Fintech startup Revolut is tweaking its subscription plans with a new mid-tier offering called Revolut Plus — it costs £2.99 per month. Like N26 Smart and Monzo Plus, the new plan is a pandemic-proof package that doesn’t focus as much on travel.
For the past couple of years, challenger banks and alternatives to traditional bank accounts have been packaging additional services into paid plans. Essentially, those fintech startups are slowly becoming freemium software-as-a-service companies.
The majority of users don’t subscribe to paid plans. But a small portion is willing to pay a fixed monthly fee to access advanced features, get an insurance package and pay less in variable fees.
Revolut already has two paid plans — Premium and Metal. Premium increases limits on free ATM withdrawals and foreign exchange. You also get overseas medical insurance, delayed baggage and flight insurance and winter sports coverage. You can also access advanced features, such as disposable virtual cards and Revolut Junior accounts
With a Metal plan, your insurance package is a bit more thorough, with purchase protection and car hire excess. You get a tiny bit of cash back on purchases (0.1% in Europe, 1% outside of Europe capped at the monthly subscription price) and higher limits across various products.
Another big selling point has been card designs. With the Metal plan, as the name suggests, you get a metal card. It’s not that useful but some people like it. Premium subscribers can also choose between premium card designs.
Revolut Premium costs £6.99 per month and Revolut Metal costs £12.99 per month (or €7.99 and €13.99, respectively in Europe). You pay a bit less if you pay upfront for a year.
So what is Revolut Plus? It costs £2.99 per month, which makes it a lot more affordable than Revolut Premium. The main selling point is purchase protection provided by Qover. All paid plans now get purchase protection with different limits on damaged or stolen goods (up to £1,000, £2,500 and £10,000 depending on your plan). You can get a refund on purchases up to 90 days after buying eligible products. If you book a ticket and your event is cancelled, you could also get a refund.
In addition to a new card design, Revolut Plus subscribers can also use virtual cards. You can also create junior accounts with the new mid-tier plan.
As you can see, there’s no overseas travel insurance. You also don’t get unlimited free currency exchange (other than spread). Revolut Plus is focused on people who mostly use their Revolut account in their home country.
Revolut is also tweaking other plans, so it’s going to be important to check the terms and conditions before you renew your paid plan. The new Plus plan is available today in the U.K. and will be rolled out next week in the European Economic Area.
When Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, formerly of Pinterest’s policy team, alleged racial and gender discrimination at Pinterest in June, the hope was for Pinterest to make them whole and address its culture of alleged discrimination, Ozoma told TechCrunch. But that’s not what happened.
“It’s about as plain a case of disparate treatment and discrimination as you can come up with,” Ozoma said.
On a call with TechCrunch today, Ozoma and Banks described a double standard in their experiences compared to Brougher’s. While Brougher received a $20 million payout, Ozoma and Banks received less than one year’s worth of severance.
“This follows the time-honored tradition in America where Black women come forward, blazing a trail, revealing injustice and white women coming in and reaping all the benefits of that,” Banks told TechCrunch.
Earlier this month, a group of shareholders filed a lawsuit against Pinterest executives, including CEO Ben Silbermann, alleging they enabled a culture of discrimination. The complaint goes on to allege that culture of discrimination has harmed Pinterest’s reputation and led to financial harm.
For Ozoma and Banks, however, they say they’ve exhausted all of their legal options and will not pursue a lawsuit. Banks said it is important to keep in mind the fact that Brougher, a former COO, had far more resources to pursue litigation.
“So we, like in many, many, many other cases, Black women put ourselves on the line, shared absolutely everything that happened to us, then laid the groundwork for someone else to swoop in and collect ‘progress,’ ” Ozoma said. “No progress has been made here because no rights have been made with people who harm has been done to.”
As a part of the settlement, both Pinterest and Brougher will commit $2.5 million toward “advancing women and underrepresented communities” in the tech industry.
“Francoise welcomes the meaningful steps Pinterest has taken to improve its workplace environment and is encouraged that Pinterest is committed to building a culture that allows all employees to feel included and supported,” Pinterest and Brougher said in a joint statement detailing the settlement.
Ozoma took issue with Pinterest and Brougher donating $2.5 million to charity. She said, “it smells rotten,” noting that she herself is an individual and not a charity.
TechCrunch reached out to Pinterest regarding Ozoma and Banks’ recent statements. Pinterest declined to comment, saying the company doesn’t comment on legal matters. In June, however, Pinterest said in a statement to TechCrunch:
We took these issues seriously and conducted a thorough investigation when they were raised, and we’re confident both employees were treated fairly. We want each and every one of our employees at Pinterest to feel welcomed, valued, and respected. As we outlined in our statement on June 2nd, we’re committed to advancing our work in inclusion and diversity by taking action at our company and on our platform. In areas where we, as a company, fall short, we must and will do better.
Pinterest says it has also enhanced its hiring and interview processes to try to improve diversity at senior levels, updated its inclusion training and launched an internal wiki detailing how Pinterest makes compensation decisions.
Pinterest had long been considered a leader in diversity and inclusion. When asked about whether that has ever been true — if Pinterest had effectively enacted a solid DEI strategy — Ozoma was clear.
“No. If it were true, I don’t think we’d be having a conversation right now.”
One person reached out to her, Banks said, asking about what hope other Black women have.
“That’s why we said something,” Ozoma said. “We’re not in a position that someone in the C-suite would have been. But our integrity means more than anything else, and if we can help other folks, we will.”
Periscope is shutting down, Samsung has plans for more foldable devices and Airbnb sets new diversity goals. This is your Daily Crunch for December 15, 2020.
That’s not hugely surprising, both because Jane Manchun Wong spotted some app code suggesting that a shutdown could be coming and also because … when was the last time you thought about Periscope?
In an open letter, Periscope said that its current operations are “unsustainable,” and that “leaving it in its current state isn’t doing right by the current and former Periscope community or by Twitter.”
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
With thousands of developers, publishers, authors, designers, production houses and distributors, Microsoft’s Xbox gaming platform is a complex ecosystem of relationships. Collaboration across this ecosystem is key to producing a high-quality product that attracts the best talent and satisfies consumers—but Microsoft recognized points of friction that needed to be addressed.
A multitude of manual processes and siloed systems meant that developers and publishers couldn’t link complex calculations for royalties to the underlying data. As a result, they had to spend time and resources reconciling, validating and recalculating royalties to verify accuracy.
To cut through complexity and increase trust in the data, Microsoft and EY partnered to co-develop the first blockchain-based financial system of records for processing end-to-end royalty transactions, from contract creation through to integration with SAP for payments. The blockchain solution provides near real-time access to trusted transaction data from source systems to game publishers.
The upshot? Publishers can access information on royalties earned in just four minutes instead of 45 days after month end. Royalties administration costs have been slashed. There’s greater visibility of the underlying data. Microsoft benefits from faster, more efficient processes and lower operational costs.
With trust, everything moves more smoothly. Collaboration is easier. Innovation drives value. Technology can be deployed at speed. But getting to this is far from easy.
We are living in a time of increasingly intelligent technologies, when an organization’s ability to be trusted really matters. But the way data and intelligent technologies such as AI are being used is creating significant trust gaps. For example, the public feels that intelligent technology is moving too fast and that regulators can’t keep up, as documented in the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer.
There are plenty of high-profile examples of data misuse and unintended outcomes from AI usage that have contributed to these gaps. One example was this June when an AI tool to reconstruct pixelated photos turned a photo of Barack Obama into a white man. It became a matter of hot debate in the AI community: was the bias towards creating more photos of white people than people of color the result of incomplete data or indicative of the racial bias baked into AI from non-diverse datasets and development teams?
Trust gaps have reframed the question of “Can tech do this?” into “Should tech do this?” It’s no longer about capabilities. It’s about trust in the intelligence that a business uses, and that customers, markets, regulators and ecosystems rely on. Can companies and government organizations ensure the outcomes of their technologies? Without trust, the ability of an organization to operate and innovate is diminished.
Trust in data and technologies results from action. There are methods and techniques that embed trust into data, systems and business models to create sustained value. At EY, we call this Trusted Intelligence.
Trust has to be designed in from the outset. Trusted Intelligence embeds trust in a tangible way that embraces behaviors, processes, business models and outcomes as data moves through the organization — accelerating transformation and lasting value.
Going back to the Xbox story, we can see how trust was embedded into the intelligence of the business:
Data from a multitude of manual workflows and unintegrated systems has been replaced with trusted data
Trusted data is also created by automating complex royalty calculations, product tokenization and onboarding smart contracts using AI based on secure cloud technologies
Trust is maintained through the blockchain-based system of record that generates invoices and statements with integration to SAP for settlement and processing of payments, as well as post-accounting journals
And finally, trust is embedded into how people work by applying clear rules and transparent processes
As businesses seek competitive advantage, applying Trusted Intelligence offers a new frontier of opportunities to accelerate digital transformation.
Accelerated transformation
While digital transformation was well underway prior to the pandemic, Covid-19 stepped up the pace. In a recent EY webcast on the impact of Covid-19 with nearly 2000 participants, 82% said they were accelerating digital transformation.
This confirms what we’re experiencing with our clients in the market. We know those achieving radical and exponential value creation are responding to three key drivers:
The ability to put humans at the center of what they do: when it comes to customers, it’s not “How do we get more customers to buy what we make or do?” but “How do we give customers more of what they want?” This new mindset is backed by engaged, motivated employees.
Deploying technology at speed: today’s customers and employees demand speed. This means automation through AI and other intelligent technologies, as well as cloud-based services. It means using agile methodologies and technology that helps you respond to dynamic conditions.
Innovating at scale: organizations need to innovate on two levels – survival today and success tomorrow. Collaboration is the name of the game, for example through ecosystems and alliances. Innovative ideas must be built using large volumes of data, intelligent technologies and cloud infrastructure that are trusted.
Each of these drivers is amplified by Trusted Intelligence. Embedding trust is how organizations can reduce trust gaps and accelerate their digital transformation.
Putting Trusted Intelligence onto your agenda
Trusted Intelligence and value are inextricably linked, and more value builds more trust. There are some fundamental questions that organizations and governments need to address to close trust gaps, take advantage of transformation and earn competitive advantage:
Do I trust my data, technologies and automated processes?
Do I trust my ecosystems’ data, technologies and automated processes?
Does my ecosystem trust my data, technologies and automated processes?
These questions define the strategies, investments and actions of organizations as they reshape their operating models.
Conclusion
As businesses and governments transform to meet new challenges, it’s essential to embed Trusted Intelligence into the core of operations. As the Xbox example shows, intelligent technologies such as blockchain can build trust into the data and the platform, increasing transparency. With trusted data and technologies, a business can move forward with confidence and at speed.
Enterprises powered by trust will be able to deliver on all three transformation drivers: people, technology and innovation. They’ll be able to leapfrog their competitors. To shape new markets. To lead into better futures.
This content was produced by EY. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
Thousands of companies and governments are racing to discover whether they have been hit by the Russian hackers who reportedly infiltrated several US government agencies. The initial breach, reported on December 13, included the Treasury as well as the Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security. But the stealthy techniques the hackers used mean it could take months to identify all their victims and remove whatever spyware they installed.
To carry out the breach, the hackers first broke into the systems of SolarWinds, an American software company. There, they inserted a back door into Orion, one of the company’s products, which organizations use to see and manage vast internal networks of computers. For several weeks beginning in March, any client that updated to the latest version of Orion—digitally signed by SolarWinds, and therefore seemingly legitimate—unwittingly downloaded the compromised software, giving the hackers a way into their systems.
SolarWinds has around 300,000 customers around the world, including most of the Fortune 500 and many governments. In a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the firm said “fewer than” 18,000 organizations ever downloaded the compromised update. (SolarWinds said it’s not clear yet how many of those systems were actually hacked.) Standard cybersecurity practice is to keep your software up to date—so most SolarWinds customers, ironically, were protected because they had failed to heed that advice.
The hackers were “extremely clever and strategic,” says Greg Touhill, a former federal chief information security officer. Even once they had gained access through the back door in Orion, known as Sunburst, they moved slowly and deliberately. Instead of infiltrating many systems at once, which could easily have raised suspicions, they focused on a small set of selected targets, according to a report from the security firm FireEye.
Sunburst stayed quiet for up to two full weeks before it woke up and began communicating with the hackers, according to the report. The malware disguises its network traffic as the “Orion Improvement Program” and stores data inside legitimate files in order to better blend in. It also searches for security and antivirus tools on the infected machine in order to avoid them.
To further cover their traces, the hackers were careful to use computers and networks to communicate with the back door at a given target only once—the equivalent of using a burner phone for an illicit conversation. They made limited use of malware because it’s relatively easy to spot; instead, once they had initial access through the back door, they tended to opt for the quieter route of using real stolen credentials to gain remote access to a victim’s machines. And the malware they did deploy doesn’t reuse code, which made the espionage harder to catch because security programs hunt for code that has shown up in previous hacks.
Months undetected
Signs of the intrusion campaign date back to March, according to security reports from Microsoft and FireEye, which disclosed a related breach of its own networks just last week. That means any organization that suspects it might have been a target must now sift through at least 10 months of systems logs looking for suspicious activity—a task that’s beyond the capacity of many security teams.
To help organizations figure out whether their systems have been hacked, FireEye and Microsoft have published a lengthy list of “indicators of compromise”—forensic data that could show evidence of malicious activity. The indicators include the presence of Sunburst itself, as well as some of the IP addresses identifying the computers and networks that the hackers used to communicate with it. If a team finds any of these IP addresses in its network logs, it’s a real sign of bad news. But since the hackers used each address only once, their absence is no guarantee of safety. Nor does the discovery that they are residing on a network mean it is easy to successfully evict them, since they can scour the network for new hiding spots.
The suspected hackers are from Russia’s SVR, the country’s primary foreign intelligence agency. Known alternately as Cozy Bear and APT29, they have compiled a long list of breaches, including the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Russia denies involvement.
“It’s given them the ability to backdoor into major networks,” says Touhill, who is now president of Appgate Federal Group, a secure infrastructure company. “They have the ability to sit there, slurp up all the traffic, analyze it. We need to be paying close attention to what else are these actors looking for? Where else may they be? Where else may they be lurking? If they’ve got access, they’re not giving it up easily.”
This MIT Technology Review Insights report is part of a series examining the degree to which business preparedness, particularly in technology strategy, contributed to corporate resilience during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in three world regions: Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. Based on survey research and in-depth executive interviews, the series also seeks to understand how technology priorities are changing as a result of ongoing business-continuity efforts.
Business decision-makers around the world were collectively blindsided by the scale and speed that working environments changed as a result of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, a recent survey by MIT Technology Review Insights, in association with VMware, finds that most had inadvertently prepared for the pandemic. More than eight out of 10 North American organizations had already made significant investments in their digital infrastructure and related operational processes—allowing them to take the massive global shift to remote work and online business in stride.
Nearly two thirds (62%) of North American respondents indicate they had business-continuity plans in place, although for many organizations, these were oriented on traditional notions of disaster recovery. “We’re used to dealing with emergencies like tornadoes or hurricanes,” says Debika Bhattacharya, vice president for global solutions at Verizon Business Group. The telecom company had a business-continuity team that was focused on bringing the corporate network back into operation after an outage. This changed since the pandemic. “It became more about, ‘How do we make sure that we’re caring for the well-being of employees who are now working from home?’” Bhattacharya says.
In response, Verizon stepped up communication with its people, with daily video check-ins to determine what employees needed to work from home, be it child-care funding or office equipment. If employees had poor internet service where they lived, the company added additional capacity or otherwise looked to see how it could help. “The focus shifted from just fixing the network to making sure employees are productive,” Bhattacharya says.
Verizon’s experience points to an important distinction between planning for business disruption—usually a momentary event affecting a portion of an organization’s operations—and operating effectively in the pervasive, lengthy pandemic. While a majority of survey respondents had continuity plans, less than half (46%) of them report that these plans were effective.
Yet for a subset of the respondents, there was no doubt over the effectiveness of their business-continuity plans. The linchpin is digital transformation—the incorporation of modern technologies into an organization’s processes or strategies to achieve business goals. Organizations that have fully implemented digital transformation projects—a cohort we’ll call “digital leaders,” representing roughly 15% of North American respondents—all report their recovery plans were effective, and nearly 40% say they were very effective. These organizations made investments in technologies that kept them adaptable and resilient before the pandemic, so they were aptly prepared for the disruption that would follow. Now, at the fore of a constantly changing business landscape where disruption is routine, they’re primed to succeed.
‘We very quickly scaled up’
Digital leaders see their relatively smooth shift to all-remote working environments and digital channels as proof that their digital transformation efforts are working. “Our new CEO recently led our organization through a strategic planning process meant to see us through 2030, and digital platforms were a huge part of it,” explains Mark Wehde, chair of engineering at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “We envisioned the hospital of the future, moving away from large, complex care centers for routine care to community hospitals and even to people’s homes through the use of remote monitoring tools and AI [artificial intelligence].”
When the pandemic hit, “there was a lot of scrambling,” says Wehde. The organization realized it needed the digital platforms it was planning for immediately. “We need to be able to treat our patients remotely. We need to keep them home as much as possible.” While the crisis revealed that Mayo’s digital transformation was moving in the right direction, it was imperative that they pick up the pace to future-proof against coming unknowns: “We thought we were being pretty bold with our 10-year plan, and what we’ve realized is we probably weren’t bold enough—that we actually do need to accelerate this even more. Our 10-year plan was now a two-year plan.”
The survey results show most organizations pivoted their digital strategies with similar dispatch. Eighty percent of North American respondents believe digital transformation at their organizations has been speeded by the pandemic, slightly higher than the global average of 75%. Nearly all (93%) of the digital leaders surveyed in North America say their digital transformation has accelerated. While there is a new sense of digital-investment urgency, these organizations aren’t starting from scratch.
This MIT Technology Review Insights report is part of a series examining the degree to which business preparedness, particularly in technology strategy, contributed to corporate resilience during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in three world regions: Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. Based on survey research and in-depth executive interviews, the series also seeks to understand how technology priorities are changing as a result of ongoing business-continuity efforts.
No business strategist could have foreseen that the world would have been thrown into the economic and social crisis wreaked by a fast-moving pandemic, even in Europe, where covid-19’s spread began to take its toll nearly a year ago. Even those with the clearest of crystal balls would not have been able to sidestep the impact of a virulent disease that has cost the global economy 14% of its working hours in the second quarter of this year, according to the International Labour Organization—equivalent to 400 million full-time jobs. A recent survey of 600 technology decision-makers worldwide, conducted by MIT Technology Review Insights, in association with VMware, found that 67% of European respondents had business-continuity plans in place, although less than half of them found them effective.
That said, one segment of tech leaders saw their continuity efforts pay off: European organizations that already invested in digital transformation—defined in the survey as efforts to incorporate modern technology into processes and strategies to achieve business goals. These organizations have fully implemented at least one digital transformation project, all of them report that their recovery plans were effective, and more than a third of them say they were very effective. This “digital leader” cohort—representing some 15% of European respondents—points to an important intersection between planning for business disruption and a commitment to investment in enabling technology. These efforts have allowed digital leaders to absorb the shock of the pandemic and transition to remote working processes and online commerce with relative ease.
‘We had to reinvent ourselves’
Digital leaders in Europe and elsewhere were therefore largely prepared for what they hadn’t anticipated: a near complete move to online commerce and at-home working. “We have seen over the last few months a massive shift in how firms operate, and how people operate. We are all looking through glass: using digital channels to work from home, bank from home, shop from home, socially interact from home,” observes Mike Dargan, chief information officer at Zurich-based investment bank UBS. The company’s investment in technology approximately $3.5 billion a year—has armed his team with the capabilities to make the shift. “The way we’ve operated, we could have basically everyone working from home—more than 95% of our people are enabled to work remotely.” UBS had up to three million calls on communication service Skype a week and at one point a 70% increase in customer engagement onboarding through its mobile app.
UBS’s experience was largely in line with survey results: ensuring that infrastructure remained robust and essential applications stayed online throughout the ensuing lockdowns were European respondents’ top priorities. In all, 73% say their responses to the pandemic have caused them to step up their digital transformation efforts. But they’re building on a solid foundation of digital investment—and this, in turn, has helped them navigate the upheaval. “Fifteen years ago, it would have a completely different result—we would not be prepared culturally or technically,” says João Günther Amaral, chief development officer at Sonae, a Portuguese retail, communications, and finance conglomerate. “We would not have the capacity to send 6,000 people home and have them work immediately and effectively.”
Amaral says “digitally assisted confinement,” as he calls it, has worked surprisingly well, in part because expectations for working almost entirely online were low. “We were really surprised with the quality of everything: the quality of videoconferencing and collaboration tools most of the staff had never used before, the quality of life without commuting. With all this technology, we are managing to create a good overall quality and experience for our employees and our customers.”
Sonae’s diverse businesses—from shuttered shopping centers to food shops that remained open—had to adapt to the new reality. “We had to reinvent ourselves. We needed to be creative,” Amaral says. “People started contacting their customers through every digital channel. People started opening windows in their stores—so the store was closed, but you could buy safely through a window.”
Amaral describes how the company expanded an existing e-commerce app into a fully mobile customer engagement tool: “Our app already was taking touchless payments, but it was really important for our customers to be able to use their phones along their entire journey, both in and out of our stores: providing information, supporting new events, and helping people feel safe.” Increasing demand for online retail placed enormous pressure on Sonae’s supply chain management and other IT management systems. “Suddenly, our IT systems had to support eight times what we were supporting before,” Amaral says.
This MIT Technology Review Insights report is part of a series examining the degree to which business preparedness, particularly in technology strategy, contributed to corporate resilience during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in three world regions: Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. Based on survey research and in-depth executive interviews, the series also seeks to understand how technology priorities are changing as a result of ongoing business-continuity efforts.
Asia was the first world region to see the spread of the novel coronavirus, and as such it was the first to feel the disease’s disastrous impact on its societies, its economies, its ways of life. As businesses were closed, and office workers sent to their homes, Asia-Pacific retailers, banks, manufacturers, and government agencies were also the first to try to effectively manage the crisis, putting IT infrastructures across the region to the test.
A global survey of 600 technology decision-makers conducted by MIT Technology Review Insights, in association with VMware, finds that most organizations in Asia-Pacific and the world over had largely prepared for the online commerce and remote working the pandemic made compulsory. More than three quarters of Asia-Pacific organizations had made digital and IT investments—and their efforts augmented their collective ability to handle new ways of doing business.
Six out of 10 Asia-Pacific respondents indicate they had business-continuity plans in place, although less than half consider them effective. By contrast, organizations that had heavily invested in digital transformation—incorporating modern technologies in processes and strategies to achieve business goals—universally found that their plans worked. These “digital leaders,” as we refer to them in this study, have built robust digital foundations to support the technologies they need to better respond to change.
“We call ourselves a technology company,” says Gautam Aggarwal, regional chief technology officer at Mastercard Asia-Pacific. “We do not see our technology adoption as ‘transformation’ so much as it a continuous journey.” He considers this mindset one of the key success factors that allowed Mastercard to operate normally during the pandemic. “We have a strong growth infrastructure—both an external customer-facing network and internal corporate network. We also have a very comprehensive business-continuity plan behind our infrastructure—even if it has never been tested to this level before.”
Digital leaders—before and during the crisis
More than 70% of survey respondents in Asia-Pacific say the pandemic has caused their organizations to step up digital transformation. “Priorities have changed for all firms since the crisis—or rather, existing priorities have intensified,” says Sanjay Poonen, chief operating officer at VMware. “The pandemic has just altered the composition of the channels firms leverage, using the digital tools with which they are already familiar.”
Jimmy Ng, group chief information officer and head of technology and operations at Singapore-based DBS Bank, recognized early on the strategic advantage of advancing digital capabilities. “This early start on the journey has really helped us deal with this pandemic.”
DBS’s digital aspirations are codified in a program it calls GANDALF, an acronym combining the initials of the digital business giants it seeks to emulate—Google, Amazon, and Facebook, with the D representing DBS itself. The name derives from the powerful wizard in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. “The intention was twofold,” says Ng. “First, to learn from the best of the technology companies and bring the best of their practices into the bank. Second, we wanted to ensure that we actually operate like a technology company rather than a bank.”
The initiative enabled specific pandemic-response capabilities that bolstered DBS’s business resilience: When the bank saw the first covid-19 case among its workforce, Ng’s team sprang to action. “We used AI tools to ingest data from staff calendars, staff access data, and even staff use of Wi-Fi networks to do contact tracing up to three degrees of separation very quickly, building up models in a couple of days. This also informed how we developed protocols within the bank to stop the spread among employees,” he says. The emergency protocols facilitated a multitude of efforts, sanitization guidelines, and the reorganization of team members across DBS facilities to enforce physical-distancing measures.
As the DBS and Mastercard testimonies confirm, digital tools have allowed organizations to nimbly respond to the new challenges of swiftly changing times—and, in general, be better prepared for them. Asia-Pacific digital leaders, who report substantial digital transformation progress, indicate that their organizations have more reliable technology planning as a result: 55% of Asia- Pacific digital-leader respondents, for instance, report that their 2020 IT budgets will be the same. At the same time, more than a third of Asia-Pacific respondents indicate that they are increasing their IT budgets, by an average of more than 10% over 2019 spending. This is reflective of efforts in the region to ramp up digital transformation: nearly four out of 10 respondents are increasing the adoption of mobile applications and moving to a “cloud-first” development strategy—more than those from any other region.
Ng describes how the DBS digital infrastructure has achieved results: “Today we are about 99% virtualized, and by the end of this year, over 90% of our entire legacy stack will have been transformed.” For some time, the bank has pursued a “mobility-first” concept for application development, which Ng points to as a key factor in the swift shift to remote working.
Have you heard people talking about Clubhouse App? Wondering why people are obsessed with this social platform and what it could mean for you? In this article, I’ll explain what Clubhouse is and why it might become a breakout social platform. I’ll also share my experience and why I believe Clubhouse has staying power. My […]
