Siam Commercial Bank’s chief information officer has a hard-nosed ‘if we can do without it, forget it’ attitude to customisation and modification. Dan Barnes reports.
Deepak Sarup, chief information officer at Siam Commercial Bank, believes that information – whether internal or external – is the key to his position as head of group technology and for management of the IT function.
He says: “Our first priority is to service our internal business customers – that comes almost to the exclusion of everything else. Therefore, we contribute to this flexibility through, first, being party to every major management decision through the CIO, and next, through allocating or reallocating IT resources to meet the specific business need.”
Recent work has taken place on improving the bank’s management of the structured data side via the bank’s data warehouse with a drive towards improving the current warehouse’s logic, tools and analytics. On the unstructured side, Mr Sarup has begun to focus on enterprise content management technologies such as imaging and workflow for added efficiency.
“Our inspiration is the tremendous value that the courier companies have been able to extract from these technologies and we would like to achieve something similar,” he explains.
The bank had a recent success in this area when it was highly commended in The Banker Technology Awards for its Electronic Presentment & Payment service (EPP), demonstrating the value to customers of electronic document processing and access.
Mr Sarup does not consider the balancing of technology projects between the short and long term to be difficult: “All of our projects, short or long, need to be tied to our strategic plans [three to four-year window] and annual plans to ensure that we stay on the approved road-map. Alternatively, any departure needs to be justified by compelling value and endorsed by the management committee or the CEO. There are no exceptions.”
Assets and risks
This decision-making is tempered by a realistic stance on the value of systems. Development can create value but may carry risk as well: “IT is both a critical asset and a major contributor to our operational risk. While we do everything within reason to minimise this risk, realistically we can’t eliminate it. The ultimate irony is that the better our IT gets, invariably the more reliant the business is on it, and thus the greater is the potential risk.”
To exploit the broadest ranges of experience and therefore reduce risk, the bank makes good use of third-party solutions and keeps customisation to a minimum, only making modifications on what Mr Sarup describes as “the oxygen test” namely “Can you do without it? If yes, forget it for now!” as he says.
As internal expertise increases, so will the potential for developing internal systems, he says, although this would not necessarily be his preference. When this occurs, the bank often partners with a third party that has proven expertise in that technology area. He is rightly proud that the bank’s expertise is growing. This was reflected by the Gallup Q12 employee engagement programme, within which Siam Commercial Bank was in the top 86th percentile.
When the organisation does not have the knowledge needed for a particular project or development, Mr Sarup is happy to explore other regions. For a bank with such an appetite for technology it is natural that it should stretch beyond its boundaries. “Increasingly, we have been turning to India as a source for these specialists. In that sense we may be different from our counterparts in the West – we are motivated to go there to obtain the skills [at a reasonable price] rather than to reduce our costs.”
Strategic inspiration
The inspiration for projects and strategies can also come from other areas – often taken from industries that are particularly strong in certain fields. Giving some examples, he cites “retailers for their merchandising techniques, courier companies for its document management [as mentioned above], fast moving consumer goods for logistics [in Siam’s case the optimisation of cash holdings], internet companies for how they have been able to attract and retain customer loyalty on the net”.
But Mr Sarup keeps a keen eye on the rest of the banking community: “As a domestic bank in a developing country, we are fortunate to have many examples within our own industry in other developed markets to draw on,” he says. “For example, recently my CEO and I visited some of the more innovative banks in North America and Europe to learn of ideas that we could apply in our own market. I believe that this avenue is our single biggest source of new ideas.”
CAREER HISTORY:
2002: Senior executive vice-president, Change Program and CIO, Siam Commercial Bank, Bangkok
1999-2001: Managing director, Asia Pacific, Alltel Information Systems (now Fidelity Information Systems), Singapore
1994-98: First executive vice-president, head retail bank and IT, Laem Thong Bank (now merged with UOB Thai), Bangkok
1991-94: Director, IT, premier’s department, government of New South Wales, Sydney
1976-90: Regional director, Asia-Pacific, IT Consulting, Touche Ross International, (now Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu International) based in London, Phoenix, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney
