CIQ, Oracle and SUSE today announced their intent to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), a collaborative trade association to encourage the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free Enterprise Linux (EL) source code.

The formation of OpenELA arises from Red Hat’s recent changes to RHEL source code availability. In response, CIQ, Oracle and SUSE are collaborating to deliver source code, tools and systems through OpenELA for the community. 

“Collaboration is critical to fostering innovation, which is why we welcome everyone to be part of this association and help us uphold open community standards,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, chief technology and product officer of SUSE. 

“Many large organizations reached out to us to express the importance of community-driven source code for EL that can act as a starting point for compatible distributions,” said Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development, Oracle. “OpenELA is our response to this need, and it represents a commitment to helping the open source community continue to develop compatible EL distributions.”

Starting later this year, OpenELA will provide sources necessary for downstreams compatible with RHEL to exist, with initial focus on RHEL versions EL8, EL9 and possibly EL7. The project is committed to ensuring the continued availability of OpenELA sources to the community indefinitely.

OpenELA’s core tenets, reflecting the spirit of the project, include full compliance with this existing standard, swift updates and secure fixes, transparency, community, and ensuring the resource remains free and redistributable for all. 

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In the banking sector, the only thing that remains constant is change. And, some of the biggest changes in the sector, over the years, were driven by customer behaviors. Banking isn’t any more about patiently standing in a queue to get your job done. 

It’s digital, it’s personal and most importantly, it’s omnipresent. 

The emergence of ‘embedded finance’ has further expanded the scope of financial services to new realms. In simple terms, embedded finance is defined as the integration of financial services into non-financial services. 

Embedded finance encompasses a broad range of platform, technology and ecosystem play, including open banking, banking as a service, and API with data and cloud playing crucial roles. 

This trend is predicted to transform the future of finance. 

But, what does it mean for consumers and what does it mean for the ecosystem players including the legacy banks- Prasad Rai, Vice President, Strategic Clients Group, Oracle India, sheds light. 

Could you give us an overview of the embedded finance market, its potential and some growth figures? 

We experience embedded finance innovations in our everyday lives — oftentimes, without even realizing. A retailer offering financing options at the point of sales or a ride-sharing app embedding payments in the app are all simple examples. 

 The value of the global embedded finance market is expected to generate $230 billion in revenue by 2025, over ten times more than 2020’s figure of $22.5 billion. This new trend will drive financial inclusion for millions of Indians in the next few years and create long-lasting value for other stakeholders. It will provide opportunities to the customers to have access to financial services when it is the most needed – just like YouTube allowing users to shop for a product directly on a live stream.

We have observed that embedded finance is quickly emerging to occupy the mind space of consumers globally. It has now become mainstream very quietly and provided a level of convenience to both the vendor and the buyer. It has transformed the way purchase has happened. 

How are the legacy banks waking up to this trend. In some way, do they see this as a threat which compels them to give up the direct control they have had on the customer? 

Banks have realized embedded finance is not a choice, but a necessity, because the consumer is used to the convenience and speed of it. Embedded finance is therefore absolutely vital for financial organizations to improve their market share and achieve growth. The consumer is now driving that.

It may look like banks have been disintermediated from the customer as many of these financial services are now directly offered to the consumers by non-banking entities.  But, the biggest advantage that financial services organizations will have is the access to data. That’s a great opportunity for them to offer new products, reach out to new customer segments, cross-sell, up-sell and so on. For example, embedded finance allows banks to provide loans at higher volume in a much more efficient manner. 

Just having closeness to the data is a traditional thinking. Banks have recognized that.

How is Oracle’s conversations with Indian banks in the embedded finance space evolving? 

Embedded finance is the front and center in every conversation we are having with banks today.  Banks have now crossed that tipping point when it comes to embedded finance and are investing rapidly on cloud-based ERP, API, platform as a service, CX and so on to be able to link up to the ecosystem players. 

In India, some of our key cloud applications customers in the BFSI sector are Federal Bank, ICICI, Kotak Mahindra Bank, SBI Card, AU Small Finance Bank to name a few.

How should banks and the other ecosystem players relook at their technology stack as they embrace embedded finance, especially since banks have a lot of legacy technology? How is Oracle helping them? 

It is a huge transformation for these banks. Technology plays a part in it, but they have to take that huge leap forward. The good thing is, most of the organizations that we are working with want to get there. 

Factors like security, regulatory compliance, performance and data integrity are going to be critical in successfully transitioning to embedded finance. Users expect instantaneous performance out of their datacentres and networks. 

You talked about legacy. Over the last 20 years, they have built robust systems that work for them. Now, they look at how these new emerging technologies fit into the broader ecosystem. 

Oracle has decades of experience working with financial services companies across over 100 countries. The largest banks run their core banking on Oracle database. The billing and key systems of most telcos run on Oracle database. 

There are a couple of steps we do in helping them make more confident in taking this step forward. We have created an ecosystem of global banking customers for better knowledge sharing and peer learning. For example, the UPI model from India is something that financial services sectors across the globe are inspired by. 

Secondly, our architecture team works closely with teams within banks to architect industry-specific products and solutions. We also have teams that comprise of experts from different industries from leading consulting companies in the world working with customers to create a road map. So it’s not just the technology conversation that we are bringing to the table. We are creating a platform knowledge sharing and bringing experts together globally. 

We are also extending the partnerships beyond the financial services companies to organizations that are key in taking this model to the market. With this consortium approach, the risk is shared and the potential of taking a great product to the market is improved.  

What would be the one biggest change that embedded finance enable for financial services organizations? 

The biggest change we will see is in anticipation. Emebedded Finance opens up the ability to anticipate the potential for an ‘invisible customer’ to go after. The next frontier in finance is this anticipation. A consortium of players can now leverage the most legitimate data sets to define new customer target groups, offer better services and enable new experiences to them. 

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They say businesses thrive on data. The simple logic is, the more the data the better. But is that really the case? 

A recent study published by Oracle proves otherwise. This massive study titled “The Decision Dilemma” by Oracle and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, New York Times bestselling author, surveyed 14,000 employees and business leaders across 17 countries. 

Some of its findings are quite a revelation. For example, 86% surveyed said that the volume of data is making decisions in their personal and professional lives much more complicated. So much so, that a thumbing 70% of the people admit that they have given up on making a decision because the data was too overwhelming. 

The decision dilemma, as expected, is reflecting equally strongly on business decision-making too. 85% of business leaders have suffered from decision distress—regretting, feeling guilty about, or questioning a decision they made in the past year.

That sounds like an archetypal leadership conflict.

But is the availability and accessibility of data helping these leaders make better and quicker decisions? But the contrary is true, with 91%

of business leaders reporting that the growing number of data sources has limited the success of their organizations. In fact, 73% even admit their lack of trust in data has stopped them from making any decision at all.          

A vicious cycle? 

The study indicates that these challenges lead to new set of problems within the decision-making process – making a decision first and then looking for data to support it, or putting the highest-paid person’s opinion ahead of data. 

This love-hate relationship with data is visible across the survey, with 97% of people wanting help from data and yet get frustrated due to the overload it. The study also specifically highlights the fact that a significant number of business leaders (87%) in India would prefer for all these difficulties to just go away and to have a robot make their decisions. 

“People are drowning in data,” said Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, data scientist and author of Everybody Lies and Don’t Trust Your Gut. “This study highlights how the overwhelming amount of inputs a person gets in their average day — internet searches, news alerts, unsolicited comments from friends — frequently add up to more information than the brain is configured to handle. People are tempted to throw out the confusing, and sometimes conflicting, data and just do what feels right. But this can be a big mistake. It has been proven over and over again that our instincts can lead us astray and the best decision-making is done with a proper understanding of the relevant data. Finding a way to get a handle on the stream of data at their fingertips, to help businesses distinguish between the signal and the noise, is a crucial first step.”

The study summarizes that technology plays a key role decluttering the data-driven decision making process to a large extent. “The message is overwhelmingly clear—our current approach to managing and analyzing data must change. Especially in the business world. The benefits of getting it right span from attracting talent in a difficult job market, to gaining new investors in a tough economic climate,” underlines the study. 

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