Businesses are getting embedded into technology: Venkatesalu P

Dynamically changing retail landscape, enabled by the penetration of technology, is keeping retail CFOs awake in the night. While continuously investing on the rapidly changing technology is one challenge, ensuring visibility and keeping hold on the real ownership of what they bring in the business is another. They believe that businesses are getting embedded into technology rather than technology getting embedded into businesses. 

Q What keeps you awake in the night in the times of dynamically changing retail landscape?

I think technology is exciting on one front and it is also a big risk on the other side. What keeps a lot of us awake is to ensure that we have visibility and real ownership for what we bring in our business.

Q Why do you think that the businesses are embedding into technology and CFOs have to focus on that?

There are various parts of the business and business processes which can’t be implemented but for technology and that’s the reason I believe businesses are getting embedded into technology rather than technology getting embedded into businesses. It has become more of a two way street. I think going forward technology will become integral to business rather the other way round.

Q Is it that adoption of technology is another concern?

Not really. I think adoption is a lot easier, it’s available, the ecosystem is very friendly and quite evolved. But the choice is what you adopt and what point you adopt and how you integrate it along side your culture.

Q Will technology be the backbone of businesses?

It depends upon how integrated two parts are rather than saying it’s a backbone or front end of the retail business.

Q According to you how are CFOs trying their best to keep simplicity with technology?

Simplicity is possibly one of the first boxes that you want to take off when you sign off on technology. Because the more you turn around and make code visible to employee, it is as bad as making the code visible to customers. It needs to become something which runs smoothly in the background rather than coming to the foreground. So you want to eliminate complexity as a first point when you talk about changes which are technology enabled.

Q How is consumer financing becoming an inseparable part of the business?

It is not just consumer financing, it is about the flexibilities and the degrees of freedom available for any business to turn around and enable consumers pay for their services or products. Today consumers have frenzy of options and as far as businesses are concerned we are only helping ourselves to becoming friendly to enable consumers turn around and leverage whichever method of payment is available, which allows us to convert their intent into cash.