GEC NEWS WIREAt the recently held Cards & Payments Middle East, Niranj Sangal, Group Chief Executive Officer, OMA Emirates-Solution Gulf peppers his views to the EC MEA team on cloud solutions, IT infrastructure shortfalls, OMA’s plan to go global and their journey into the Managed services platform.
“We will soon have a base in Asia Pacific with a regional office in India by the end of this year.”
Niranj Sangal, Group Chief Executive Officer, OMA Emirates-Solution Gulf
What is ‘Different’ this year for OMA Emirates?
OMA Emirates is transcending platforms and is showcasing services rather than solutions. We are looking at Managed Service launch. Apparently this has been a good year for managed services. We have already signed our three big banks this year— NBO (National Bank of Oman), ADIB and Mawarid Finance and four more are in the pipeline. Next three years focus would be on services.
In spite of all the technology and solutions in place, why are banks and finance sector still termed as the most vulnerable sector in terms of security breaches?
Cards are an important part of the banking and finance industry, hence the security factor is high there. We expect banks and financial institutions to prove themselves as a benchmark for security. The fact is that, 60% of the banks are still undergoing transition. The reason is they are using very primitive systems and to change is –long phases of processes to be followed.
‘Cards’ as an entity is also slowly getting erased physically. So what is next?
Security in cards is something which everybody debates on. Security is a very important feature. So, Cloud is the moment that we are all looking forward to. Cloud takes you to the mobile platform and cards would practically be eliminated. The practicality and application of this is still at bay but over time everything will be virtual. We also see the use of mobile devices increasingly functioning as cards, without the card leaving the account holders hand.
According to you, how important is infrastructure and how the lack of it can be a showstopper?
Take the data centers as an example for a basic infrastructure. They have been established for over a decade now. Things have changed, right from cabling, networking etc. So every industry should have specific investments to it and R&D budget should be high. Many industries are still not ready to make this investment and that is where the shortfall is. .
How do you align your business with your partners? Do you have any set criteria while working or choosing your partners?
That is the first and foremost thing that we look at. We have vendor partners and not channel partners. The industry we are focusing requires a lot of investment in security every year. So we select vendor partners who have strong R&D budgets to enhance that on a yearly basis.
Which are the key verticals you are focusing on?
Banking and finance is always a green side for us. We are also quite aggressively into retail now. More recently we are also looking at entering the government sector for national IDs. We have marked our presence in the oil and gas sector with the RFID cards which you can see being used in a majority of petrol pumps now. So with this technology we are establishing the cashless environment with mobile credit. Apart from these we are also entering the medical as well as the insurance sector.
We are trying to push ourselves more into the services platform where everybody can have a one-stop-shop access to all services. We are launching the ‘Retail suite’ that allows you to add as many customers to it and do your own eMarketing. It is like a dashboard, a web-based solution that works on a cloud and requires no installation.
How are you contributing to the smartGov landscape?
We are trying to work everything on a cloud platform. We don’t want people to invest in infrastructures, so we are running all our products on the cloud. Talking about smartGov, mobile is the only platform we are looking at and we are launching many products on the mobile space. We are also focusing on the mWallet which is going to be the next big thing in the government sector to move everything to the cloud.
Are you planning to spread your wings geographically?
We are expanding globally. We will soon have a base in Asia Pacific with a regional office in India by the end of this year. We will also expand in Europe and US also. US is moving to EMV so that is also a key forte we are looking into.
