Ketharaman Swaminathan

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Founder and CEO

GTM360 Marketing Solutions

Member since

17 Apr 2009

Location

Pune

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Ketharaman's opinions

CTS-2010: Cheque Truncation Or Contract Termination System?

There has been a spate of ads and announcements over the last 3-4 weeks by banks in India about the introduction of the new Cheque Truncation System, CTS-2010, from the new year. For the uninitiated, CTS transforms cheque clearing from a paper-intensive to a digital process whereby only images of cheques move between the payer bank, payee bank a...

06 December 2012 /payments /retail

The Clear And Present Danger With NFC Payments

Technophobes and security pundits have been warning us for a long time that it’s possible for a passerby with an RFID reader – and malafide intent – to skim debit / credit card details off contactless cards and NFC smartphones even when they’re tucked away inside their owners’ wallets, pockets or hand bags. I’d a first hand exposure of this securi...

26 September 2012 /payments

The Business Case For Social Media Customer Service

In a previous blog post titled Gain Social Media And Lose The Call Center Hold Music, I’d written about how customer service via social media is a great experience for customers of airlines, banks, insurers, mobile network operators and other service providers. Let me now look at social media customer service from the perspective of service provid...

11 September 2012 /retail

Web - The Forgotten Channel?

According to many recent analyst reports, including the World Retail Banking Report 2012 co-authored by Cap Gemini and EFMA, customers are viewing the Internet - alongside the branch - as one of the two most important channels of retail banking worldwide. In this context, I find it odd that many banks and nonbanking financial service providers are...

20 August 2012 /payments

My Bank Does Right To Scrap Cheque Deposit Systems

Over five years ago, I'd written a post titled Cheque Deposit Systems — Are They Really Worth It? During the next couple of years, I'd found this equipment to be down every other time that I'd visited the bank's branch to pay my credit card bill. My overall poor experience with this technology led me to conclude, in a follow up post titled Technol...

04 August 2012 /payments /retail

Height Of eBanking Irony

Irony is when My bank wants me to visit its branch to update my email. I wonder why I can't convey my new email address to my bank via Internet Banking or in a letter signed by me in 'wet ink'. Left with no choice, I visit the branch but find that it has moved. Despite 'friending' it on Facebook, I keep getting irrelevant offers from my bank on ...

04 June 2012 /retail

Save Costs But Lose Revenues With eBills And eStatements

Electronic delivery of bills and statements promises to save stationery, printing and postage costs for banks, mobile network operators, municipalities / boroughs, utilities and other types of billers. Attracted by the cost savings potential, a large number of billers have adopted eBilling / eStatements technology in recent times. To actually real...

24 May 2012 /retail /wholesale

Gain Social Media And Lose The Call Center Hold Music

Around the end of 2009, my HP OfficeJet printer had broken down. I promptly logged a call with the local office of Hewlett Packard's service partner. After several futile attempts over the next three days to get its engineer to visit my office to inspect the defective unit, I gave up with the vendor's local office and decided to escalate my compla...

04 May 2012 /retail

Whither Upselling With eBills?

For a long time, I've been hearing about how electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) solutions enable greater cross-selling and upselling by billers. For the uninitiated, EBPP, among other things, generates paperless versions of bills and statements and publishes them on portals or emails them as PDF attachments, or both; the term "bil...

18 April 2012 /payments /retail

Pushing The Envelope On Technology - Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog post, I had lauded ICICI Bank for pushing the envelope on adopting cutting edge banking technologies by launching a Facebook App and Online Account Opening offering. In this Part 2, let me share the results of my personal experience with these initiatives and voice a few concerns around their implementation. After completing...

05 February 2012 /retail

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