MIKE - 2017

The 5^th International Conference on Mining Intelligence and Knowledge Exploration (MIKE-2017) began at IDRBT on December 13, 2017. The conference was inaugurated by Shri H. R. Khan, Former Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India.

The conference, spread over three days from December 13-15, 2017, is an interdisciplinary conference that presents the latest research from the domains of Learning Algorithms, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Knowledge Exploration, Large-scale Data Analytics, Big Data, Soft Computing, Information Systems, etc. Some of the previous editions of the MIKE were hosted by other prestigious institutions such as National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City, Mexico (2016) and National University of Ireland, Cork, Ireland, (2014).

Dr. A. S. Ramasastri, Director, IDRBT, welcomed the dignitaries and participants of the MIKE-2017. In his welcome address, Dr. Ramasastri highlighted the following key points:

• The Institute’s cutting-edge research at the intersection of Technology and Banking;
• The Institute is now focusing on the domains of Mobile Banking, Cloud Computing, Analytics, Affordable Technologies, Payment Systems, and Blockchain Technology;
• With a view to bring the latest research across the world that is relevant to Banking Technology, the Institute has started publishing the IDRBT Journal of Banking Technology;
• The Institute’s new Staff Paper Series highlights one area of focus on a regular basis. While the previous Staff Paper Series focused on Biometrics, today, the Staff Series on Analytics is being released.

INAUGURAL ADDRESS BY SHRI H. R. KHAN, FORMER DEPUTY GOVERNOR, RBI

Shri H. R. Khan, Former Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India, inaugurated the international conference and released the fifth volume of IDRBT Staff Paper Series on Analytics.

In his inaugural address, Shri Khan spoke on “Digital Financial Services and Payment Systems”. He suggested an I-framework for the digital financial services, which are as follows:

Inspiration

• The Government is focussing on building a less-cash society
• The persistent problems related to cash such as cost, not formalising the economy has led to ideation of building a digital economy, which increases production as well as productivity and efficiency
• The launch of Digital India with a mission to have a digitally robust, resilient economy (financial sector) and the various initiatives have reduced usage of cash.

Infrastructure

• The Reserve Bank of India has been at the forefront of building critical infrastructure in both wholesale and retail payments
• The development of RTGS and RTGS-II is one of the best in the world
• On the retail payment side, NEFT, IMPS and a host of products have led the transformational changes that took place in payment systems
• Focus on JAM (short for Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) trinity is building digital infrastructure in a big way.

Innovation

• One of the important dimensions is innovation
• FinTech plays an important role. There have been rapid changes in technology such as SMACI (Social Media, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, Internet of Things)
• Social Media is used for banking purposes. For instance, banks earlier gave 40% weightage for information provided by credit information bureaus, now rely on 20% of information from them because of the increase in usage of analytics by banks in terms of customer diligence, in terms of monitoring and in terms of products and services
• Cloud services like SaaS, is driving new consumer value propositions for easier financial management services and integrated point-of-sale, etc.
• What is the importance of FinTechs here? They are very agile, turnaround time is very short, they can bring a lot of changes
• On the other hand, they lack the scale and trust being newcomers and perhaps lack the data which banks have
• In the future, FinTechs have to compete and co-operate. So, co-petition is the model with FinTechs and the banks
• Both have to co-exist as banks are risk-averse and FinTechs can take some risks.

Incentives

• Incentive is very important in the financial services to expand in a sustainable manner
• Post-demonetisation, cash incentives have drastically reduced and digital payments innovators have come up with novel incentive schemes
• In case of government, digitisation helps in pushing subsidies and for plugging the leakages
• Financial institutions, be it banks or non-banks, for them it helps in customer acquisition, customer retention, expanding the coverage, leveraging on technology, expanding small ticket customer products whether it is loan, insurance, microfinance, pension, etc. All this can happen because technology brings advantage of scale and cost reduction
• Incentives therefore play an important role in driving digitisation.

Insurance

• Security and integrity, customer trust is important
• Cyber Security is of prime concern
• For protection against fraud, customer must be aware of their rights and obligations
• Awareness and sharing is crucial to contain cyber frauds so that the digital financial journey is not derailed.

Information

• Bank staff, especially frontline staff should be well-aware and well-trained to disseminate information to the customers
• Financial literacy is required. Many training programmes are organized by RBI and SEBI on financial education
• Customer education about use and misuse of digital financial services is very important, for which there is a need for a coordinated and coherent national strategy.

"These are the blocks which are propelling and will take digital financial services to a much higher level. And in the next few years we will see, India becomes a less-cash society and highly efficient and effective in terms of penetration of digital financial services," he said.

He concluded his talk by saying that the conference should enable collaboration of researchers and practitioners i.e., coming together of research and industry. He said that mining data with intelligence and knowledge exploration through cognitive technologies and analytics would provide invaluable offering for banking and financial systems.

MIKE CONFERENCE - 2017

MIKE 2017 brings together eminent researchers and practitioners from USA, Russia, Portugal, Norway, South Korea, Mexico, Columbia, Algeria, India, Bangladesh, etc., who would be presenting 40 peer reviewed research papers addressing various application aspects and advances in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Mining and Information Retrieval, Image Analysis, Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, Speech/Signal Processing, Text Mining and Natural Language Processing, Social Media and Big Data Analysis, Intelligent Security Systems, and Smart and Intelligent Systems.

The papers are authored by leading researchers from across the globe including Moscow State University, Russia; University of Kentucky, USA; Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway; University of Cauca, Columbia; University of Minho, Portugal; Peking University, China; Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh, etc. A total of 139 submissions were received for MIKE – 2017 and the acceptance rate is 28.78%.

A galaxy of renowned international researchers including Prof. Sung-Bae Cho, Yonsei University, Korea; Prof. Alexander Gelbukh, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico; Prof. Sankar Kumar Pal, Distinguished Scientist and Former Director, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India; and Prof. N. Subba Reddy, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju, Korea, are participating in the conference.

The MIKE also includes two half-a-day workshops focused on key emerging areas:

• Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Banking and Finance and
• Workshop on Deep Learning and Industrial Applications.

RELEASE OF IDRBT STAFF PAPER SERIES ON ANALYTICS

On the occasion, Shri H. R. Khan, Former Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India also released IDRBT Staff Paper Series on Analytics.

With the unprecedented growth in both banking and payment transactions in digital form, banks have been becoming repositories of large volumes of varied data piling up at a great velocity. The more the data available, more informed the decisions would be, provided the data is analysed quickly and meaningfully.

Banks have recognized the strength of analytics in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM). As the discipline of analytics is getting enriched with more sophisticated techniques, banks need to continuously upgrade and update their solutions.

In the second Gyan Sangam meeting of the heads of banks along with top officials of Government and Reserve Bank India, there has been considerable discussion on the use of analytics. There is a consensus that analytics is very useful to banks and that banks have to evolve strategies to build analytics-based solutions for many of their activities. There have been suggestions to prepare criteria to assess the degree of implementation and the impact of the same on banks’ business and profitability.

It is in this background that IDRBT chose to bring out its fifth volume of Staff Paper Series with the theme of Analytics, which consists of three articles as mentioned below:

• Data Analytics: A Phenomenal, Pervasive, Productive and Profitable Paradigm
• Analytics Based Business Practices for Consumer Retail Finance
• Text Mining for Financial Analytics.

The three articles covered will help in the increase in usage of Analytics in Banking. The Staff Paper Series has been helping the Institute in presenting the latest research carried out by the Institute in various areas related to Banking Technology. The previous Staff Paper Series focused on Mobile Banking, Payment Systems, Cloud Computing and Biometrics.

Click here to visit MIKE 2017 Website