Publicis Sapient drives domain expertise and shared purpose for BFSI clients

HFS attended Publicis Sapient’s Financial Services Analyst Roundtable, where the service provider shared its latest value propositions for its financial services clients. Key banking and capital markets themes included customer engagement, cloud modernization, and product engineering. For insurance, Publicis Sapient highlighted themes of claims re-invention, reimagined agent experience, and the creation of new revenue streams. More notably, it showcased its capabilities by inviting a couple of its newer customers, Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) and BT Pension Scheme Management (BTPSM), to talk about value and benefits.

Three themes stood out to the HFS team:

• The power of partnerships in creating enterprise value,
• The criticality of domain experience in financial services, and
• The role of shared purpose as service providers strive to do a heck of a lot more than drive cost savings.

The power of partnership helped Publicis Sapient win SCB’s mindshare

SCB is the oldest bank in Thailand and is one of the largest, with $100 billion in assets and 17 million customers. Six years ago, it started the first phase of its digital transformation: It went agile and adopted a cloud-based banking-as-a-service platform approach enabled by a data lake. SCB successfully drove massive digital adoption with its customers and did things that seemed crazy, like eliminating fees for peer-to-peer lending. It accomplished all this with internal resources.

The realization that many of its businesses were still not transformed drove SCB’s second round of digital transformation. A key wave-two initiative was core banking modernization; it was in the cloud, but its core system was still mainframe-based. This focus led it to partner with Publicis Sapient.

Publicis Sapient was new to Thailand, but its partnership with a cloud-native core banking solution was of sufficient interest to SCB and its transformation objectives that helped begin a conversation. The relationship-focused first on core banking transformation and then on having data at the core. SCB worked in partnership with Publicis Sapient on its second wave of transformation.

Bringing consulting and domain-led execution capabilities in pensions and trading

BTPSM manages the BT Pension Scheme, a defined benefit pension scheme for employees, former employees, and dependents of BT Group and some of its associated companies. It has 274,000 members, £57 billion in assets, and pays out £2.6 billion in benefits annually. It is one of the largest corporate pension schemes in the UK.

Across the pensions industry, there is an anachronistic model with lots of paper and even microfiche, requiring lots of cleanups. About four years ago, the firm decided to invest in transforming and implementing relevant investment strategies for seamless integration with the pension administration platform. The pension scheme needed a more intuitive platform to offer members more self-service opportunities.

BTPSM and Publicis Sapient engaged in pension administration and investment management platform transformation, addressing systemic issues through enormous data cleanup and cloud-native technologies, paving the way to a modern approach. They created a new investment management platform that can productize new models in hours and days instead of months. As Kevin Samborn, BTPSM’s CTO, shared, “the ultimate goal is that if someone passes on a Friday, BTPSM can now model cash flows on a Monday, which used to take years.”

BTPSM partnered with Publicis Sapient because it understands the pensions and investment management domain and possesses relevant tech expertise. This combination helped position Publicis Sapient as a strategic partner driving end-to-end transformation for BTPSM, including strategy and implementation.

Shared purpose exemplified

As HFS noted in a recent report on the evolution of enterprise relationships with services providers, these relationships are progressing from being effort-based to performance-based to increasingly purpose-based. Chalee Asavathiratham, Chief Digital Banking Officer of SCB, exemplified this shared-purpose theme as he discussed SCB’s evolving relationship with Publicis Sapient. While its shared purpose is certainly exemplified by the focus and fulfillment of its transformation objectives, the firms also engage in a co-investment joint venture, SCB Tech X, a technology and service provider for the bank and its group companies.

The Bottom Line: The need for strategic digital business transformation partners is changing in financial services. Tech expertise remains paramount, but smart firms will progressively prioritize domain expertise and embrace shared purpose.

Strategic transformation partnerships in financial services are evolving.  As the Publicis Sapient clients noted above, smart financial services firms are looking for more than technical expertise in their services partners. We are seeing the evolution from effort to performance to a focus on shared purpose to help businesses stay relevant meeting, if not exceeding, customer needs in real-time. The measure of a ‘strategic partner’ is increasingly determined by the ability to deliver technical expertise plus domain knowledge collaboratively.