TechAdwiser’s director Danish Siddiqui shares his company’s plans with The Post on how to enhance banking and financial institutions’ efficiency.
As a software company, how does your company contribute to the Cambodian economy?
We help businesses make wiser use of technology in digitisation of banking and finance sector. From identifying the right technology for their business to smooth implementation and training of the workforce, we support our clients at every step so that they can adopt modern technologies with confidence.
With our partner TPS Worldwide, we help Cambodian businesses implement leading technologies such as Tokenisation, big data, artificial intelligence, process automation and block chain. We bring international experts to Cambodia for specific technological projects and encourage client’s personnel to work closely with our specialists and learn from them during the project.
This approach gives our clients more confidence in the technology and in the long run will help upskill the country’s workforce.
What is TechAdwiser’s main focus in Cambodia?
We focus on banking and finance sector in Cambodia. We are also keen to help the growing insurance sector and telecom sector with their technology needs.
Cambodia has a relatively large number of banks and microfinance institutions [MFIs], and technology is important for them to stay competitive. Cambodian banks and MFIs already have modern infrastructure which makes it easier to adopt new technologies. With our partner TPS we specialise in payment systems which is mainly relevant to banks and MFIs and telecom [pay by phone].
What are other services your company offers?
We have been in the country for over four years. We are now launching cloud based services to enable smaller banks and MFIs to easily and economically use certain world class software. This “software as a service” will be delivered from a data centre within Cambodia. The services will include remote monitoring of IT infrastructure, application performance monitoring and big data analysis of any type of data like consumer behaviour analysis. It is expected to launch by mid October.
How can TechAdwiser help Cambodian companies to improve efficiency or productivity?
This is our key focus. Technology can be expensive and sometimes businesses may buy a software and never use most of its features.
At strategic level, we first help businesses select the technology that is suitable for them then we help them develop the skills to ensure it can be fully utilised so that the business realises a high return on its investment in technology.At operational level, we are bringing “process automation” that has been very popular in the UK and the US as it can save significant amount of time and effort and make human jobs more interesting.
Is Cambodia ready to embrace high-end technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data or internet of small things (IoT) ?
Cambodia has been somewhat slow in adoption of such high end technologies mainly due to skill gap in the market. Such high end technologies require highly skilled people to implement and operate them.
We are working to fill that gap and help Cambodia speed up the adoption of such technologies. For example, our partner TPS has a digital banking platform that has artificial intelligence based image recognition capabilities that can be used for easy customer on boarding. We are also making big data analysis available to even small businesses via our in-country cloud based service.
Are the education institutions producing enough experts to work in sophisticated IT environment?
Cambodian youth has a great attitude and work ethic. However, the education system may not be giving them sufficient exposure to such IT environments thus restricting their chances of developing the skills required for such environments. [Local] universities should perhaps look to work closely with the private sector to try and give more real life experience to the students.
What is the biggest challenge facing Cambodia’s IT sector?
In my view the biggest challenge is the skills shortage. IT sector requires highly skilled people and a lack of such people can put a serious constraint on growth of the sector in Cambodia. While such people can be brought in from abroad as a short term solution this may not be sustainable over long term. The country needs to develop its own people and train its youth.
