[NEW] MAKE by KBank: Next generation Thai app | kbank payroll program download – NATAVIGUIDES

Chetaphan Siridanupath, K-Labs Senior principal visionary architect, discusses the bank’s next generation app based around the Thai way of sharing.

Family members wish to provide financial support to loved ones despite the distance. Friends regularly lend money to friends without a rigid record. Thus, this became a theme of ‘sharing’ and later translated to the sharable Cloud Pocket feature.

Despite the trend of a nuclear family, the culture of the Thai extended family still exists. Family and kin take care of each other’s expenses.

What led to the creation of ‘maKe by KBank’? how is it different from your former mobile banking app? MAKE by KBank was originally created as an experimental mobile banking with three objectives: 1. Experiment with new technology to explore new capabilities 2. Experiment with a new way of working 3. Experiment with new customer experiences There is a substantial gap between what traditional mobile banking applications can provide and the changing needs of the younger generations. Specifically, the next generation has a unique Thai style of sharing. The new generation is our beachhead market. Their behavior and lifestyle helped us reimagine mobile banking and how we developed the app. Moreover, humanizing the financial experience was a key consideration of MAKE by KBank. Pop Pay, one of our new features, enables seamless fund transfers via Bluetooth without requiring your friends’ banking account number or mobile number. Chat banking lets users view transaction history in a conversational format. Imagine seeing your friends’ profile pictures and their names, just like when you call them, and their activities instead of their meaningless bank account number. With sharable Cloud Pocket, users can split money into different pockets to save money for specific purposes or to raise funds from their group of friends instead of opening several bank accounts. The full version of MAKE by KBank will be introduced to the public soon. Banking is not necessarily considered a social activity. Why did you decide to make it social? A unique aspect of Thai culture is that financial matters are not personal but rather casual and shared among groups. We found out during user research that Thai people often share money casually.

how did you involve customers in the creation and testing of make by KBank? Could you explain the ‘Let’s maKe it Together’ program?

The first beachhead market of Make by KBank is university students.

Therefore, we held the ‘Let’s MAKE it Together’ program, which let us co-innovate with our target group who would know their financial needs best. There were more than 100 teams that participated in the program, giving us interesting features and ideas to strengthen our value proposition and validate with a bigger customer group.

Finding the right compromise between customer experience and security is challenging. What solution do you offer for authentication?

We do not compromise on security. But we also need to deliver the right experience for customers. Of course, there is tradeoff, thus we decided to invest in development efforts. To manage the overhead of development efforts, we stress the importance of utilizing Agile and Scrum frameworks with our working squad.

In addition, we use the same security standard as our current mobile banking app. The authentication framework requires three authentication factors including mobile device, a mobile phone number, and PIN while users can simply enter their PIN number when they log into our application.

We always explore new technologies in the market and assess risks before deploying them to the customers. For example, Canary Deployment provides us a capability to do targeted releases in order to control the risk of mass deployment. Google Kubernetes Engine helps streamline operations including deployment, and scaling up/down the infrastructure.

one of the challenges for banking is to innovate fast. Could you tell more about ‘maKe it Fast’? There are two meanings behind ‘maKe it Fast.’?

Firstly, we use a cross-functional team including business, designer, developer, and tester, working together and setting biweekly goals to make changes quicker. We utilize Agile and Scrum frameworks to accelerate the pace of iteration and development.

Secondly, we use new technologies to help us deliver faster results. For example, we use Flutter, a new programming language, to provide a faster way for developers to build native apps on both IOS and Android without having to code twice. This not only helps save development time, but also helps minimize human errors and testing time.

Let’s talk about the ‘maKe it Scalable’ part. What is meant by that? and why is scale so important in today’s financial services industry?

There are also two meanings when we talk about ‘MAKE it Scalable.’ First, in a vertical way, the application was designed to automatically scale as everything is cloud-based, meaning we can scale up and scale down our infrastructure to meet the transaction traffic in near-real-time.

Second, in a horizontal way, we design an application to be modularized, meaning if we want to adjust, change, or duplicate one feature or the whole application it can be done very quickly

without affecting the whole application. This makes it easier when we want to expand and adjust the application to a new segment or market.

Finally, how do you see maKe by KBank developing in the next five years?

As mentioned, Thai culture has a unique Thai style of sharing. We hope to deliver the best banking experience for Thai people. We strive to be innovators with customers at heart. We started with the Thai younger generation with their unique style of sharing. By the end of the day, with our flexible infrastructure and innovative technologies, we aim to create the best mobile banking experience for Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia. 

Kasikorn Bank is creating the digital bank of the future with Cloudera.

KASIKORN Business-Technology Group (KBTG) is the IT arm for Kasikornbank (KBank), a large banking group in Thailand with approximately 17 million customers. KBTG delivers a range of technology services to help drive service efficiency and enhance competitiveness.

Challenge

KBTG’s mission is to help KBank create the digital bank of the future, providing customers with fast, easy, and safe access to financial services from anywhere, and at any time. As KBTG delivers new digital services, its ability to accurately assess each customer’s needs and potential risk is vital to its success.

“In the past, we looked at data to understand what happened last month or last year,” said Tul Roteseree, deputy managing director at KBTG. “We wanted to use machine learning to predict what is going to happen—which loan applicants would likely default or which customers are not only creditworthy, but also credit hungry.”

However, KBTG’s existing data warehouse didn’t provide the scalability or flexibility to effectively support existing Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics, or future predictive analytics needs.

“The more data we can bring together and analyze, the better we can understand our customers,” said Roteseree. “With Netezza, we were limited to roughly two years of pre-aggregated data and not enough capacity to support the full breadth of analytics needed. Our analysts were forced to extract subsets of this data for analysis beyond the canned reports. We needed a modern platform that would allow us to not only consolidate and store more data for longer histories, but also enable more flexible, self-service analytics directly against this shared data.”

Solution 

KBTG teamed with Cloudera to implement a modern platform for machine learning and analytics that helps improve customer service and fraud detection, and enables innovative services, such as automated lending. With automated lending, the bank can send a targeted loan offer to a customer’s mobile app. Once the customer accepts the offer, new funds can be transferred into their account within minutes.

KBTG currently stores and analyzes more than 12 years of transactions in its new platform, and plans to increase that to include nearly 35 years of data. Approximately seven million transactions are added to the platform daily.  The ability to include new types of external data, including social media data, will allow the bank to see beyond their own transaction information and gain a more complete view of each customer’s financial needs.   

“With Cloudera, we can store a deeper history and a greater variety of data than traditional data warehouse systems, and analyze and operationalize that data all within the same platform so we can be more accurate and understand our customers better and faster,” said Roteseree. “We’re getting approximately 10 times the amount of storage, and 10 times the computing power, and we are well on our way to entirely replacing Netezza.”

Implementation

As part of its implementation, KBTG is assessing which workloads to run on prem and which are more appropriate for the cloud. “With Cloudera, we have the flexibility to run workloads on-prem, in the cloud or both as needed,” said Roteseree. “We’re exploring moving some of our statement generation capabilities to Cloudera on AWS [Amazon Web Services]. The server that delivers monthly email statements is used quite a bit at the beginning of the month, and then, after that, it sits idle. This type of workload is a perfect fit for the cloud, where we can pay for the processing power as needed. ”    

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