech challenges during the lifecycle of their super FinTech App.

Globally, fintech companies raised more than $90 billion in the first three quarters of 2021, almost double the pace in 2020, with 42 new fintech unicorns minted in the third quarter alone, says McKinsey.

Finance as a sector includes financial service companies and fintech companies, and the sector juggernauts towards digital transformation with strategic technological trends. Before we dive into these trends, we must first understand what is fintech? Financial Technology, also known as FinTech, is described as the new technology which automates or improves the functioning of financial services. FinTech companies help the finance sector with better efficiency and delivery through algorithms, software, computers, and smartphones.

In our blog series on FinTech insights, we are going to discuss extensively about the FinTech trends shaping the industry. In this blog, we are going to discuss the challenges of the fintech industry in India and the technologies used to solve those challenges.

What challenged the status quo for FinTech Companies in India?

“Increased demand for inclusive financial services, customer expectations, and the business need to reduce costs while providing faster, safer, and more reliable services underpin the rise and growth of FinTech companies,” explains EY. So what challenges the status quo in the financial services sector?

1. Firstly, more fintech companies want to be branded as digital-native in the FinTech landscape. This means that several services which traditionally were dependent upon human capital for loan disbursal, real-time payments, investment advisory, peer-to-peer lending, and other financial services, are automating tasks through one ‘Super App’.
2. Secondly, there are now efficient and sleek offerings from FinTech companies, which help businesses in reducing costs and providing more customer-driven services.
3. And thirdly, rising advancements in technologies like data science, automation, and AI/ML push traditional financial services companies towards a digital environment.

Current status of FinTech in Asia

“People skipped the cards stage altogether in the Asia-Pacific market. Then newer technologies came in, mostly mobile-payment-based, a lot of wallet platforms. Basically, every single company that has a substantial number of consumers decided to start monetizing these consumers by providing payment applications that replace the need to use debit or credit cards,” says Arik Shtilman, CEO of FinTech platform provider, Rapyd (U.S.). This explains one of the most significant trends, i.e., payments accounting for almost half of India’s FinTech unicorns (42.9%).

Zeroing in at a granular level in Asia, if we speak specifically about India we see that country’s total fintech opportunity is set to rise to $1.3 Tn by 2025, according to Inc42’s State Of Indian Fintech Report, Q2 2022. There are 102 unicorns in India, and the latest entrant to the list is neo-banking FinTech start-up, Open. The total number of FinTech companies in India is 21. So what shifts are paving way for technology trends in the FinTech industry?

Large Shifts for FinTech Companies

Three shifts that are playing out across Asia, according to McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) research are:

• More consumers reaching the highest tiers of the income pyramid, and movement within the consuming class is likely to be a larger driver of consumption growth than movement into it,
• Cities driving consumption growth, but increasingly diverse cohorts within cities account for promising growth sources, and
• Relationship between income and consumption breaks down in some instances, new consumption curves are emerging in specific categories.

Sitting upon these shifts, there are 10 critical technology trends playing across the FinTech industry in India.

10 Technology Trends Driving FinTech Industry in India

1. The Rise of SuperApp: FinTech, corporate giants, and BigTech are racing toward creating a one-stop shop for offering a comprehensive financial service platform.
2. BNPL rewriting credit: Buy Now Pay Later has become a new buzz-phrase in the FinTech industry in India. It allows consumers to leapfrog credit cards, and directly get instant digital credit during purchase.
3. InsurTech, a rising example of product innovation: Its digital distribution is making penetration of insurance products easier and accessible for consumers.
4. Neobanks serving underserved or unserved customer segments: There is an increase in hyper-personalized banking services.
5. WealthTech rise during COVID: This trend has transformed the investment environment of the country, and serves as a critical vertical in scaling-up new equity investors.
6. API banking development: Embedded banking is helping each financial (or non-financial) company in adding FinTech as a strategic feature to enhance customer experience.
7. MSME becomes a battleground for FinTech: Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises have shown massive acceleration towards the digital landscape, thus making it a ripe market for disruption.
8. Digital Lending attracts most investors: This is the most-funded FinTech business model and is maturing further with an increased focus on collections.
9. Digital Payment account for the biggest sub-sector: This sector continues drawing large funding, and has the most number of firms queuing for IPO. Major unicorns like PhonePe, Paytm, and BharatPe being heavily payment-focused (Fig. 1).
10. Rise of Crypto: Bitcoin, Ethereum, digital tokens like NFTs, and digital cash rely heavily on blockchain technology. Despite becoming popular, the major hiccup in this sub-sector is regulation and compliance.

Road Ahead for FinTech in India

India’s FinTech journey is unique because governments, regulators, financial institutions, and FinTechs contribute collectively towards making the finance sector digital-native. Yet, the technological challenges and policy rails need to achieve and sustain higher growth for successful collaborations.

Strategic adoption of technology trends can lead to transformational evolution in the way financial services or products are delivered to end-users and helps in creating exceptional value for customers.

If you are facing a tech challenge in deploying a project or need a hand in starting a project, reach out to us to learn how Valuebound has successfully converted ideas into unique digital solutions through a team of creative product engineers and developers.

By rethinking their business models and embracing the innovative strategies of digital-only banking, traditional banks could boost revenues by nearly 4% annually, resulting in more than half a trillion dollars in additional revenues by 2025, according to Accenture. And as per the 2022 Digital transformation and Next-gen technology survey by Broadridge, about three-quarters of C-suite executives across top financial firms have successfully transitioned from paper to completely digital communications.

Cloud migration seems to be an easier road for financial services companies if they set the goal of digitizing and modernizing their everyday business functions. But, what constitutes a successful formula for driving digital transformation in finance using the cloud? “If there is one thing separating these digital transformation leaders from the rest of the pack, it is their capacity to fully embrace the cloud,” says Mark Schlesinger, former CIO of Broadridge Financial Solutions. Such an embrace needs advanced stages of digital transformation.

Only 28% of the digital transformation business leaders have been able to achieve the advanced stages of transformation across the company, suggests Forbes. And only 14% of the companies sustain digital transformation and see improved results. Challenges in achieving advanced levels of cloud transformation in financial companies can be listed as-

• Creating centralized data platforms
• Technological execution capabilities not scaling up their tasks
• Rise in expenses due to staled technological environment
• Inability to align digital capabilities and changing demands of the market
• Complex infrastructures choke data requirements needed for sophisticated analytics

Such advanced cloud technology implementation has been an enabler of success, and companies that have deployed such digital efforts derive multiple benefits. The firms that are struggling with that cloud transformation must develop a long-term plan based upon the exact business outcomes desired from cloud deployment.

Top 5 strategic recommendations (Fig.1) to help you understand your enterprise’s full cloud potential are:

• Considering PaaS (platform as a service)
• Reimagining existing operations
• Migrating current applications from physical-security perimeter to cloud
• Planning cloud transformation with DevOps through containerization
• Reviewing people strategy to ensure successful model enhancement

Consider PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)

Focusing your business investments in domains where the cloud helps in increasing revenues and margins is one area where financial companies can enable business-technology transformation. Data and Digital Platforms or DDP are among the crucial elements of driving cloud transformation for finance. DDP makes use of components like microservices, APIs, and a data lake, which allows companies to build applications in scalable and modular ways and gives them real-time data accessibility. Tech vendors can enable the processing and governance of DDPs through PaaS.

Cloud-native financial companies push code releases into production at a faster speed with the help of end-to-end automation. Automated cloud platforms help companies to release codes 100-1000X in a day, which helps them in meeting demands sooner, and get feedback faster. McKinsey suggests that the companies which adopt cloud platforms have 20-40% faster time-to-market for newer capabilities.

Reimagine existing operations

Businesses can reimage operations by adapting AI and natural language processing (NLP) which support digital customer service. Financial companies can also adopt optical character recognition (OCR) and robotic process automation (RPA) which streamline everyday processes like credit card processing, account closure, accounts payable, and report automation.

Cloud-first technologies can help employees in setting up operational metrics or KPIs, which offer higher transparency to the organization. Major cloud-service providers offer various native services which also provide access to the 3rd-party ecosystems. Such services have also evolved to move beyond the basic infrastructure, and include advanced functionality, such as data aggregation, facial recognition, and quantum computing.

Citing a real-world example, Rob Cameron, CEO of Barclays Payments says, “It’s about looking at how we can use technology to change processes to the benefit of the customer.” The company, for example, recently transformed its onboarding process. Rob Cameron says, “Our digital POD worked to build a better journey while also attacking the underlying questions set. Their work reduced the questions by 75% for new bank customers and by nearly 95% for existing bank customers.”

Barclays Payments now uses technology to inherit the remaining data across. The company had launched this digital initiative at the beginning of 2020, and to date, has seen call time reduction by 2/3rd, which indicates that agents are spending time on finding solutions for customers.

Migrate current applications to the cloud

Moving legacy systems to the cloud offers several benefits like improved performance, full compliance, and reduced license fees. Roughly 1/5th of the companies spend enough time and resources on building zero-trust applications which require no network perimeter. Many CIOs and CFOs opt for this model because this acts as a great combination of security, protection, and cost.

At the top level, companies can focus remediation on fixing compliances and security and later optimize the systems. Either this or they can also optimize all apps on the go. The kind of migrating path a financial company takes depends on the kind of risk they’re willing to underwrite. Migrating first, and optimizing later can help in breaking through the gridlock that several companies experience in cloud transformation. However, this approach needs company leadership to accept that some of the applications would cost more in the immediate run.

Top Leadership must define a clear strategy for replacing their legacy systems and leveraging the cloud for supporting existing business priorities. With clarity, you can also set a business case for those apps or workloads which will benefit the organization most with early migration.

A company requires the highest investment in rewriting the existing application into cloud-native platforms. This yields the most improvement in terms of agility and cost of ownership.

Rewriting an app for cloud-native requires the proprietary services of tech vendors. Some of the apps which were designed natively for cloud architecture can easily be configured to the present systems. However, such sophisticated plans require application developers and engineering skills, which financial companies struggle to have in-house. Having a mature full-stack DevOps tech vendor can build the cloud into your present legacy network design.

Plan cloud transformation with DevOps through containerization

“Containers are a way of packaging an application so that it’s easy to get the application and run it in any kind of environment. So, a lot of the complexity of installing and configuring an application is taken away. Containers let a developer abstract all of that and make a very simple package that’s easy to consume,” Tim Hynes from Rubrik, a cloud data management company defined containerization.

Through containerization, developers put together the tools, libraries, settings, code, and runtime engine in one package, and make it portable. This makes the software easy to be deployed in a cloud environment and needs fewer resources to function. Refactoring applications or software in containerization offers greater flexibility, sustainability, higher productivity, agility, and scalability. The payback period of most companies with this effort is no longer than 18 months, explains McKinsey.

Docker containers are aptly fit for DevOps because it allows the teams to break huge applications into microservices, which can then be rapidly updated or deployed. This provides quicker development velocity.

Planning cloud transformation with DevOps across apps and software with the use of containerization can also offer cost-efficiency. Designing and running containerization with pre-defined standards facilitates a predictable pathway that can also provide the repatriation of software or apps from one cloud to another during migration.

Review people's strategy

Successful cloud transformation in financial companies draws a parallel with other factors like people’s strategy. How will the organization change after digital transformation? What would be the new business model enhancements? What changes will be there in the organization’s structure? Business leaders would have to revisit business and IT amalgamation to support such a transformational shift. Since cloud innovation and transformation will bring in a natural change in the organizational chart, it would also be a good time to rethink and review how to adopt a culture with continuous learning or experimentation.

Key Takeaways

Cloud transformation in finance can scale up through vendor support so that various teams can unify on the recommended strategy suggested above. Automating infrastructure provisioning and application delivery with calculated risk assessment is possible through the continuous integration/ continuous delivery (CI/CD) approach, while also keeping security governance using DevOps in mind.

If you have an application migration or cloud deployment project that needs a hand, drop a hello to us to know how we have successfully converted codified blueprints to modern architectures with our unique product engineering capabilities.
 

Opigno LMS is a Drupal-based open source Learning Management System, for any organization, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and any other enterprises. Organizations like SPIE, World Anti Doping Agency, CaterTrax, Maastricht University etc. adopted Opigno LMS today due to easy accessibility, flexibility, scalability, extensibility, and user-friendly features. Opigno pitches itself as an ideal choice for mid-sized companies to handle training and monitor progress. Since the system is developed around being a learning management solution the adoption can range between schools, colleges, universities and companies which handle training programs for new recruits.

What makes Opigno enterprise-ready?

Opigno LMS offers a customizable e-learning platform with innovative and collaborative features with business as well as a human-centric approach. Continuous support from its consultants and experts makes it a no-cost, no-maintenance solution.

Some of the key features of Opigno include:

• Freedom to create engaging training
• Customizable and engaging content, thanks to the great authoring tools
• Mobile learning & Multilingual management
• Fine-grained content management within the training, courses, modules, and activities
• Guided training creation wizard
• Graphical learning path manager
• Reusable content at all levels (activities, modules, courses)
• Reporting & analytics capabilities such as global user dashboards, and skill management tools

Opigno LMS features makes it an interesting and popular choice among various enterprises. But how do you get started with this? In this blog, we aim to provide a stepwise tutorial on how to install Opigno LMS. For installing the Opigno LMS in your localhost follow the steps given below.

Step 1: Setting up Installation Commands

Installing Opigno LMS on Ubuntu -

If you are using Ubuntu, follow the following points:

• Open /var/www/html folder in the terminal
• Create one folder in html 
• Execute this command to install opigno-composer in the newly created folder

composer create-project opigno/opigno-composer:^3.0

Installing Opigno LMS on Windows -

If you are using windows, the following steps will help you install Opigno LMS:

• Visit /xampp/htdocs
• Create one folder
• Execute this command to install opigno-composer in that newly created folder

composer create-project opigno/opigno-composer:^3.0

This will install the latest version of Opigno-composer in your system.

Step 2: Installing Opigno LMS on your OS

Once the commands shown in step 1 are successfully executed, we now install Opigno-LMS. To install Opigno-LMS, follow the following steps:

• From the terminal, visit the folder opigno-composer, which is freshly installed.
• In this folder execute the below command:

composer require opigno/opigno_lms:^3.0 dompdf/dompdf:0.8.5 --with-all-dependencies

This will install Opigno-LMS with all dependencies.

Step 3: Making Basic Changes in Opigno LMS

Now that the Opigno LMS is installed, some basic changes are needed within the settings. You must follow the following points step by step:

• Visit the websites/default folder, and create the settings.php file from the default.settings.php file, which would already be there.

• Give write access to the settings.php file, so that it will be able to mention the database and the connection associated with it at the time of installation. For giving write access you can execute the command:

  sudo chmod 777 -R settings.php

• Create a directory named “files” inside the default folder where you just created the settings.php file.

• Give write access to the files directory also. For giving write access you can execute the command:

  sudo chmod 777 -R files

Step 4: Installing your site

After executing all the aforementioned steps, you are now ready to install the site. For installing the site visit path:

localhost\<your_folder_name>\opigno-composer\web

At this stage, the drupal installation will be visible to you. Fill in all required details like database name, username, and password, and continue the installation.

Step 5: Site Configuration

After installation, you will be prompted to configure the site. Configure it by providing the site name, site email address, and other details.

This completes your site configuration.

Step 6: Completing Opigno LMS Installation

Now the system will try to redirect you to \user path. If that is not accessible to you, it shall say No requested URL found.

To fix this issue, create a virtual host for the site and provide the path up to the web folder. Once the virtual host is created, try to access the site with the virtual host. It will send you to a login page, as shown in Fig. 1 below.

               

Fill in the credentials you entered at the time of site configuration (refer to Step 5) and follow Fig. 2 below.

               
After verifying the credentials you will be logged in and the dashboard will be visible to you, as shown in Fig. 3 below.

          

Opigno LMS installation is now complete. The above steps should have helped you complete the installation process locally. 

Conclusion

Opigno LMS allows you to derive multiple benefits like flexibility, scalability, interoperability, excellent customer experience, and a unified platform that can control, analyze, and track the movement of your content.

We look forward to your queries and suggestions. Drop us an email or write to us in the comments section below. Also, let us know what other tutorials might interest you!

Razorpay Payments is the converged payment solution that enables merchants to accept, process, and disburse payments with the help of its product suite. This payment gateway allows businesses to access all kinds of payment modes, such as credit & debit cards, UPI, and mobile wallets. Razorpay Payments can easily scale itself to match the growing demands of a business, which is why it has become one of the most sought-after payment infrastructures. 

Razorpay Payment enables end-to-end payment solutions. It is the payment gateway system that can be easily added to the app or web platform for a faster and seamless checkout process. This blog is a complete step-by-step guide for setting up Razorpay Payment Integration into a Django backend with React's front-end app, which is a full-stack payment gateway application. Razorpay Payment is not just easy to use, but also very smooth for integration.

Before we move to the tutorial part, let us understand the Razorpay payment flow (Fig. 1). This has been taken from the official documentation of Razorpay for Integration.

Getting Started with the Razorpay Payment Gateway Integration

The tutorial below is a step-by-step guide to going live with Razorpay Payment integration. The reason it is easier to set up this integration is that Razorpay Payments gateway is a developer-friendly platform with a variety of libraries, APIs, and plugins. Supporting the extensive sets of modes for payment, Razorpay Payment integration supports versatile businesses, and hence, remains much in demand. So let’s get started with the tutorial on Razorpay Payment Gateway integration.

Step 1: Setting up Razorpay Account

You need to sign up for a Razorpay account to use the Razorpay Payments access to the Razorpay Dashboard. To create a Razorpay Account:

• Click here to check official docs from Razorpay for creating and setting up an account.
• Businesses can only accept payments from customers after they have created a Razorpay account. Once the KYC (Know-Your-Customer) verification is complete, the money is settled into your account with Razorpay.
• Razorpay Setting allows you to get your Razorpay Key Id and  Razorpay Key Secret from Razorpay Setting.
• To check the Razorpay Dashboard -> go to the settings (Fig. 2 & Fig. 3)

• Click on API Keys

• Click on Generate Test keys.

The popup will show you the Key Id and Key Secret. Click and download the file, and store that API key somewhere since we are going to use it later in our next few steps.

                    RAZOR_KEY = YOUR_KEY

                    RAZOR_SECRET = YOUR_KEY

 

• Finally we can see Keys are Generate.

 

Step 2: Create Django Project Backend

For creating Razorpay orders and handling Callback API, follow these steps shown through codes below:

• Install Razorpay's python package
  • $ pip install razorpay
• Install djangorestframework
  • $ pip install djangorestframework
• Create Project
  •     $ django-admin startproject myproject
• Create payments app
  • $ python manage.py startapp payments

CORS is very important to access other domains and here we are using React Js. Since it is a completely different domain, that is why we are adding CORS Headers for a smooth transaction between the cors domain i.e our Django App and React js App. Read More Here.

• $ python -m pip install django-cors-headers

To use the app in our project we need to specify our app name, rest framework, and corsheaders in the INSTALLED_APPS list as follows in settings.py:

                    INSTALLED_APPS = [

                               'django.contrib.admin',

                                …

                               ‘payments’ ,   # add like this

                                'rest_framework',   # add like this 

                                ‘corsheaders’,  # add like this

                      ]

 

To Access CORS Domains, we also need to add middleware in your settings.py file.

• MIDDLEWARE = [

                            'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware',
                             …
                            ‘corsheaders.middleware.CorsMiddleware',  # add like this
                    ]

                CORS_ORIGIN_ALLOW_ALL=True  # add like this after middleware.

If we want to use our app URLs, we need to add them in URL patterns.

Now also add the Payment Model in our admin.py file for GUI view of Tables in Browser.

In the admin.py file add the code shown below:

The Setup part is now done and hence, we can move to the actual coding. Follow the instructions below for completing your tutorial.

 

• Create the Order Schema in payments 

With the help of codes available across multiple sources, you can create Order Schema in payments, and make migrations for the payment app. For doing so, hit the below commands to migrate this model into the database:

$ python manage.py makemigrations payments

$ python manage.py migrate

And with this, we have set up our model. It is now time to write API Logic to perform operations. But before moving to that part, first, we’ll understand the flow of Razorpay payments. To understand this, let us first explain the Code Logic or Views.py file in the payments app. 

How do the payments actually work in Razorpay Payment Gateway? We’ve got you covered in the dev language for better understanding:

1. Initiate a Razor order from the Django server.
2. Pass order Id and all options to the React front end.
3. The user clicks the payment button and pays with one of the payment methods listed on the front end.
4. Razorpay Payment System will handle payment success or failure.
5. On failure of payment, Razorpay will try to retry the payments in the front end only.
6. On success, Razorpay will make a post request to a callback on our server.
7. Verify the payment signature and other details to confirm that the payment is authentic and not tampered with.
8. Once the signature is verified, capture the payment and send the success response to the front end.

Since the Razorpay amount works in sub-units of currency, therefore while passing the amount we multiply it by 100. For example, INR 200 would become 20000 paise.

Add API logic for creating orders and verifying payment signatures (views.py) 

The codes mentioned below will help you add API logic which is needed for creating orders, and also for verification of payment signatures. 

Add API routes for orders and for verifying payment (urls.py)

Below is the code that will help you in adding API routes meant for orders and verification of payment.

Create a constants.py file in the same dir for easy access

Also, add one more file constats.py for easy update of payments status using the code written below:

And with this, we are done with our backend Django setup. Now the next step is to set up the react frontend and make payments with APIs.

Step 3: Set up React front end and make payments with APIs

In order to set up React front end, refer to the official documentation of React JS Here.

Create a simple project with React App by referring to the Official doc. 

Follow the codes below for further steps:

• $ npx create-react-app my-app
• $ cd my-app
• $ npm start

Your folder structure will look like this (Fig. 7).

 

In App.js under the src folder paste the below code for a smooth transaction.

Step 4: Start the React project -

$ npm run start

Step 5: Start Django Project -

$ python manage.py runserver

Code GitHub Link - https://github.com/SwapnilPawar88/Razorpay-Django-ReactJs-App

Conclusion

Razorpay Payment Integration allows your corporate customers to simplify, automate, and accelerate the pace of their financial operations. Whether it is accepting payment, reconciling transactions, or managing cash flow, a simple Razorpay Payment Integration will help them get various benefits like flexible payouts, excellent customer experience, and a unified platform that can control, analyze, and track the movement of money. 

Let us know what other payment gateway integrations might interest you! We are looking forward to your queries and suggestions. Drop us an email or write to us in the comments below.  
 

87% of the healthcare providers or HCPs are looking for either completely virtual or hybrid meetings with the pharmaceutical reps even after the pandemic, states a 2020 Accenture research. 67% of the HCPs think that pharmaceutical companies have a scope of improving communication, which could help physicians with better prescriptions to their patients, suggests Chief Marketing Officer at Sermo, a world leader offering actionable insights for the healthcare community. Digital transformation through an omnichannel commercial model is at the forefront of several pharma companies, yet these digital dreams remain deferred.

Harvard Business Review in its report ‘Why So Many High Profile Digital Transformations fail?,’ highlights “We think there’s something more here than executive over-exuberance of slowing markets. This kind of unfortunate decision has happened over and over again, in wave after wave of transformative business technology.”

Key lessons which emerge from heavy commitments and investments in raising digital capabilities include product desirability and the economy of a country. Our previous blog spoke extensively about the 5 challenges of pharma companies in adopting analytics-enabled omnichannel commercial models. This blog will cover a 5-step journey called REACT, to omnichannel commercial transformation for pharma companies.

REACT: Strategic Journey to Omnichannel Commercial Transformation

With a clear definition of business objectives, a pharmaceutical company can align its strategic vision to the solutions that it aims to pursue. To convert traditional models into omnichannel digital commercial models with the agile approach, we suggest this 5-step transformative journey REACT(Fig.1):

• Reach out HCPs by setting your business objectives and strategic vision
• Enhance the patient experience by offering treatment options specific to the population, instead of one-size-fits-all
• Act towards data-driven health care and dynamic delivery; & Adopt by leveraging robust analytics and data capability, and shifting towards innovative modalities
• Covert potential customers by building trust in the brand, and finally engage them for retention, and
• Test with the created MVP on selected population, region, and product

Step 1: Reach Out HCPs

A company should map out its specific growth plans, like reaching out to more HCPs, maximizing awareness around new product adoption, and developing new indicators. Priorities and use cases will also define the scope of advanced analytics, including modeling approach, types of data requirements, end-users, user interface design, talent requirement, and features involved. This step will therefore standardize the actions of your sales reps, and improve and optimize the content through personalization, messaging, and channel deployment.

Step 2: Enhance patient experience

Customer experience and personalized care have become the keywords of the pharma industry as customers continue to dictate their choices and preferences. Pharma companies must therefore consider the technology platforms which can interface with their stakeholders and are critical in improving enhanced engagement. Sameer Lal, SVP at Indegene, a leading pharmaceutical company, says, “We aim to bring together leaders from the industry to evaluate practical applications of modern technology for increasing the efficiency of the organization, enhancing communication, and improving compliance.”

Pharma companies must consider building capabilities across digital engagement. Since there is a transition from a one-size-fits-all approach toward a specific population, region, and demographics-based treatments, therefore the pharmaceutical companies must work by building blocks that can lead to improved outcomes. Investing in digitally-connected and hyper‑personalized services can help by reducing costs and driving adherence.

Step 3: Act & Adopt

The emergence of new models and improved care are the key drivers for enhanced processes, systems, and models pushed through new requirements and data explosion. Advanced analytics and robust data can help in omnichannel interconnectivity which drives more targeted marketing strategies and leads to enhanced agility and mobility. Pharmaceutical companies that can leverage advanced analytics and data capabilities gain an advantage through dynamic forecasting, sales force performance analytics, advanced segmentation, predictive pricing modeling, and contracting analytics. The shift towards new and innovative modalities can transform core business processes in contemporary commercial models. All this, in turn, frees up a company's resources and allows it to focus on improving quality, strategizing, aligning, and decreasing the costs of managing such initiatives.

Step 4: Convert potential customers

For any pharma company that aims at becoming a market leader in inorganic growth and therapeutic area, it is essential to focus on product desirability. For the ad hoc or targeted support, a pharmaceutical company must focus on bolstering its portfolio, while also looking at capabilities to build partnerships and purchases to increase its competitive ability.

The average organic customer acquisition cost (CAC) in the pharmaceutical industry is $196. Companies derive CAC by Total Cost of Sales and Marketing by Total New Customers. For converting potential customers, the companies need to focus on building trust which can happen by offering value-based care, and affordability. Continuous innovation, improved data systems, and standardized data sharing models for accessing adherence data can help in delivering value. The companies must therefore focus on outcome-based and risk-adjusted models to offer value, outcomes, and affordability, and convert potential customers.

Step 5: Test with the created MVP

A pharma company can build momentum by testing out a value-adding MVP or Minimum Viable Product. The company can also focus on single indications in the pilot country or even smaller geographical regions within a country. This will help the company in offering tangible showcases for personalized approaches to engage HCPs. The choice of indication or a product should have a balanced approach between its ease of implementation and impact (value to the customer).

For developing MVP, for example, McKinsey suggests that a pharma company can create a product or indication with a large sales force, strong competition with more growing space, a high-value proposition, the flexibility of content customization, and more customer data. Rich data availability can create impactful analytics. However, the country or region that a pharma company selects must be important and should have strong data availability and willingness to change.

Conclusion

Targeted investments for analytics-powered omnichannel commercial transformation models for pharma companies can lead to improved outcomes. So how do you equip your field force for reaching out to the right customers? How Do you empower your business with the right tech capabilities? How can you leverage analytics and data for deploying impactful strategies like REACT? If you’re looking for the right answers to these questions, reach out to us to learn how we have digitally enabled our pharma clients in empowering their end-users.
 

31% of the CEOs of large companies believe that the top challenge to accelerating digital transformation was difficulty making quick technology-related decisions, says a report from KPMG. Other challenges that hinder the pace of digital transformation in the finance sector are- security, rapid burst of innovative technologies, implementation of technology, and matching customer expectations.

While 92% of finance leaders across 89 corporates have started their journey to introduce digital interventions in the finance function, only 11% believe they are at an advanced stage according to EY Report ‘Digital disruption in finance”. In this blog, we aim to assist decision-makers in navigating their route to their company’s digital transformation by speaking about key technologies, and enterprise-ready digital solutions.

Digital Transformation in finance has now become an essential part of goal setting across financial services companies, thanks to readily available business data, and the ability of teams to process such huge data. Algorithms and analytics, better connectivity tools, improved platforms, cloud computing, and sensors have made accessibility to data easier. The finance teams must work on continuous redesigning of processes to ensure digital transformation, versus the repetitive traditional processes, which tend to slow down the pace of execution.

Some of the clear benefits of digital transformation include- automated and accelerated processes, tangible financial gains, reduced errors, and improved efficiencies. Jennifer LaClair, the CFO of Ally Financial, an industry leader in digital excellence, suggests, “The CFO function plays a critical role in driving Ally’s digital transformation. We partner closely with IT, strategy, and business leaders to assess business opportunities and ensure the most effective allocation of investment dollars and capital.”

Deloitte suggests critical technological predictions for finance in the times ahead. These suggestions are based on what finance leaders are presently doing, and what technologies are available, or would dominate in those areas (Fig. 1). Blockchain, Automation, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are some of the key technologies discussed below.

Blockchain

Digital transformation fintech solutions include blockchain, which makes use of distributed ledgers in making data and transactions secure. Blockchain helps with reduced costs of database maintenance, faster operations, and real-time contracts. Finance and accounting processes can be largely transformed using blockchain technology. Key functions like accounts payable, trade finance, and general accounting are excellent candidates for the adoption of blockchain technology.

Automation

40% of the financial activities like general accounting, operations, revenue management, and cash disbursement, can be fully automated, suggests a McKinsey Global Institute research. 17% of such activities have the potential of being mostly automated. These figures suggest that CFOs and other financial companies’ leaders can simplify core transactions through automation.

Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a kind of automation software that helps in scheduling the timely performance of redundant tasks like data entry. Companies applying RPA at scale have adopted the technology by redefining their internal processes and altering operations. RPA helps in reducing the human error rate, thus increasing compliance. Also, it helps with reduced operational costs.

For instance, Zurich Insurance experienced a 50% cost reduction in the pension and insurance division in the UK, and thus implemented the technology in other divisions in fewer than 2 months. RPA solutions helped Bancolombia, Columbia’s largest bank, in enabling their clients with better management of their investment portfolio. As a result, it is felicitated with the award for Digital Transformation in the largest company in Columbia.

Artificial Intelligence

AI can be used to identify patterns and enable predictive analysis, thus helping with outliers identification. Among many use-cases, this can help eliminate fraudulent practices or at-risk parties automatically. You can use such digital tools for picking out patterns to mark non-payers or avoid such kinds of transactions, thus eliminating disagreeable entrants, which can dilute the customer base of a company. AI also carries out most of the operating activities with almost negligible human intervention. AI-enabled decision-making can help financial companies with gaps identification, making forecasts, and measuring expenses- leading to optimized business processes.

For example, Ant Financial crossed the 1 billion mark in the number of customers in just 5 years of its launch. Spun out of Alibaba, Ant Financial Services Group makes use of data and artificial intelligence and serves over 10x more customers than any of the largest banks in the U.S. The number of employees here is just 1/10th. Built on the digital core, the company today competes with the top financial companies of the U.S., like JP Morgan.

Advanced Analytics & Insights

Mining business data through automation techniques, statistical methods, predictive modeling, and machine learning has become essential for strategic decision-making. Financial leaders must work in tandem with strategic and IT teams and assess business through their leaders to identify broader ways in which AA and data insights can uncover business value. Advanced Analytics and data mining through insights have multiple use cases like risk management, managing talent, preventing fraud, optimizing prices, and exploring various other applications. It can be covered across various areas such as data visualization, graph analysis, data processing, and mapping customers’ behavior.

The time to act is now!

“The most important thing is to make the technology inclusive - make the world change. Next, pay attention to those people who are 30 years old, because those are the internet generation. They will change the world; they are the builders of the world,” says Jack Ma, Founder & Chairman of Alibaba Group. Therefore, financial services companies should work closely with engineering solutions partners and strategic decision-makers to initiate digitization in financial companies.

A financial service company can set clear expectations, and ensure strong talent leadership to drive growth through technology. If you have a clear agenda and need to discuss the digital transformation of your financial company across pain points, get in touch with Valuebound, an enterprise digital experience company in India.
 

77% of the marketers in the Pharma sector believe that the omnichannel commercial model is the right way forward. One dimensional strategies with limited healthcare practitioners (HCP) engagement and disconnected promotions are no longer considered best practices. Even as face-to-face HCP visits still remain relevant in Asian markets, they too have reached the tipping point in terms of effectiveness. 87% of healthcare providers (HCPs) want either virtual or a mix of virtual and in-person meetings with pharmaceutical reps, suggests Forbes. As a response, pharma companies in the Asian markets have started to transform the way HCPs interact. At the core of new digital strategy is aggregation and synthesizing of behaviors and trends via deep insights, actionable data and advanced analytics.

However, misconceptions and myths around omnichannel, analytics and digital approach remain a key problem in Asian market. Over 50% of the senior marketing executives in pharma companies struggle to gather actionable insights itself from data as per a report by Eversana. In this blog, we aim at answering these challenges around adopting analytics-based omnichannel commercialization in Asia for pharma, and develop a four step digital strategy (Fig. 1).

Why does omnichannel digitization via analytics matter?

While sectors like banking, retail, and media have already seen benefits from the use of Advanced Analytics (AA), pharma is yet to improve its commercial model through data which can be positioned as the strategic asset. Today, sales reps find it challenging to customize and optimize the complex channels, frequency of interactions, and content for specific HCPs who expect relevant and tailor-made content to their patients and practice (Fig. 2)

McKinsey suggests that the leaders who have adopted AA along with an omnichannel approach for the commercial model saw 5-10% revenue growth, 10-20% better market efficiencies & cost savings, 3-5% prescribes increase, and 5-10% higher satisfaction amongst HCPs. Such improvements are a result of differentiated insights through AA which can guide commercialization such as, creating channels and personalized messages for each HCP, and allocating resources.

Suggested Strategy for Omnichannel Marketing

The Omnichannel commercial model helps in upgrading the way pharma works, by upskilling for a tech-enabled world, and personalized engagement which creates value. Continuous feedback from the market helps in strengthening optimization power and predictiveness of analytics systems.

We suggest a four pronged strategy involving data gathering, developing analytics models, building the right team, and adopting the same (Fig. 3)

What kind of data needs to get gathered?

Data collection through CRM systems around HCP interaction details, market-specific data like competitive landscape, demographics, sales data, content, and through third-party is already available with the marketers. For developing an omnichannel commercial model for pharma, such datasets can be interconnected to create a holistic view of HCPs and customers. For developing insightful analytics, McKinsey describes six criteria for data requirements:

• Sales data about products for each HCP or certain groups of HCPs. This helps in understanding sales estimation at individual HCP level, thus understanding sales impact through analytics.
• HCP interactions data which is customized at individual level. This helps in channel and frequency recommendations.
• Messaging/content data which is interconnected to interaction data. This helps in content modeling.
• Product data which is mapped across sales and interactions with individual HCPs.
• HCP characteristics data including basic details, demographics, patient estimate at brand level. This helps in sales estimation at individual level, and also enables micro-segmentation.
• Market data like epidemiology, market access, competitive environment, market events, and market access.

Compliance and regulatory requirements must be fulfilled for each country during the data collection process.

What are the analytics insights from data gathered?

Advanced analytics can help pharma companies gain deeper understanding and insights across macro trends, which are:

• Focus on customer experience- At the core of omnichannel approach is customer-centric experience, which must flow across channels in a seamless manner. Mary Alice Dwyer, Chair of Medical Affairs Digital Strategy Council says, “A company must embed digital in its operations and ways of working, rather than bolting it on as a separate project or through a separate team,”
• Personalized Care- Audience segmentation using derived analytics can enable personalized engagement, which is measurable and assists pharma companies in charting the future campaigns with impactful messages, especially before launching a new drug. Patient-focused marketing can boost engagement rate by 20-90% depending upon the segment.  
• Dynamic delivery models with Innovative solutions- like AI and AA have the capacity to digitally transform commercial models of pharma companies. Insights through advanced analytics enable strategizing, improving product quality, and ensuring consistency.
• Data-enabled healthcare-  Companies that can leverage data have the edge over competitors in terms of contracting analytics, predictive pricing modeling, dynamic forecasting, advanced segmentation, and sales force performance.

What kind of talent requirements do we need?

Analytics-driven marketing efforts require pharmaceutical brands to partner with tech companies that are data-driven. Typically, omnichannel commercial model of pharma companies require tech team which includes-

• product owner
• translator
• data engineer
• data scientist
• change manager

On the functional side, the companies would need representatives like marketing manager, sales director and medical adviser. (Fig. 4)

Average penetration of digital talent for Asian countries is double that of the US, suggests APEC Closing the Digital Skills Gap Report, 2020. The pharma companies face the major challenge- job profiles of designer, translator, data engineer, and data scientist in life sciences and healthcare sector. While hiring tech talent for pharma could be challenging, it shouldn’t stop the companies in pursuing holistic omnichannel commercial models. But, the change must begin from the top. Harvard Business Review report notes, ‘It has never been clearer that leadership — both good and bad — cascades down to impact every single aspect of the organization, with as much as 50% of the variability in group or unit performance being attributable to the individual leader.’

How to adopt Omnichannel model pan-organization?

A company’s success or failure for any of its digital capability depends on several factors. Harvard Business Review, in its report ‘Why so many high profile digital transformation fail,’ underscores 4 main reasons:

• Economy of a country or product desirability can affect omnichannel commercial model adoption for pharma companies. That is why, leadership should not see technological innovation or digital marketing solutions as its only salvation.
• Advanced Analytics for an omnichannel commercial model is not a plug-and-play thing, but is a continuous process powered by robust change management within an organization. It requires infrastructure, IT systems, projects, and skills Additionally, it requires ongoing monitoring and introspection.
• Digital investments must be calibrated towards industry readiness focused on both customers, and competitors.
• If the efforts aren’t going well, there must be a call for a new model.

Looking ahead

Pharma marketers may be tempted with the idea of radical technological change in the early phases of the new technology to dominate new markets, rather than  learning about the market through valuable insights. Investing ahead of a new technology curve in pharma only makes sense when the marketers are aware about where the curve actually is. The way forward is clear-headed decisions regarding the omnichannel commercial model for pharma companies through advanced analytics. In our next blog, we shall focus more on the “how to” part of solving the omnichannel commercial model for Asia-pacific Pharma companies by discussing a 5-step REACT journey to achieve transformation.

In an exclusive interview with Valuebound’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Piyush Sharma, Content Manager Akanksha Mishra, discussed topics ranging from his views and approach towards building growth oriented teams, developing technical capabilities and technology leadership. He also shared his personal journey, hobbies and interests, which would inspire the youngsters looking to be CTO in future.

Hi Piyush, Glad to have you join us as CTO, Valuebound. Could you share something about yourself? What defines you? What is something you have been passionate about throughout your career?

It’s wonderful to join a growth-oriented company that is looking to solve the tech problems of clients through its high-performance team. Recognized as a people person, I love to lead from the front with accountability & ownership. Result orientation and empathy are something that I try to bring into my team’s approach towards work, be it personal or professional, and this has always helped me in building a sustainable and agile team. A perpetual learner, would not shy away from learning from anyone and everyone. I enjoy reading management strategies, business success stories & failures, and philosophy of life. I’m a poet and flutist myself.

Everyone has their idea of success. What is your measure of accomplishment as a technology leader? Can you share some incidents/examples about the same?

I’ve been associated with the successful delivery of multiple critical products on the server and client-side, desktop CPU space, delivery of Internet Banking systems, and various software projects around eCommerce, digital space, and client-server applications across multiple market segments. I’ve been recognized as a Star Manager at Intel. I also believe that my accomplishments include being instrumental in building the entire team from scratch at startups like Zigy, and AyurUniverse. 

My measure of success as a technology leader would be to:

• Build and retain a smart team - which is well-versed in the current technology, focused, disciplined, committed, works with high integrity, and stays together
• Quality technology deliveries to customers - Define and execute a planned, robust, self-learning model which delivers.
• Create a learning ecosystem - which will enable people to cross-train and master emerging technologies required for the business. Have a career growth plan for every individual in the organization.

What is your management style?

With transformational management and a collaborative leadership style, I would strive for the organization to the best of its potential by bringing in changes that align with the present ecosystem and market dynamics. Also with my inclusive management style, I will work towards a cohesive, cooperative environment within the team.

What are the first few things that you came across when taking a walk-through of Valuebound’s service delivery, value proposition, and existing client success?

I see Valuebound as an organization, which has grown consistently and has created its own niche in the Digital Transformation space. With its deep-rooted capability in the Content Management Systems space, Valuebound has proven itself to be one of the preferred partners for the customers. The long-term relationships with the customers, timely delivery, and cost-effective quality solutions are some of the critical metrics that reflect the customers’ confidence and trust in Valuebound very loud and clear.

Valuebound has a strong technology backbone, and a committed & motivated workforce. I believe we have the right team with strong technical capabilities and the right attitude to craft the brand of Valuebound as customers’ choice. The organization with its focused attention on employee development and stakeholders’ satisfaction is rightly positioned for a steep growth harnessing the huge market potential going forward.

What are your views on the current IT services industry, considering the high growth trajectory at the moment?

The IT industry is waking up from the lull of the last two years of the pandemic. The business had been in the maintenance mode with a keep-the-lights-on kind of attitude and rare high-value investments.

Gradually we see growth in demands, and investments rising with tech budgets, which allows us to identify, and fill the missing skills in technology. The industry will be looking towards more innovations, diving into emerging technologies or digital transformation and new business models to support these. And, we must plug ourselves well enough to partake advantage by grabbing our slice of the opportunities.

What kinds of current technologies and solutions are we going to focus on delivering at Valuebound?

While we continue to focus on our existing capabilities around Drupal and other digital technologies, we shall be looking at building Cloud Computing, and DevOps capabilities in the mid-to-long term, like AWS for sharing storage and computing resources, Big-data for data-handling/analytics, etc.

Also, we see the trend towards low-code or no-code. So Spring and Angular will also be crucial. Machine learning / Artificial Intelligence is becoming much in vogue. Right now not very clear on how we can venture into this, but it will be on our radar for sure.

Where would you choose to invest your time more- ensuring that all current systems are running efficiently, or researching innovative and new technologies?

While we stay focused on our current delivery streams, we would invest our energy and resources towards creating new avenues in terms of technologies and product engineering beyond our regular Software Services and Delivery space. Process improvements and strengthening the technology organization in terms of skill development, career-focus, result orientation, and customer-oriented approach would continue to be our keen attention areas.

We would continue to be agile and vigilant to the changing dynamics of the market and customer requirements to align ourselves suitably as and when needed. Forming Valuebound Labs to trigger the creative side of the capable brains that we have and foster innovations would be an integrated and important part of our customer & market-centric growth strategy. Having the right business acumen, i.e. understanding the business impact of what each of us does, at different levels of the organization, is something that we would also focus on as needed.

What are your recommendations for professionals aspiring to be CTO?

As with any senior leadership role, technology leaders also have multi-dimensional activities. Senior leaders are best nurtured and developed over time. My sincere recommendations for young professionals out there would be so- 

• Visualize with a 360-degree approach - The aspirant should have a holistic focus on the current market scenario, present organization’s placement, emerging opportunities, understanding of the pitfalls, emerging market technology trends, how an organization can have its share, what we need to be there, and how do we align with the future market.
• Be good with communication - Self-driven, disciplined, and very organized concerning stakeholders’ communications, to get buy-in, resolve conflicts, to inspire and encourage people would be a plus for any professional aspiring to be a CTO.
• Be able to draw a line between taking calculated risks versus taking bold and novel approaches.
• Translate strategy to execution, and a product, & create a cutting-edge ecosystem hierarchy- (S)he should be able to build innovation in the organization’s DNA, which is instrumental in formulating policies, conflict resolution, etc.

61% of respondents find technology as a competitive edge in supply chain, and many of them find emerging technologies as key areas of investments, a Gartner survey underscores. Emerging, evolving and maturing digital technologies are key factors that provide competitive advantage to supply chain companies. 20% of the respondents are keen towards investing in one such technology of robotics.

Key areas of focus in supply chain management are the technologies which can easily manage assets, and help with human decision-making. Andrew Underwood, Partner, Supply Chain Operations at KPMG (UK) says, “The future of supply chain is going to be enabled through technology, ecosystem, people, and capabilities, only we can dream of at the moment.”

In our previous blog, we discussed how a supply chain company must define its vision into technical capabilities. In this blog, we aim at providing a roadmap on how leaders can digitize its operations across the supply chain.

Creating a robust vision

Creating a vision for transforming supply chain management largely depends upon a key step- assessing your supply chain business, and knowing where the technical capabilities presently stand. Therefore, the companies must gather data by anchoring them on following base points:

• Decision-Making: Technologies like Machine learning can update legacy systems, and support human decision making, which is a key focus area of supply chain management. 
• Automation & Innovation: Gartner predicts that data science, advanced analytics, and artificial artificial intelligence will become a key offering amongst supply chain management application vendors in the next 4 years.
• Data: Are you collecting and generating the entire data required for your vision? And is it rightfully stored for you to access it easily?
• Software & Hardware: Do the business systems enable analytical capabilities which are needed by the company?
• Talent: Does your business have digitally-sound talent that can operate and transform the supply chain in future? Does your business culture encourage innovation, continuous improvement, and willingness to experiment?

Today, analytics depends on off-the-shelf applications, which can help in extracting transactional data and insights, which will be more worthy rather than insights collected through traditional sampling and survey methods. 50% of the supply chain organizations are investing resources in AI and advanced analytics capabilities through 2024, Gartner suggests (Fig. 1)

Developing a Roadmap for Supply Chain Digitization

The teams must identify scope for operational improvements, and thus build digital solutions, which will support capabilities that are already present. With the help of root-cause analysis, shortfalls come into forefront, and this helps in charting digital journeys for potential changes.

No-regret changes, as defined by McKinsey, can yield high value, and fewer implementation barriers. Depending upon the levels of urgency, each company can segregate their digitization efforts into different categories (Fig.2)

But what are “no-regret” changes? These are the changes which are implemented on the contemporary models, and are easily quantified in respect with cost, capital, service, and agility. For instance, by deploying a tool that assists with inventory tracking and optimization, a supply chain company will enhance its awareness regarding the levels of inventory throughout the supply chain. This brings direct financial and operational benefit, and adds great value to the business.

Clarity in strategy will help you in implementing suggestions, such as these:

• Implementing SCMS: Digitizing supply chain needs software that can support your vision. Supply-chain-management software and digital logistics solutions, for example, can help in streamlining processes, overseeing transactions, and managing relationships with your suppliers. The software must be scalable across your long-term, multi-year digital strategy though.
• Implementing RFID: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) will help your business in creating coherence and improving connectivity throughout the supply chain. This will make the process more efficient, data-driven and transparent across production, distribution, and retail. This will help businesses in increasing the return on investment. How capable is an organization in converting RFID data into its business intelligence also defines the kind of ROI you will achieve. Research suggests that the average time across industry for recovering RFID investment is around 30 months and falling.
• Implementing GPS: Global Positioning System implementation brings in the benefits of increased transparency, security, and accountability. Also, it provides insights around cost analysis. GPS helps in contributing towards interconnected digital supply chains by way of transparency and tracking.
• Implementing robotics and automation: Improvement and efficiency around omnichannel retail sales, inventory updates, email automation, tracking information, and payments is a direct benefit of automating processes across the supply chain.   Likewise, robotics implementation, especially in the packaging supply chain. Some of the key developments revolve around artificial intelligence, machine learning, navigation, response and sensor capabilities, and public policy and regulatory reforms.

Recap

By prioritizing changes, the companies can organize action plans into a multi-year roadmap. Meanwhile, side processes like making changes in organizational and operational processes, and across talents, can help in setting up a stage for successful digital revamping.

One example of successful implementation of machine learning in planning and forecasting demand is Mahindra & Mahindra. Aniruddh Srivastava, Head of Demand & Supply Planning at the company, in a recent conference said that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are the cornerstones of their digital strategy. Mahindra & Mahindra increased its forecast accuracy by 10%, which in turn also improved its service levels by 10%, and reduced inventory investment by 20%.

Disciplined assessment, and long-term roadmap for transformation are two key ingredients that can help companies in reaping benefits. Companies that can employ operational and technological transformation have a better chance for using digital transformation to its full potential. Talk to us about deploying the latest digital technologies for improved supply chain performance at a modest cost.