The Financial Services Industry in APAC Can Withstand the Upcoming Challenges in 2023

The financial service sector will face challenges in 2023, such as increasing competition, technological disruption, evolving regulations, and macroeconomic uncertainties. To address these challenges, the sector should focus on digital capabilities, investing in innovative technologies, improving customer experience, and embracing sustainable practices.

FREMONT, CA: The period of rapid loan growth fueled by low-interest rates seems to be ending, particularly for the financial services in the Asia-Pacific region, after a deafening year in 2022. Due to the significant challenges in the Asia Pacific region, particularly in the financial services sector, it is important to find new ways to drive growth and steer economies forward. Addressing the limitations of core data platforms with modern tools could be a potential solution to overcome these hurdles and continue thriving despite the current uncertainty.

Legacy data platforms are still widespread in financial institutions, and they pose a challenge for these institutions to provide personalised services to customers. This challenge could be even more significant as competition intensifies. Additionally, these legacy platforms have limited connectivity with third parties, hindering collaboration and innovation.

Financial services companies are exploring ways to take advantage of cloud computing and advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, to fully realise the benefits of these transformations, data must be the central focus. Without a data-centric approach, technology deployments will not deliver the full value to the business, and companies will need to start over from the beginning. To fully move away from the problems of traditional systems, data must be precise, protected, efficient, and accessible in real-time.

Data Centricity: Shape Up or Ship Out

Companies that have spent up their digital information are facing challenges in managing increasingly large sets of data. The main concern is how to effectively extract value from this abundant pool of information.

The top financial firms in the APAC region will prioritise data-centricity in critical operations in the upcoming years, but significant investments are necessary to treat data as important as other business objects such as sales. Failure to do so results in negative consequences, particularly for those companies slow to digitalise and unable to compete with startups that can quickly produce scalable applications to meet evolving customer needs.

Financial services can overcome the challenges they face by making data-driven decisions, as long as they keep up with the competition. By using real-time data ingestion, storage, processing, and analysis, financial services can make intelligent decisions even when dealing with data from multiple sources across hundreds of databases.

Financial service sectors in the Asia-Pacific region enhance the resilience and maximise the value of their data by recognising the importance of achieving data centricity and addressing challenges associated with it.

To achieve data-centricity, decision-makers in financial service organisations should understand that the choice they make regarding their core data platform will have a significant impact on the direction of their business in the future.

Financial services sectors now have access to distributed NoSQL databases that provide both scalability and affordability. These databases are crucial to succeeding in the face of economic challenges and ensuring on-demand performance while remaining user-friendly.

Financial services firms can benefit from using serverless, multi-cloud native DBaaS to manage large data sets. Such a solution provides high availability, eliminates single points of failure, and frees up time spent on operational tasks. This enables faster application development while maintaining security, DevOps simplicity, and developer agility.

By implementing appropriate data-centric solutions, financial sectors that are behind in digital transformation can avail themselves of significant operational advantages without long-term contractual obligations, as they pay for the services they require as they use them.

In the current highly competitive environment and weakened global economy, financial industry decision-makers understand that only the strongest will survive. Therefore, upgrading their core data platforms is an obvious choice for delivering value promptly.

The financial services sector in the Asia Pacific region will face various challenges in 2023, and there are steps they can take to weather these challenges. Some of the obstacles that the APAC financial services sector may face in 2023 include increasing competition, technological disruption, evolving regulations, and macroeconomic uncertainties. To weather these concerns, the sector can focus on areas such as enhancing digital capabilities, investing in innovative technologies, improving customer experience, and embracing sustainable practices. By prioritising these areas and taking a proactive approach to the challenges, the APAC financial services sector can adapt and thrive in the changing landscape of the industry.