Driving technology solutions

Pennant are delivering business capabilities to the Middle East banking industry with its ACT Strategy

 

With an excellent understanding of local market dynamics, greater insights into the local user needs coupled with technical expertise and deep domain expertise, Pennant Technologies, the business driven technology solutions and services company, has emerged as one of the leading provider of technology services and solutions, through the strategic adoption of ACT (Adding business value, Cost optimisation and reduced Time to market).

What really matters for any global industry is the enhancement of business capabilities to keep abreast with customer expectations, and race ahead of their competitors. The exponential development of the technology driven business transformation enabled organisations to embrace the technological innovations to effectively converge their business objectives. Recognising the increasingly pivotal role of Information Technology, a growing number of CEOs have positioned their corporations to leverage latest technological advancements, thereby achieving competitive advantage.

This applies equally to the global banking industry where the line managements are increasingly looking at IT to deliver new and innovative solutions, raise their levels of performance and respond to the accelerated rate of change required to address the complex business challenges. Intense competition among the local players and international players pushes banks to explore every option to gain market share. Innovative products can often provide that edge, and technology is usually the enabler. In addition, as the market is growing extremely saturated, optimising technology is increasingly crucial. Thus the key business driver for the banks is to effectively utilise the latest technology advancements to offer innovative services cutting across the boundaries outpacing their competitors.

Technology solutions, as we know aim at enhancing internal banking operations and offering better banking services across various delivery channels like ATMs, Internet Banking, IVR etc. But, the success of any technology solution depends on identifying areas for innovation and thereby enhancing business capabilities. This becomes all the more crucial in the evolving markets like Middle East, where the regional banking industry is currently among the fastest growing markets in the world thanks to the economic boom fuelled by skyrocketing energy prices in the recent past.

The financial sector in the Middle East survived the crisis better than most; predominantly due to its limited exposure to global markets, efficient management and timely support from the local governments. As the dust begins to settle after the worst financial crisis in living memory, Prudence is the latest buzzword among the regional banking industry as organisations striving to manage the risk and resources in better manner.

With all this, banking industry is increasingly prudent in any investment that applies even to any technology investment amidst the growing requirement for sophisticated financial products and services to compete with their national and international counterparts. In order to address these challenges, organisations are increasingly looking for a technology partner who truly understands their business challenges and delivers business aligned technological solutions in line with their expectations quickly at affordable cost. Here, for technology companies, the greater challenge is in understanding local market dynamics, the technology requirements of banks particularly the end-user’s requirements, and thereby developing the right custom solutions without massive technological investments.

Pennant Technologies is pioneered by a team of entrepreneurs, who have more than a decade experience in the Middle East banking space. Starting from 2006 till today, Pennant has been working closely with nine leading banking majors of the Middle East delivering variety of technological solutions that truly addresses their business challenges.  Pennant’s association with a core banking Product Company based in UK, meant to gain first-hand knowledge of product life cycle management, greater insights to the product inherent behavior at the granular level.

A close observation of Pennant’s technology solutions for the Middle East banking industry makes one to realise how ACT could create the needful difference for any bank, to outrace its competitors. The company has emerged as a business enabler imparting benefits of cost optimisation and reduced time to market. The company’s passion to go an extra mile is the real motivating force for successfully integrating all the delivery channels (ATM, online banking, telebanking etc) with the core banking applications at multiple client locations across Middle East and Africa.

Pennant’s perfect project execution capability meant evolving a harmonious combination of diverse technology streams, Java, J2EE, .Net, iSeries and IBM Enterprise Application Integration Platform. Well, it is definitely Pennant’s profound domain knowledge and technology expertise that has endeared it to evolve as the choicest technology provider to the nine leading banking majors of the Middle East and Africa.

Learning from each technology project is sure to ensure greater readiness on the part of IT solutions providers, and to counter the challenges associated with each client-interface. For Pennant, learning is considered as a strong catalysing force to go an extra mile. In addition, the Management team’s association with various bank’s IT departments across the Middle East in the last decade provided greater insights on various critical aspects like the gaps between standard off-the-shelf applications and the actual requirements; and the importance of the traceability of the transactions in the later day in any banking environment are corner stone in deriving the ACT strategy and enabled Pennant to adopt innovative measures in all its service and solution offering fully aligned to the business challenges.

In life or in profession, success speaks for itself. But, success cannot be guaranteed unless built on strong convictions and values. Understanding the cherished convictions of the banking industry, and the immediate expectations of the end users, is the first step towards developing the right set of solutions. Pennant demonstrated its capability and competency with consistent delivery of its suite of right set of solution and services to various leading banks across the Middle East and Africa within short span of time.

“We have successfully delivered variety of application integration services and custom developed applications to various banking clients within the stipulated timelines and well within the budget always and we believe our understanding of local market dynamics coupled with our strong technical and domain expertise helped us to achieve this. In addition, our fundamental objective of ensuring the ACT in each and our every engagement did the rest. We can proudly say that we have always lived up to our client’s expectations and delivered the business capabilities in each and every offering” said Rama Krishna Raju, CEO, Pennant Technologies.

The conceptualisation and development of ATM host integrator and its successful deployment across multiple sites reflect on how the gaps in the off-the-shelf solutions can be addressed by the developing the right set of custom applications. The innovative concept of fully configurable accounting engine in its product enables the banks to add new products on the fly there by reduces the time to market.

Technology needs to be understood in its totality. Technology cannot be limited to offering of custom applications, but it also includes software product development. In one way, custom applications and software product development go hand in hand, to complement each other. Pennant seems to have not only understood the totality of technology experience, but also the greater integration of custom applications and product development.

In this context, Pennant’s association with UK’s leading banking software product company has helped in getting insights into product life-cycle management. Pennant’s strategic approach in developing the products that truly addresses the gaps in the off-the-shelf applications is rewarding as its product has seen multiple installations across the region itself. It seemed that, the thinking of Pennant in terms of product development was basically to identify white spaces in product development, and address the concerns of customers for greater user experience of enterprise applications.

Notably, even in the prevailing economic crisis situation, Pennant has sustained its good work in evolving the custom applications for the Middle East banking industry, and continues to work on new projects from repeat customers. With the balance sheet reflecting revenues that more than double each year, Pennant has proved that global businesses across domains and geographies can continue to improve their order books by identifying and catering to the end users needs and requirements.

“Building on decades of experience, Pennant is continually enhancing its service and solution offerings to provide our clients with new technologies that fuel performance and lead directly to improved business results”. A closer look at the pennant’s strategy reveals that Pennant is not sitting on the laurels of initial success but is determined to broaden the current offerings on the strong foundation of the excellent process framework, deep talent pool, proven offshore capabilities and solid financial backing.

For further information
email: ravi.datla@pennanttech.com
www.pennanttech.com