London as a Digital City

London's FinTech position is widely known with the overal ecosystem for start up digital innovators leading Europe. Most pundits don't see this changing too much post Brexit, whatever the consequences of negotiation between Britain and the EU. However, that is a European position and many other cities have aspirations in this area,whist at the same time within the UK Birmingham and Manchester are begining to grow critical mass within their digital ecosystems too.

Singapore and Hong Kong are showing stron signs of trying to build strong ecosystems around Block Chain (see previous posts). But this week, Telangana (the southern Indian State with Hyderbad at the centre of its IT prowess) announced a partnership with Tech Mahindra to launch a "Blockchain District" as a technology park for incubating blockchain technology and applications.

Interestingly, The smart City Index ranking of global smart cities, shows London in 12th place, just behind Singapore and just ahead of New York, San Fransisco and Chicago. So there is a lot to do if London is going to achieve its Mayor's and the UK government's aspiration that it will be the leading Smart City in the world.

Given the fact that Smart Cities are an extended affair, reaching far beyond the borders of the city environs into a connected network of outlying areas, it will be interesting to see whether it attempts to partner with other cities in the UK to build a networked system, where the cobination of the cities is stronger than the sum of their parts.

So at this point there's loads of competition and everything to play for if London is going to fulfil its aspirations or fall behind, as so often in the past when the UK has held an initial strong leading position. This needs both political will and finance industry recognition of how wealth is actually created and sustained.

Digital Era Customer Contact and Experience

In the 1980s, The theory of Customer Care was propogated widely at the same time that call centres started to evolve into contact centres. The subtle difference between a call centre and a contact centre being that a contact centre is supposed to deal with customers through all media of communication: letters, telephone calls, and direct contact in person if somone knocked on your door. With the '90s, email was added and then websites and latterly mobile apps have started to grow traction.

In parallel with this we have seen all sorts of mechanised and automated technologies arrise to help improve productivity and efficiency. IVR or Interactive Voice Response (which really is not that interactive), Power diallers to fuel direct telemarketing campaigns, backed up with scripting to ensure consistency of message were also introduced followed by features such as distributd call centres, off shoring, workflow based load balancing etc.

The touble with all these approaches has often been that they focus on work load balancing, limited levels of scalability and cost efficiency rather than personal experience. Offshoring also intorduced problems with culture and language, as well as greater possibilities of fraud and exposure of customer data to theft and exploitation, as "solid legal contracts" have proven to be paper tigers in protecting confidentiality. In fact in some countries, such as Singapore, which have reutations for innovation and fast moving companies, customer experience is terrible.

This just does not cut it in the modern digital age, when customer experience and reputation will make or break a company. We now have people pondering the future of the contact center and whether there will be any people in them to take calls with the advent of AI and chatbots as well as the use of IoT to collect customer behaviour information and change the model by which companies interact with customers.

The real issue is that many of these advances can be uselfull exploited in situations which suit "self serve" activities such as "how can I fix my thermostat or change my account settings". They don't particularly work well when there has been a service failure or a billing mix up. Assumptions that Generation Next Letter in the Alphabet will always want to contact you via a certain technical chanel are also wrong. Peoples contact method decisions are often affected by context. If they are not allowed to use mobiles at work for instance, or they are in an airport and have lost their mobile phone or iPad and urgently need help with a travel problem, then other contact options are needed.

The new technologies offer opportunities, but greater effort needs to be put into creatively exploiting them and designing a great customer experience. So it is interesting to see that a company like Creston is establsihing a global network of Customer Experience Centres to show exactly what it can do for people. It will also be interesting to see how Creston exploits this interaction chanel to improve its customer offerings as well.

Lessons on Innovation

Apparently Singapore has been ranked the 6th most innovative county in the world. Recently 8 innovation leaders in Singapore were asked to share their thoughts and secrets on what works.

One of the strong themes which came out was how much the culture, perceptions and mindset of business leaders affects the ability of a business to innovate.

They used a number of approaches to over come this, e.g. by trying to adopt a learning culture, by evisioning the "bank of the future" or focusing on key objectives and KPIs the business wants to achieve and working out strategies to "move the dial". One company tries to find a unifying principle by exploring key leaders aspirations, fears and "journey" to find something that they all agree to be the guiding principle for their strategy.

The other key theme which came across was how much they relied on experimentation, prototyping and piloting to help align people and test hypotheses, proving what works and learning from failures.

This is a great vindication of the approach set out in the Way of DAU or Digital as Usual,

Smart Gardens Take the Cool Award

Last week was an interesting week in many ways. Intel and Juniper announced that Singapore was leading the way in Smart City adoption, beating 19 other advanced adopters. One of the more interesting statistics was around how much time lost to congestion can be saved. Average figures suggested that over 80% of the time lost to congestion can be freed up by using Smart City technology to manage traffic flows better. Whilst this is interesting to motorists in the UK as town planned continue to persecute them with more and more "traffic calming" measures such as speed bumps, lights, constrictions in road width etc. it is also good news for those interested in urban health. Less congestion equals less emissions as well as a lower carbon footprint.

Moving on from this, India was identified as the leading Asian country for cashless money adoption, driven by widespread electronic purse adoption on phones in a country where many people don't have bank accounts.

Meanwhile in London, Cloud Expo returned to Excel with its partner exhibitions. This was definitely more interesting than last year (which had been a disappointment following the great show 2 years ago). It was noticeable that a wider set of companies are now offering global services with a first appearance (that I am aware of) from China telecom. there were more companies looking at clod orchestration and Oracle was making its pitch for differentiation from the mainstream service vendors such a Azure (Microsoft), AWS (Amazon) and GCS (Google) by featuring its cloud DNS services and Systems Management as a Service. The latter being apparently multi-platform for hetergeneous technologies and offering an automated and intelligent Machine Learning capability to features normally associated with companies such as Splunk.

The coolest show stealer however was on the diminutive stand for Gartenzwerg. Gartenzwerg offers an indoor automated gardening kit which uses smart technology to control lights, watering, temperature and pH. This apparently enables you to grow things all the year round and at 3 times the normal rate of growth. So you can have all the herbs, chillies etc. that you want. Anyway, in the stark and quite sterile ambience of a trade show, the luscious and colourful display was a verdant knock out.

Cyber Defence Gains Traction

Whilst the spotlight has been upon implementing GDPR in Europe, things have not been standing still elsewhere.

Singapore has passed a new Cyber Security Bill. This has many positive aspects as it appoints a National CISO to oversee and coordinate measures to protect critical national infrastructure. It also contains important requirements regarding accepted best practice, a duty to report incidents and enables the CISO's staff to investigate and demand standards based improvements.

This does not come a moment too soon as a recent report from AT Kearney and Cisco ( Cybersecurity in ASEAN: An Urgent Call to Action ) indicates that Cyber Security spending in ASEAN countries is at half the global average (0.07% of GDP cf. 0.13%) and much less than European or North American Countries which are typically at around the 0.2 - 0.3% mark.

So for global organisations, now is the time to make sure that their cyber measures are up to standard so that they can contine to operate safely and legally on a global basis.

It's not Brexit which Challenges London's Fintech Position

Whilst people have been focusing on the local broo-hah-ha of Brexit and worrying about whether Paris will steal London's FinTech crown, another competitor has been quietly getting on with its plans for dominance.

Singapore boasts the worlds largest Fintech Exhibition and has been building relationships with other ASEAN countries and organisations. The most tangible evidence of this is a pact with Hong Kong to build blockchain supported trading mechanisms between their financial trading exchanges, with over 20 banks already signed up to participate. This promises to be a classic implementation of Blockchain doing what it is good for, whilst keeping within the current scalability challenges of Blockchain's distributed ledger approach.

Interestingly enough, singapore sees great opportunities for Fintech as Asia currently has what is referred to as a massively unbanked population, i.e. one where most people don't have bank accounts. This is probably a once in a lifetime opportunity for banks to gain a massive increase in customers and lock them into their ecosystem if they pitch it right. The consumer based lifestyle opportunities that digital products offer are only fully addressable if consumers have an electronically based payment means available to them. So there's a choice for them: banks or crypto currencies.

Who wins out in this market where consumers are notoriously suspicious of banks, but authorities want to clamp down and regulate crypto currencies is anyone's guess. But there seems to be lots of opportunity.