Space - The Next Mega Cycle?

Space has always fascinated and intrigued me. For a long time, it had been that elusive, final frontier beyond the reach of humans. Ever since the Wright brothers powered the first aircraft in 1903, we have dreamt of one day conquering outer space and unravelling its mysteries. More than a century later, the time has come. Much like the Internet in late 1990s, which led the digital revolution for the next two decades, space is at the cusp of a mega cycle. In a multi-part blog, I explore the space economy – its evolution and future for nations and businesses.

 

Space has largely been a realm of governments dominated by the US which accounted for 70% of the spend in the early 2000s. Now more than 90 countries are now participating in the space economy, which is estimated to reach $1 trillion over the next decade. The sector has also witnessed a huge spike in venture capital activity attracting significant private sector capital, even though the venture capital investments halved to $21.9Bn in 2022 (from $45.7Bn in 2021) ¹, due to macroeconomic headwinds.

 

Historically, the space economy has been characterized by the high cost of launch of the larger & more expensive GSO (Geosynchronous orbit) and GEO (Geostationary equatorial orbit) Satellites. GSO satellites have the same orbital period as earth’s and operate at an altitude of 35,786 km. These GEO satellites cover a larger Earth area and were used for earth sensing, satellite TV and weather. However, on account of latency and susceptibility to interference from objects on earth, they were less useful for communications and IOT.

On the other hand, the much smaller and cheaper LEO satellites orbit close to earth (altitude of less than 2000 kms) with reduced latency. However, we need hundreds or thousands of LEO satellites in a constellation to provide adequate coverage. Their lower latency makes them a logical choice for space-to-mobile connectivity, and they have seen heightened activity in the last decade.  There are almost 5,500 active satellites in orbit as of the end of 2022. Many companies are ramping up their satellite launches in the next 2-3 years. Starlink currently has 3,300 satellites in orbit, and they have FCC approval to deploy 7,500 satellites as part of its Internet network constellation². Amazon Kuiper plans to deploy a constellation of 3,236 satellites³, with 1,500 of them to be launched in the next 5 years. We could end up with 50-80k satellites by the end of the decade. 

There are a wide range of business use cases ranging from earth observation and imaging, satellite to mobile communication, space manufacturing leveraging principles of microgravity and sustainability. The largest value pool is the 5G based convergence of Terrestrial (TN) and Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) using Satellite communication. The benefits are immense in terms of Service ubiquity (e.g., SpaceX’s Starlink offers broadband services to unserved locations) and service continuity where 5G services cannot be provided by TN alone (e.g., ViaSat provides inflight Wifi services in flights) and service broadcasting (e.g. Satellite TV content)⁴. 

Another example of an interesting use case is using satellite images to determine Night Time Light (NTL)⁵ and its variance across decades to determine levels of human activity and natural events (refer image below). This can act as a measure of socio-economic and other environmental indicators like electricity consumption, population growth etc. The below picture depicts states with high development and socio-economic activity indicators contrasting radiance variation in a decade.  

Why is space at a tipping point?

One of the primary factors is the significant decline in cost of satellite launch, from around $160,000/kg in 1960 to $1400/kg. SpaceX starship is expected to bring this down to $100/kg later this year. Moore’s law is disrupting the space industry. 

 

Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are investing in reusable rocket launchers, which will also lower entry barriers for access to space and reduce overall costs.   

Technology advancements in Satellite to mobile communications: Until now, consumers had to carry expensive satellite phones and pay high call rates to send and receive messages from remote locations, which lack cellular coverage. There have been significant announcements in the last few months overcoming some of the previous technological limitations. Apple has partnered with GlobeStar to provide emergency SoS services on iPhone 14. T-Mobile, in August 2022, announced its partnership with SpaceX to provide ubiquitous connectivity in remote locations (mobile dead zones), leveraging SpaceX’s LEO satellite constellation. At CES 2023, Qualcomm announced its Satellite messaging solution (Snapdragon Satellite) leveraging Iridium’s satellite constellation.        

 

Some Interesting developments…

These fundamental seismic shifts put space at an inflexion point. The space economy could give nations and companies access to new value pools given their space priorities and where they intend to play. Every enterprise needs to have a space strategy, which I will discuss in my next blog.

 

It’s exciting and the race has just begun. 

1. Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/space-startups-funding-halved-2022-investors-shift-safer-bets-2023-01-19/
2. CNBC, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/01/fcc-authorizes-spacex-gen2-starlink-up-to-7500-satellites.html
3. Amazon, https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazons-project-kuiper-satellites-will-fly-on-the-new-vulcan-centaur-rocket-in-early-2023
4. NRSC, https://bhuvan-app1.nrsc.gov.in/2dresources/NTL_Atlas.pdf
5. 5GAmericas, 5GAmericas, https://www.5gamericas.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/5G-Non-Terrestrial-Networks-2022-WP-Id.pdf

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Machine Learning in Practice: Shinkansen Travel Experience Hackathon

 

I had been wanting to practice data Science for a while, but been putting it off because it required too much effort, telling myself I was busy. Over the last few weeks, I commenced my journey, thanks to MIT Data Science Program and Great Learning - tough to begin, but very satisfying. If you are someone similar, "Just do it" and get started - time will find itself.

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a Data Science Hackathon to test my concepts and knowledge of Python, I had learnt recently. First, the thought of participating in a hackathon made me uncomfortable – 72 hours to solve a problem along with your day job, can I do it? I am a novice; can I really compete and complete? I will never know if I never tried. 

It was a great experience to use data science techniques I had learnt to solve real world problems. The objective of the problem was to predict whether a passenger was satisfied or not (classification problem) considering his/her overall experience on the Shinkansen bullet train. 

We were given train and test data separately. There were several variables to consider (24 in all) right from customer demographic information to travel type and class, delay (arrival and departure), seat comfort, catering, onboard WIFI and entertainment, ease of online booking, legroom, check-in experience etc. to name a few. 

Took the following approach:

Treatment of missing / null values: Given the magnitude of missing values, dropping them altogether was not a viable option. Adopted the following principles:

• Numerical values: Replaced missing values with the mean (average) of the dataset on both train and test set

• Categorical values: Used a combination of replacing them with the most frequent values and using models to predict the value

This gave a cleaner, a more complete data set. 

Treating mismatch between train and test dataset: Few customers had an additional category to rate some variables e.g., Some customers had rated Cleanliness as extremely poor (new category in train data set) to Poor in test data set. The training data set had to be adjusted to map / categorize customer feedback appropriately. 

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA): Used EDA to understand / visualize the data set to better understand variables and their impact on overall customer experience. Uncovered key insights and relationships between some variables and experience e.g., Onboard entertainment, seat comfort, cleanliness, online support had largely positive impact on customer experience, while travel class (economy), (in)convenient arrival time, catering had a negative impact on experience. 

Data preparation: Then performed encoding on categorical variables and scaled the dataset as preparation before applying different algorithms to test for accuracy.  

Apply Different Machine Learning Algorithms: Next step of the process was to apply different machine learning algorithms:

- Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA)

- Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA)

- Logistic Regression 

- K-Nearest Neighbor

- Decision Tree

- Random Forest

- XG Boost

- Naives Bayes

For each of these algorithms, followed an iterative approach - first train the dataset on the model, apply that to the test dataset, measure performance and then tune the hyper parameters to further improve the prediction accuracy. XGBoost and Random Forest models delivered the most accuracy (95.33%). 

I found the experience very enriching and fulfilling. 

Continue to learn and hone your skills, and keep reminding yourself to “just do it” every step of the way.

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Winning the Platforms Race: Essentials of a cohesive digital platform

 

The power and potential of the platform is widely acknowledged. According to an Accenture Technology Vision 2016 survey, 84 percent of Australian executives agree that platform-based business models will become a part of their organization’s core growth strategy within three years--higher than global results (37 percent) and Japan (23 percent), and on par with China.

More than 4 out of 10 (43 percent) of Australian executives believe that adopting a platform-based business model and engaging in ecosystems of digital partners are critical to the success of their business. With industries leading the charge on digital platforms, leaders from all areas of the business are involving themselves in platform strategies and priorities.

Framing the discussion around digital platforms often begins with a few questions:

• What capabilities does my digital platform need to have?
• How do I run my legacy IT systems and infrastructure in parallel to my next-generation digital platform?
• How do we build a platform in a progressive, agile and iterative manner to handle future developments in business models?
• How do I leverage my existing slate and build a platform strategy with little incremental capex?

These questions can be addressed through the five zones of a digital platform. These zones avoid the common challenge of finding new capital by working progressively within an organization’s existing investment approach. Just like platforms themselves, the zones build upon each other and feed additional innovations and developments. All are essential to a digital platform that is capable of driving an organization’s strategy and engaging consumers in sustainable connections.

This Point of View was originally published for Accenture. Read the complete Point of View at https://www.accenture.com/au-en/insight-winning-the-platforms-race


 

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Platforms can be a bad strategy

It’s the in thing, the most widely spoken tenet of business strategy – Platforms. To the extent that if you are not talking about it, you are from the stone ages.

Successful platform stories are all around us – i.e. Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Pinterest and Apple. Want to embrace the model? Think again. Hidden in these examples are different dimensions of what makes a successful platform.

Category 1: Amazon and e-bay offer a platform bringing buyers and sellers together and then pairs them off to create value for themselves.

Category 2: Facebook and Pinterest play the role of providers of a platform (essentially features), but don’t own or create value on it. The value is created in the enablement of conversations by users of the platform who ‘manage’ and ‘transact’ through ‘conversations’ on the platform, facilitated by communities.

Category 3: Apple through its Apps Store provides a platform for other third parties to build on it, but in a way prescribed by the interfaces exposed by the platform.

In summary, you needs to bring a network of buyers and sellers, create a community that leverages your platform to engage in conversations and open it up to other third parties to create value. Easy? But what happens if you have a traditional, conventional business model built around proprietary products and services, marketed through channels that you own, manage and govern? How do you migrate to the open world of platforms from there?

Well, for a start, you need to think about whether you want to be the platform provider or integrate your products & services into another platform provider? Being a platform provider gives one better control and leverage over the customer or consumers of the platform. Even though value is created by third parties who choose to bring their products and services onto the platform, the value for the provider is disproportionately and exponentially higher than the parties who choose to transact on it. eBay and Amazon’s valuation is multi-fold compared to the millions of buyers and sellers that contribute to it. The proximity to the customer brings deep insight of buying patterns and behaviour, unmatched! Which is why some players (esp. banks) have so far been very wary of integrating their products and services into a platform provider. By doing so, they become in some ways further removed from the customer and thus receive little insights on buying patterns. Also, there is this inherent fear that the platform provider can themselves offer competing services at some point. Inside banking board rooms, the one thing bankers fear the most is threat of competition from unexpected & tangential platform players like Facebook and Google than direct competition. It is the trust or lack of it that discerns them from being platform players or advocates of it. On the other hand, becoming a platform provider is not easy especially if you are yourself competing on the platform. Attracting external market participants can be a big challenge and not everyone can become one in the first place.  

I am not for a moment saying there is no value from a platform strategy – organizations need to think hard about their approach or else it can severely backfire. The answer lies in the problem!  

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NPP - 8 Technology speed breakers for real time payments

The New Payments platform offers the potential of plenty of business advantages to the retail and corporate customer segments, however it presents significant technology challenges in its adoption and implementation. In this last installment of the three part series, I discuss the technology impact of the move to NPP.

1. 24*7 nature of Real time payments will mean greater operations / technology costs to maintain fail over tracking teams and enabling manual intervention to process the transactions. While majority of the transactions are expected to be STP, but given the legacy nature of back office processing systems, banks will need to maintain business operations and technology teams to manage exceptions or failed transactions to ensure they maintain the SLAs under the new payments regime. Over the period of time, banks will have to re-engineer their technology processing and process flow logic needs to be more products and channel agnostic. This generic flow concept will help reduce the time to market for new products as well as reduce implementation costs for any changes to existing product schemes.  This re-engineering should also improve overall payments system resilience and efficiency in general.
2. Integration between online banking and the real-time payments platform will need to occur at multiple levels. Mobile payment processing platforms (e.g. Zapp or ApplePay or proprietary bank apps like Barclays PingIt) with online banking platforms for account balance and processing requirements.  There are others like Sofort in Germany which integrates online banking with the e-shopping experience to provide convenient, faster and secure transfers. Additionally, payments processing will also have to be integrated with real-time cash & exposure management and ledger systems to seamlessly manage the real time, online and batch platforms for unified experience.
3. 'Scagile' Sight Applications – To fully harness the benefits of NPP, enterprises will need to build Scalable, agile and insightful applications not only to handle the load of real time payments data required, but also to harness the value through process / customer insights.  
   
   

   
4. Implementation issues especially involving batch and non RT back end systems for greater efficiency and reduced costs will be important to address. Real-time settlement and reconciliation will present its own challenges. Banks currently manage non-availability / upgrades to systems through batch and maintenance windows at the end of the day, which will no longer be available. Enterprises and businesses will retain Batch / bulk processing of payment transactions especially for schedule payments and payroll processing as they are more cost effective. However, real-time clearing and settlement will put more pressure on system resilience and availability of payment platforms as processing will need to be done outside business hours with availability stretched to 24*7. Platform upgrades and changes will need to be made with little to no down times to ensure customer convenience is maintained which will be a challenge for systems not designed for minimal planned downtime and it is a considerable challenge to retrofit these capabilities into existing heritage systems.
5. ‘Agile’ Business Activity monitoring (BAM) will be a critical component of a real time payments implementation. This has some significant implications -  
   1. Investigating incidents raised by online merchants and enterprises, especially those involving manual interventions and transaction research by technology or business operations teams
   2. Proactive alerts to help limit and manage critical events or transactions which have a significant impact on customer satisfaction
   3. Identifying and measuring performance bottlenecks for continuous cycle time improvement and historical comparative analysis.
6. Elastic Payments Store – Richer data due to the NPP enhanced messaging capability will necessitate maintenance of payments data within a dedicated payments data store to ensure traceability, acknowledgment and reporting of transactions and detailed analysis within real-time performance requirements. Also, this will drive the creation of differentiated overlay services bringing additional revenue opportunities for ADIs. The data architecture around the data store will be critical in search and retrieval activities and should be designed to utilize modern “big data” technology.  
7. Increased pressure on completing the AML/CTF checks within seconds to enable real-time payment clearing and settlement. This will be particularly important given the non-reputable nature of NPP transactions. Banks will have to prioritize the essential business rules required before the payment is processed within the real time settlement window. Also, they will need to manage a mechanism for after the fact checks and processes. 
8. Reconciliation utility – As complexities increase with real time processing, reconciliation will be a key focus area and abstracting all aspects of reconciliation from channel / products systems will be critical to the overall success of the NPP.

Designing and implementing resilient and flexible payments platforms to extract the benefits of NPP will be critical to the success of the program at each participating financial institution.  This will separate the winners from the losers.

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What will it take to implement real time payments/NPP?

This is part 2 of the 3 part series on the New Payments Platform (NPP). Subscribe via email or get added to Google Circles to receive an update on future posts. 

The focus of the New Payments Platform is to provide an infrastructure for a versatile and data rich, real time payments infrastructure for low value everyday payments. But few organisations understand the challenges in the implementation of real time payments system, so, I attempt to uncover the key considerations - functional and technical for the program. NPP will also facilitate an enhanced customer experience through the introduction of an Addressing Service which will allow payments (particularly mobile payments) to be “addressed” or “routed” by using an Alias which will enable payments to be directed to a specific account using either a mobile phone number or an email address. The email account option will be particularly important to businesses and people with multiple accounts. 

The introduction of the NPP will create many opportunities for participating financial institutions (ADIs) as well as their customers through provision of overlay or value-added services, particularly if the introduction of the NPP is viewed as more that a “simple” compliance exercise. There are some important considerations ADIs need to meet to be ready for NPP.

Functional Considerations

There are a number of key requirements to be considered as a consequence of the introduction of the NPP.

1. Message standardization, transformation and acknowledgment into a format compatible with the central message format. The rigor associated with payment enrichment and repair for incomplete or missing information will be much higher with NPP. Even the clearing process with acknowledgement of messages between gateway/clearing house/bank, including handling and integration of settlement messages needs to be robust.
2. Payments reversal – For rejected payments, given the real time nature of clearing & settlement, the reversal and transaction research and reconciliation process will need to be drastically streamlined. Impact on payments and GL balances for unhappy path situations will be extensive and the resultant changes will need to be comprehensive.
3. Payment routing – based on least cost and load balancing of the payment processing access to an alternate option and gateway will need to be automatic, instantaneous and dynamic.
4. Audit trail of transactions along with journalizing – Tracing the payment transactions through various platforms, interfaces will be extremely critical in not only ensuring compliance but also for AML/CTF purposes. The provision of a single comprehensive view of payments and hence, the ability to do a drill down of transactions and fees will be a critical feature and differentiator.
5. Liquidity management and settlement will, given the real-time nature of the NPP, need to be examined closely to ensure that from a participant and participant customer perspective a very clear real-time understanding of their position at any point in time. This will also need to include the ESA position for Participants, particularly when acting on behalf of other participants.
6. Comprehensive configuration, fee management and reporting will need to be NPP specific and will be critical to ensuring accurate product pricing can occur and correct cost allocation can be done. Fee and Billing – at a minimum, the break-up of the charges by product/customer/segment/account/channel.

Architectural Considerations

There are a number of architectural implications that need to be considered as a consequence of introduction of the NPP.

• What aspects of payments enrichment, scheduling and monitoring should stay in the channel or product systems and what should be centralized? This will particularly have an impact around recurring and future-dated payments and consideration should be given to a centralized data store which would facilitate processing as well providing both the Participant and its customers with a complete view of upcoming payments, it will also help facilitate liquidity management.
• What non-functional requirements should the Participant build towards? Having a clear and unambiguous understanding the payments flow becomes even more critical with the NPP as it will run 24*7 and its availability (or lack thereof) will have high visibility not only with the participant’s customers but also with regulatory authorities and other Government agencies. This requires a good understanding of expected volumes, response and repair times within and outside the enterprise boundary.
• Business Activity Monitoring capability – abstraction of the processing and idle times for various sub-segments of the business process; real-time payments dashboard and reporting; real-time fraud monitoring will significantly improve an ADI’s ability to meet and exceed their customers’ expectations as well as providing a firm baseline of performance across the payment systems of the ADI..
• Supporting Rich Data through a centralized payments data store to facilitate comprehensive reporting and transactional research as well as providing a foundation for enhanced reconciliation capabilities across product and channel streams.
• Real-time Fraud monitoring will be an essential component of any NPP implementation particularly due to the non-reputable nature of NPP payments once the payment is complete. AML capabilities will also need to be considered, again due to the finality of the payment.
•  Rich remittance data that will be present in NPP transactions will need additional consideration as it will create the potential need to interface new internal and external systems by allowing ADIs to introduce new value-added products and services particularly aimed at small-to-medium enterprises thus improving customer acquisition and retention as well as introducing new income streams through fee-for-service offerings.
  Some of these considerations would involve ADIs to progressively revamp their payments systems infrastructure necessary for them to guarantee higher levels of stability.
  Are you ready for it?

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NPP - More than just compliance

This is part 1 of a 3 part series on New Payments Platform (NPP). Please subscribe by email or get added to Google circles if you wish to get informed when future series are published.

The introduction of the New Payments Platform has seen some very diverse reactions from financial institutions. Some see it as a huge burden on them to comply with the regulations – an unnecessary cost which could be avoided especially in times when credit growth is slow and margins under pressure. Others see it as an erosion of their competitive advantage, built-up over the years through systematic and long term investments in the overhaul of their payments and core platforms. For these institutions, NPP threatens to level the playing field through lowering the barrier to entry via investment in central infrastructure ensuring greater competition in real time payments anytime, anywhere which, of course, is one of the RBA’s intentions with the NPP’s introduction.

However, worldwide experience has proven that there will be a select number of institutions which will convert this into a substantial business opportunity to consolidate and grow their revenue and market share. In the first installment of this three part series, I uncover some of the potential business opportunities stemming from the program.   

Improved Cash management and Liquidity: Overlay services can help improve cash management, liquidity and traceability of payments along with convenience through mobile initiation of payments.  – An example of overlay service could be e-invoicing coupled with end-to-end payments manager, providing corporates with the ability to schedule, prioritize, authorize, track, get acknowledgement and reconcile payments in real time through a single interface leveraging the central payment infrastructure. This service integrated with an expense manager to help corporates, SMEs and consumers with better cash-flow and liquidity management. Through better spend analytics and traceability there is a significant opportunity to improve cash-flow & liquidity management and better integrate these capabilities with external customer platforms.

 

Reduce costs and improve operational efficiency:

·        Rich data flow can enable the payments flow and transactional data to be directly entered into the accounting system, increasing visibility and accuracy of payments data. A lot of small merchants today, expend significant time and costs in manually entering the payments transactions into their accounting system. This can also result in inaccurate data due to manual entry hence incurring further costs. The richer payments data will be an opportunity for standard accounting packages to build pre-fabricated interfaces with payments systems to ensure straight through flow right from payments initiation through to the accounting system.

 

·        Real-time payments should be cheaper for merchants, since they can reduce or eliminate higher cards transaction fees in favor of a direct money transfer between bank accounts at real time, whilst eliminating the credit risk normally prevalent in a non-real time environment. Though the exact savings will depend on the pricing structure for NPP payments.
 

·        Richer payment data can help in quicker and cheaper reconciling through itemized invoicing and enabling greater control over expense management. This can help in reducing the number of errors in payment processing as well as reduced exceptions optimizing back office operations costs. A good example of the value this can bring to a business is by having additional information relating to the purpose of the payment in the payment transaction itself which will then allow a business to understand which invoices are being paid, without requiring manual reference back to the payer, by a single payment and / or which specific line items of an invoice are being paid which will substantially improve the efficiency of the accounts receivable function of a business.
 

·       SME and Corporates will have the ability to generate real time cash flow statements and balance sheets.
 

Improved budgeting and traceability: Greater visibility of cash positions and control on spend management through rich data for both consumers and enterprises. PayPal for example, used the real time payments implementation in the UK to provide their merchants with real-time payments when consumers are buying online or in bricks-and-mortar storefronts. Additionally, retail consumers could find splitting bills much easier if ADIs were to provide overlay services around itemized invoicing, particularly when associated with smartphone apps on top of a faster, quicker real-time settlement. The ability for SMEs in particular to receive both funds and enriched data in real-time and to have the enriched data directly integrated with their accounting solution will of significant benefit. As an example being able to receive settled funds 24*7 will allow SMEs the ability to better ensure they are getting maximum benefit from allocating their cash to a high interest account as an example particularly those businesses that have significant cash receipts after traditional hours or over the weekend. This should also help ensure suppliers are paid more promptly.

Greater customer convenience

·       Cheaper, instantaneous international remittances at least for customers of multi-national banks who wish to transfer money between accounts in different countries. For businesses, this could eliminate the need for keeping idle ‘float’ or ‘liquid’ money, for better liquidity management.
 

·        Buying processes could be significantly simplified. E.g. The private car buying process which is quite cumbersome and time consuming today - involves either an electronic or bank cheque based money transfer into the vendor’s account which has an inherent level of risk associated with it, transferring and paying for the registration and post that at least third-party insurance and possibly additional insurance coverage. There is an opportunity to provide a car buying payment transaction service which could integrate these discrete sequential processes and complete the end-to-end transaction within minutes leveraging the irrevocable central NPP infrastructure for an enhanced customer experience.
 

·        Real time mobile payments – One of the biggest use cases for real-time payments is a flexible medium for mobile pay-anyone payments. As an example the UK Zapp payments allows customers to make real time payments from their mobile through a service integrated with their banking applications. The service doesn’t expose details of the bank accounts and allows consumers to select the banking accounts from which to make payment.
 

Supply chain efficiencies: Consider a scenario where an apparel manufacturer places an order for a weaving machine. It has to wait for a few days till the payment is cleared into the supplier account before the supplier ships the equipment. The advent of real time payments could help improve productivity of the apparel manufacturer and reduce working capital & storage requirements through quicker receivables management for the supplier.  In a real life consumer scenario, the consumer can electronically transfer funds to the supplier and the supplier can then ship the goods immediately and with the non-reputable aspect of the payment the supplier can be assured the chargeback risk is significantly lower or eliminated altogether.

Person-to-person payments: The ability to make a real time payment through aliases – mobile number or email, offers a transaction medium to the non-banked or under-banked sections of society. Immediacy and non-revocability of payment will reduce the credit risk and improve funds availability.

Can our banks counter the new entrants by leveraging the true benefits of NPP? Only time will tell.

 

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