The Economics and Finance Association (EFA) organised an in-person talk on campus, after the reopening, on October 13, 2021. Mr Venu Madhav Miriyala, a 1993 graduate from BITS Pilani and the Senior Vice President of Fidelity Information Services (FIS), conducted an interactive session on “Next Gen Core-Banking Platforms”. He holds degrees in Economics and Computer Science and has worked in the core banking sector for over 25 years. After being placed at IBM and working in the Australian and European markets, he began supervising the Bangalore development centre of FIS—a Fortune 500 company partnering with IBM.

Mr Miriyala initiated the session by defining core banking and talking about how instrumental it is to any bank’s functioning. He labelled the backend system responsible for—among other things—holding, processing, and reporting accounts, as the ‘heart of the bank.’ He stated that the five significant segments that banks deal with are retail deposits, commercial deposits, retail lending, commercial lending, and mortgages. Mr Miriyala’s team is currently working on the fourth generation of the core banking system and is involved in formulating solutions. He classified India and China’s lack of primitive banking systems as a strength. He said that such a banking system made it easier to dispose of old structures and replace them with more efficient core banking solutions. He emphasised the potential India and China show, owing to their population and scale of innovation.

The team has devised various design patterns for each target country to resolve existing problems and introduce new features. Even though the various countries have starkly different taxation and fiscal norms, Mr Miriyala said, ‘80% of the banking structure is uniform across markets.’ He added that special teams are deployed to the respective locations and trained to customise the model to tackle region-specific challenges. The six principal patterns of designing core-banking solutions include component architecture, platform architecture, cloud technology, integration architecture, DevOps architecture, and country extensibility, Mr Miriyala explained. He went on to add that the patterns were devised after extensive research, which involved drawing inspiration from various other industries such as the automobile industry for platform architecture.

Mr Miriyala proceeded to explain the operations of the Indian team. The 800-member team conceptualises and prototypes new products, provides sales support, handles 90% of the engineering operations, and delivers core solutions. Towards the end of the talk, he summarised some of the indispensable lessons he had learned over the course of his career. He said that even with a 2% probability of success, his team had kept on trying to develop more efficient techniques. He advised all students to never give up and highlighted the need to have mastery in a specialised field. He mentioned that unless a new venture is significantly different from existing ones, an experienced setup will always be valued more than a new and marginally better one. A vote of thanks was delivered right after Mr Miriyala responded to the numerous questions posed by the attendees.