An Interview with Innervate’s Business Development Director ARUN MURRIA.

Please tell us more about Innervate and how you guys are helping to make the world a better place.

Innervate’s primary goal is to advise, guide and support organisations in the GCC who wish to digitize their business and transform their capabilities as they become more agile, customer-centric and compliant. We have a key specialism in supporting Financial Services organisations such as Banks, Insurers and Wealth Managers to ensure they are putting the customer first, and stay relevant and competitive. We pride ourselves on the work we do, as essentially we make it easier for the consumer to access more products and services, in a convenient and cost competitive way; by working closely with the institutions that they are customers of. Our customer-centric approach ensures we act in the organizations’ best short to long term interests, while making sure we are making customer’s lives easier. In addition to our day to day business, we are also big supporters of developing young and emerging talent and we aim to support the next generation of talented individuals to drive forward the Fintech space forward. In line with these goals we have supported key events such as the STEM event run by the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst – to ensure more young women are looking at careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. This initiative is supported by prestigious U.K. companies such as X-Forces.

You work on empowering businesses using technology and people. Why do you think this is important in today’s world?

We are strong believers that technology is an enabler, and the future is very much technology and people, not one or the other. It is important in today’s world to ensure that technology is being harnessed as much as possible to support people, and make lives easier, whether that’s at work or at home, and that is why all of our technology solutions are always customer-centric at heart. To give a personal example, I use a Fitbit, which ensures I get a minimum amount of 10,000 steps a day and helps me keep track of my fitness goals through prompts, competitions with friends and family and through data analytics. This is a great example of why it’s important that technology is actually helping people and working with them in today’s day and age. To relate this to what we do for banks, we help the banks get closer with their customers and be able to positively predict the best services for their customers. From the customer’s perspective they are able to manage their money and access more services in ways that have never been seen before, which has empowered them to make better and smarter choices. To summarize, by empowering businesses using both technology and people, it results in more flexibility, more informed decisions and ensures better levels of productivity and profitability.

Congratulations on your launch! What are your plans for the Bahrain market?

Our plans are to bring some of our solutions accelerators to the Bahrain Financial Services market that we’ve been successfully deploying in the U.K. financial services sector. This will add value to a key sector in Bahrain and be a significant contributor to the economy by ensuring the institutions have the right tools and processes to service their customer base better and to grow in market share within the wider GCC and beyond. Our plan is to make our Bahrain base our Regional GCC HQ, and we have committed to this as we have seen first-hand the wealth of highly educated talents in Bahrain, who have ambitions to improve not only themselves, but also the wonderful Kingdom. We initially plan to invest upwards of $1 Million USD to ensure we expand in the best way possible, by hiring and developing local Bahrainis to ensure we have the right mix of global and local expertise. We are working very closely with Microsoft as our key partner, to ensure we are expanding with them hand in hand, and we have their buy-in for this at Regional Director levels for the GCC, and we are proud to announce that we have just been named as a Focus Microsoft partner for Bahrain.

How do you envision the relationship between people and technology in the coming years?

We strongly believe that the relationship between people and technology will continue with such force that most people will struggle to even imagine the vision ahead. The relationship will all be powered by data, and how this information will be analyzed and used will be key to the amount of benefits people can realize from technology. They say knowledge is power, just think… data is knowledge and people need the right tools today to actually make the most of this asset at their fingertips, and that’s where companies such as Innervate come in to the picture. The data needs to be interacted with and understood as best as possible for informed decisions to be made in everyone’s benefit, and this is what the solutions we deliver actually do for customers.

What advice can you give to aspiring tech entrepreneurs?
Stay curious, and work hard. The market is ever changing, and everyday there is a new innovative technology to hit the market, so it can be difficult to keep up sometimes, but what really sets aspiring tech entrepreneurs out from the crowd is their curiosity to understand, and their desire to get things done. Going back to a key theme to some of my answers, which is the importance of people as well as the technology; people skills are now more important than ever, in a world that is being dominated by instant messaging and computers
– the ability to engage with people, communicate ideas effectively and build partnerships will be key to moving forward, so my overarching advice would be to keep this in mind, as when you couple ‘people’ and ‘technology’, special things happen.

For more information:
www.innervate.uk.com