I was in Brazil earlier this week to speak at the Cognizant
Innovation Forum at Sao Paulo, and was struck by the tremendous potential the country promises for start-ups and business innovators. While I had an idea
that the country’s economy is gradually on the rise giving rise to excellent
investment opportunities, I was fascinated to see the perspectives and
geography specific requirements of this country that ranks #2 in Facebook and Twitter usage. I met with various customers and investors, and spoke about a diversified set of topics from banking innovations to
emerging technologies in card payments to online insurance to retail analytics, and of course cloud computing use cases.
One of the interesting facts that I noted was the
shooting up of online sales from 0 to 28 billion within a span of just 12 years
indicating a phenomenal economic growth. I happened to visit a Hippie fair and
was quite surprised to find that most sellers were accepting credit cards. That
spoke a great deal about the country’s economy. The steady economic growth in
Brazil is contributing towards a growing middle class which is creating a
demand for different kinds of insurance products. During the meet, one of the
discussions revolved around the challenges related to not just technology, but
people, process and social elements for bringing up a SaaS-based insurance
offering in a country that has more than 70,000 insurance agents. The demand
for insurance products in Brazil, in fact, is said to be as diverse as it is in
Europe and the U.S.A.
We also discussed about a unique challenge in the retail
and online stores. The credit card transactions that get timed out and
translate as lost business opportunities is close to 25% in Brazil. This number
is less than 3% in U.S.A. In this context, we spoke about what could be the
underlying issues in the infrastructure. I met with a start-up in Brazil that
is trying to solve this technology problem and decrease the percentage of
failed transactions for businesses. We had addressed similar problems of lost opportunity to several of our online customers of Cloud360 using various auto remediation, and other platform features of ours. It was interesting to see a different perspective of the business problem, technology means and the solution as well.
My stay has been a fruitful one when I learned a lot
about the country’s prospects and figured that in spite of some of the
challenges it has, this is a place that has a lot of scope for start-ups and
companies planning business innovations.
