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Apple-Goldman Sachs Partnership Could Steal Credit Card Market Share from Consumer Banks | Blog

Apple’s March 25, 2019, announcement of a physical credit card, called Apple Card, might initially seem like a strange step away from its highly entrenched Apple Pay digital wallet. That Apple and Goldman Sachs partnered on this initiative might also seem odd, as neither operate in the consumer banking space. But when you take a closer look, you realize this is actually a very well-crafted go-to-market strategy for both Apple and Goldman Sachs.

What’s in it for Goldman Sachs?

Goldman Sachs wanted to enter the retail banking space with a credit card. But the U.S. cards market is already crowded and growing at 6-7 percent, payments is a volumes business, and it would have taken a long time to gather significant market share if it went solo. And while the wallet market is growing fast, a standalone wallet is unlikely to make a near-term impact. Goldman Sachs chose the best of both worlds; a card in partnership with a wallet service provider. This helps it enter the cards market while getting easy access to Apple’s wallet user base and future proofing the business.

What’s in it for Apple?

For Apple, this physical credit card partnership opens the path to new customer segments, particularly baby boomers who are still more comfortable with a card and have been slow to adopt digital wallets like Apple Pay. It will also help Apple expand more quickly into geographical markets beyond the U.S., where it doesn’t dominate the mobile devices market. And because Apple sells the synergy of its ecosystem and ease of use, and is promoting the card’s intuitive design, simplicity, and transparency, Apple might also boost its device sales.

Apple Card comes with an EMV chip but there is no number on the card, which means that users will have to use Apple Pay to use the card online or for NFC transactions. The physical card can only be used at point-of-sale (PoS) terminals. This may translate into a higher fee for Apple Pay and explains why Apple chose Goldman Sachs over other banks.

Further, Apple lags a bit behind some of the other BigTechs in the war for data. For example, Facebook has massive amounts of social data, and Google has enormous quantities of location and search data. Goldman Sachs can help Apple with financial analytics, an area in which it’s not particularly strong, and having access to financial data surely gives Apple an edge in its marketing efforts.

All in all, we firmly believe that Apple Card is a sound and strong market entry and growth strategy for both Goldman Sachs and Apple. Indeed, this move could prove to be a strategic masterpiece in the dynamic payments industry.

What does it mean for BigTechs and banks?

We can expect to see BigTechs like Facebook and Google make similar partnering moves to enter the cards market and tap into the larger PoS network to attract new users with their marketing power and brand name cachet.

Banks need to move faster on their journey towards digital payments or risk losing market share to other more nimble companies or partnerships like Apple/Goldman Sachs. To accelerate their move into the digital payments space, increase customer satisfaction, and avoid making huge investments on their own, banks should strongly consider partnering with FinTechs, which can be more agile and respond faster to the changing market with the right infrastructure and technology capabilities.

What’s your reaction to the Apple/Goldman Sachs partnership? Please share your thoughts with me at: Rohit.Sharma@everestgrp.com.

The post Apple-Goldman Sachs Partnership Could Steal Credit Card Market Share from Consumer Banks | Blog appeared first on Everest Group.

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Fredricks John, EVP and Site Head Personiv Coimbatore – Sustainability Champion of the Year

Fredricks John, EVP and Site Head, Personiv Coimbatore was honored with the Sustainability Champion of the Year at the India Sustainability Summit & Awards 2019 held in Mumbai on 12th April, 2019.

Fred has been consistently taken initiatives to make a long-term sustainable difference in the world. He has led solar panels installation, tree plantation drives, Silambam classes, offered assistance to students, conducted blood donation camps every year and conducted a Polio eradication campaign through Rotary club.

On winning the award John said, “Our Pillar of Strength – Giving Back, has made us rub shoulders with some of the Top Companies in India on a platform that recognizes Sustainable Social Responsibility. It is the involvement of each and every one of our associates in the CSR activities we do that touches the lives of people in our communities. We not only give, we ensure that it is sustainable – be it in teaching Silambam (Martial Arts) as a mode of self-defense for children in Public Schools or planting and caring for trees for the future or erecting Solar Power Plants that keep giving back for 25 years! I would like to dedicate this award to all of us who continue to believe that it is important to Give Back!”

The India Sustainability Summit and Awards discusses how leadership from businesses could play a transformational role to design future development pathways, measure business value and share the imperativeness to achieve the SDGs. The Summit brings together key thinkers and business leaders, who have delivered and continue to deliver strategies, ideas, and solutions for a sustainable business and future. The Summit aims to enhance awareness on business models, tools, technologies, solutions, and approaches followed by the global leaders towards building sustainable economics.

 The post Fredricks John, EVP and Site Head Personiv Coimbatore – Sustainability Champion of the Year appeared first on Personiv.

Via Personiv https://www.personiv.com from pesonivt2a https://personiv.blogspot.com/2019/04/fredricks-john-evp-and-site-head.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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SOW/Services Procurement Spend Management | Market Insights™

Spend on third-party services is huge and growing, bringing attention to the need for better spend management capability.

Enter the titans of third-party services spend management – contingent workforce MSPs and Procurement Outsourcing BPOs. Given their history and expertise, these types of service providers are well-positioned to help manage this spend, but they have varying capabilities that are vital to understand when choosing between them.

Visit the report page

The post SOW/Services Procurement Spend Management | Market Insights™ appeared first on Everest Group.

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Intelligent Virtual Agents Synergize Disparate Systems | Market Insights™

IVAs can act as a unified user interface layer for multiple disparate systems that have distinct backends and enable them to work together

Visit the report page

The post Intelligent Virtual Agents Synergize Disparate Systems | Market Insights™ appeared first on Everest Group.

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Cloud storage 101: Specifying for cloud storage

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Construction halted at Apple datacentre in Denmark over alleged contractor dispute, report suggests

from pesonivt2a https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252461815/Construction-halted-at-Apple-datacentre-in-Denmark-over-alleged-contractor-dispute-report-suggests via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Cloud storage 101: Specifying for cloud storage

from pesonivt2a https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Cloud-storage-101-Specifying-for-cloud-storage via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Construction halted at Apple datacentre in Denmark over alleged contractor dispute, report suggests

from pesonivt2a https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252461815/Construction-halted-at-Apple-datacentre-in-Denmark-over-alleged-contractor-dispute-report-suggests via http://www.rssmix.com/

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How to Construct a Digital Transformation Analytics Roadmap | Blog

Is data really the new oil fueling digital transformation? Absolutely. A company’s ability to make fast-paced, meaningful decisions in a volatile business environment is key to competitive differentiation. Indeed, industry leading enterprises are using data and analytics to adapt to dynamic market conditions, drive continuous innovation, and accelerate the speed of doing business.

However, many organizations are struggling in their efforts to harness the value of data to aid their transformation efforts. The single most important reason for these failures is their technology-first thought process. They invest in the latest big data and analytics tools, AI and ML algorithms, and visualization technologies, and subsequently determine how to drive adoption.

This approach is flawed. Why?

Technology in and of itself does not provide answers to how businesses must adapt for success in a data-driven future. It’s not enough to have the best tools; organizations need to start with a broader vision built on a foundation of business requirements. Companies that succeed at meeting their analytics objectives let business goals drive the technology, and not the other way around.

The business objectives

To develop an effective and value-generating analytics roadmap, enterprises need to start with their strategic business objectives. These tend to fall into three broad categories:

• Top-line growth – Value derived from better understanding potential target segments to enable greater revenue generation. For example, improved customer satisfaction, creating long-term customer loyalty, etc. • Cost reduction – Value created by leveraging analytics to identify the cost leaks, such as redundancies and inefficient processes, and trim expenses. For example, minimizing procurement spend, plugging revenue leakage by reducing inventory cost, etc. • Risk and compliance management – Value gained from monitoring, preparing, and managing risk and compliance on a real-time basis, and anticipating any potential risk-related issues, e.g., fraud detection and monitoring.

  The building blocks

After clearly establishing their business objectives, organizations need to make important decisions about four distinct building blocks:

• Data – At the heart of every analytics solution lies data in its raw form. Enterprises need to have a data strategy in place to cope with increasingly large and complex data volumes coming from diverse sources in a wide variety of formats (text, images, audio, video, etc.) • Technology tools – Core technology tools and platforms for data ingestion, processing, preparation, and visualization are critical. But they cannot be one-off implementations. Enterprises should focus on building integrated technology ecosystems to address immediate, distinct use cases without considering the mid-to long-term creation of sustainable capabilities • Talent – This requires the creation of competencies around the specific, expected data and analytics capabilities. Given the huge demand/supply gap for data and analytics professionals, particularly data scientists, e-enterprises must proactively and enticingly attract and retain the right talent • Infrastructure – The focus here is on ensuring that the IT infrastructure can handle the volume, variety, and velocity of the data and the complexity of the analytics.

Once they’ve laid the business objectives and building blocks groundwork, enterprises can develop their digital transformation analytics roadmap. In order to achieve the desired business outcomes from the analytics process, they need to embrace a structured, five-step iterative approach.

Getting this right is critical, and the stakes are high. The organizations that proactively embark on a data-driven digital transformation journey – i.e., every company– will gain a significant competitive advantage. Those that fall behind risk irrelevance.

For more information and insights on how to create a digital transformation analytics roadmap for your business, or to share what you’ve been able to achieve with your roadmap, please contact me at Jimit.arora@everestgrp.com.

The post How to Construct a Digital Transformation Analytics Roadmap | Blog appeared first on Everest Group.

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Cloud storage 101: Specifying for cloud storage

from pesonivt2a https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Cloud-storage-101-Specifying-for-cloud-storage via http://www.rssmix.com/

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Construction halted at Apple datacentre in Denmark over alleged contractor dispute, report suggests

from pesonivt2a https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252461815/Construction-halted-at-Apple-datacentre-in-Denmark-over-alleged-contractor-dispute-report-suggests via http://www.rssmix.com/

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SIG Spring Global Executive Summit — April 15-17 | Event

Chief Research Guru Michel Janssen and research VP Shirley Hung will be featured presenters at the SIG Spring Global Executive Summit held on April 15-17 in Fernandina Beach, Florida. Shirley and Michel will discuss the latest research and data from Everest Group in a presentation titled “Everything Sourcing Leaders Need to Know about Customer Experience Outsourcing in 2019”.

Session description

Keeping your customers first in a digital-first world is paramount. Achieving that goal is complex. In this session, we’ll share the latest insights and research on market shifts, the impact of digital, and achieving better outcomes.

Specific key topics we’ll discuss:

Today’s landscape: contact centers are out . . . customer experience centers are in

How the digital customer experience (CX) is changing the operating model of CX centers

Today’s market: which service providers are winning, getting left behind, and making bold moves

How the best-of-the best companies leverage their customer experience outsourcing relationships to create better results

When

April 16, 2019 (3:25 – 4:15 pm)

Where

39 Beach Lagoon Road Fernandina Beach, FL 32034

Speakers

Michel Janssen, Chief Research Guru, Everest Group Shirley Hung, Vice President, Research, Everest Group

Learn more about the event

The post SIG Spring Global Executive Summit — April 15-17 | Event appeared first on Everest Group.

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Race to Reality: Full Contact Center Automation vs Fully Automated Cars | Blog

The contact center industry is changing considerably due to technology enablement. Contact center automation is rapidly becoming a priority as centers increasingly embrace technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, robotic process automation (RPA), and robotic desktop automation (RDA) to handle customer interactions on rote queries like account balances, package tracking, and reservation confirmations.

A similar transformation is also taking place in personal transportation. Advancing technologies and intense competition are driving amazing strides in the autonomous vehicle industry. While cars aren’t yet 100 percent self-driving, companies like Tesla are already offering advanced driver assistance solutions that can pretty much take control of driving, albeit with human supervision.

With the perceived nature of each of these two industries, it’s easy to assume that contact centers will be fully automated in far less time than the two to three years some believe it will take for autonomous driving solutions to get you from one point to another without human intervention.

However, this is an incorrect assumption.

Indeed, counter-intuitive as it seems, it’s much more difficult to completely automate contact centers than it is to automate driving. Why?

Driving involves a large, but still finite, number of scenarios that need to be programmed for. But a contact center environment can throw up potentially infinite unique problem statements and challenges that enterprises cannot possibly predict and program for in advance. Yes, AI helps, but even that can only get you so far. At the end of the day, the human mind’s problem-solving ability far exceeds anything that the current or foreseeable technology can offer. And while most people would be more than happy to let robots take over the wheels on the road, they still expect and require human touch, expertise, and judgment for the more complex pieces that usually make or break the customer experience. Technology just isn’t sophisticated enough to handle these yet.

The degree of contact center automation that can be leveraged within an industry varies by process complexity

Although technology use in contact centers is in the early stages, we are already witnessing higher agent satisfaction and lower attrition rates in an industry that has one of the highest churns globally. And as robots increasingly take care of customers’ simple, straightforward asks, we certainly expect agents’ satisfaction to increase.

Of course, agent profiles will continue to evolve as they are required to deal with more challenging and complex issues leveraging machine assistance. This will, in turn, demand greater investments into talent acquisition and upskilling programs.

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out in the next few years as technology becomes increasingly advanced and capable. The only thing we can say with certainty is that the customer experience of the future will be much more pleasant as irritations like long wait times, inept IVR responses, and repetitive conversations with agents who hold incomplete information become issues of the past…or, shall we say, smaller and smaller objects in our rearview mirrors?

The post Race to Reality: Full Contact Center Automation vs Fully Automated Cars | Blog appeared first on Everest Group.

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Google doubles down on machine learning to drive up energy efficiency of global datacentre fleet

from pesonivt2a https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252461464/Google-doubles-down-on-machine-learning-to-drive-up-energy-efficiency-of-global-datacentre-fleet via http://www.rssmix.com/

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JetStream DR cloud replication aims to make backup redundant

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Google Cloud CEO outlines plans to take firm even deeper into the enterprise

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Google slams public cloud rivals over 'mistreatment' of open source community

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