To a large extent, the success of an organization is determined by the degree of collaboration between the different departments across the enterprise. A collaborative business planning process synchronizes data from various sources from both within and outside the organization. The intent is to streamline the progression of turning data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into better-informed, smarter business decisions when it comes to planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
Banking is changing forever. Organizations like Britannica, Blockbuster, Borders, and even Bank of America (hint: don’t start a business with ‘B’) all suffered from the same collective challenge. When your business is built around a specific distribution model, how can you adapt when that distribution model is no longer relevant?
The difference between those with access to formal banking in high-income, developed economies versus developing economies is stark. The World Bank reports 1.7 Billion of the world’s population went unbanked in 2017, with the poor making up 75 percent of this number. Even in developing economies if you are considered wealthy, you are twice as likely to have a bank account than if you are in the poor income segments. Among those living below $2 per day, only 23 percent have a formal bank account.
It’s hard for many to conceive of a world without little bits of paper that we today denote as currency. In fact, money is so ingrained in society that we’ve come up with hundreds of slang terms around the world to describe the stuff. In the US you might hear the term “Benjamins”, “Dead Presidents” or “Greenbacks”. Can you guess which countries gave birth to “Bucks”, “Clams”, “Loon”, “Dough”, “Shtuka”, “Two Bob” and “Moola” when it comes to describing money?
Since 2005 I’ve been predicting the fundamental decline of branch banking. For almost 10 years I fought bankers who decried my assessment that branches would cease to be the most important channel in banking, to be replaced by far more efficient mechanisms for revenue generation and relationship. Today the discussion is increasingly resorting to a sort of desperate plea — “but branches aren’t going to die completely, are they?” No one who is watching these trends today is still saying branches will grow.
Today’s business world is significantly different from that of just a few years ago, and the velocity and magnitude of change and uncertainty will only accelerate. We are operating in an environment of high “VUCA” – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Deep learning is a term we’re increasingly using to describe how we teach Artificial Intelligence (AI) to absorb new information and apply it in their interactions with the real world. In an interview with the Guardian newspaper in May 2015, Professor Geoff Hinton, an expert in artificial neural networks, said Google is “on the brink of developing algorithms with the capacity for logic, natural conversation and even flirtation.” Google is currently working to encode thoughts as vectors described by a sequence of numbers. These “thought vectors” could endow AI systems with a human-like “common sense” within a decade.