Presenting my paper from the Infosys Knowledge Institute to Nandan Nilekani

"Seattle has Bill. Bangalore has Nandan," said Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times. It was Nandan's insight that inspired Friedman to write the best-seller "The World Is Flat". Friedman wrote Nandan's profile for The 2006 TIME 100 list and goes on to talk about Nandan's unique ability to decode emerging trends and how these trends can affect global politics and economics.

Nandan was recently Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in the rank of a Cabinet Minister. His achievements are mind-boggling to say the least: Fortune Magazine's "Asia’s Businessman of the year 2003”, TIME magazine's 100 most influential in 2006 and 2009, Lifetime Achievement Award from E&Y among other stellar recognitions.

The Infosys Knowledge Institute (IKI) was Nandan's brainchild and is headed by Jeff Kavanaugh. I was the first from India to be externally hired and my first project when i joined IKI in February 2019 was with Dr. Ashok Hegde from the Financial Services Consulting Unit. Ramesh Narayan, IKI Practice Lead gave me the opportunity to work on this assignment in my early days at Infosys.

The discussions were fascinating and pointed to disruptive fintech firms and digital commerce players rapidly encroaching across financial boundaries to steal market share and profitable services from incumbent banks. Banking was moving away from the traditional pipeline model. We had to get a deeper understanding through our research. From the Infosys Knowledge Institute we conducted a survey with 1,250 respondents from 26 countries, asking customers about their choices with respect to multiple elements in the banking sphere.

In around three weeks, the data was in. Our findings said that banking will evolve into a platform-based model and banks will become services marketplaces for their customers. More than 75% of customers see the bank of the future as a marketplace to cater to all their financial needs. What does this imply? Incumbent banks would need to reconstruct their ecosystems through a platform-based model, aggregating as a service delivery center. Along with Dr. Ashok's team, we detailed out this transformation journey for a bank and wrote the paper "Banking as a platform: A new-age transformation".

The big moment came when i got the opportunity to present a copy of this paper to Nandan Nilekani. It was a surreal moment to meet him in person and hand over a copy of our paper with its findings. He is the epitome of humility and simplicity and it was a thrilling moment indeed!

I'd like to thank Jeff Kavanuagh, Dr. Ashok Hegde and team, and Ramesh for the opportunity to work on this project.

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