Collaboration with Startups will Bring Huge Disruptions to Business Segments

HemenGoswami, Chief Technology Officer & IT-Head, Anand RathiMulti-million new Demat accounts were opened and many dormant accounts came to life due to the pandemic after-effects. How do you see the financial services market to be affected over the last two years of the pandemic? in a brief chat with Amit Singh highlights that greater collaboration with the startup community will bring tremendous disruption to each business segment. He further underlined that AI and machine learning are enablingbusinesses to customize their offerings even at the level of an individual user With heightened interest in stock markets and mutual funds from retail investors, how do you see the financial services businesses grappling to deliver a high level of customer experience?

Since 2019, the number of Demat accounts has doubled. Most of the new Demat accounts are being opened by the younger generation i.e., less than 30 years of age. This age group has certain expectations from a digital product in terms of the speed of execution. This has brought very high throughput technologies to the forefront such as serverless architectures with high speed of delivery. Onboarding and account opening has become very fast with most brokers automating onboarding and opening accounts within a few seconds. Most investors now increasingly prefer meeting over digital modes rather than in person for consultation and review. The mode of engagement is becoming Omni-channel.

Many of the Fintechs have come to the fore offering a high level of customer experience and added features. How are the traditional players seeing them as competition or as a collaborator?

Data becomes a critical resource going forward. With huge amounts of data available, a lot of targeted offerings can be made to the user. This requires heavy investment in big data technologies by the financial services business. With the advent of AI and machine learning, offerings can be customized even at the level of an individual user. This offers an excellent use case in the recommendation engine with automated advisory. Also, the mode of interaction is predominantly mobile on a smartphone app, thus a targeted product becomes a huge strength. Finally, these new breeds of users are increasingly social and therefore, new models of research for stocks and interaction among peers have emerged.

Please talk about your initiatives around digital transformation and automation to deliver a high level of customer experience.

Traditional players are learning fast from the new-ageFinTech ecosystem- either as a competition or as a collaborator. It is critical to enhance customer experience during its entire lifecycle- starting from the acquisition stage. Today’s customers want an easy onboarding process, easier access to service providers and support ecosystem, using multiple engagement channels. Digital technology itself is a great leveler which brings service providers to a common platform. One important area, which I want to highlight is that today we see greater collaboration with the startup community who are bringing tremendous disruption into each business segment. The startup community is driving innovation, whereas traditional financial services have also become the foremost beneficiaries. Traditional financial service providers are investing in technology and innovation significantly in-house.

How are you leveraging new-age technologies like Blockchain, AI, and analytics for digital transformation?

Bringing delight to customers’ experience is our top priority. Customer engagement with us is a journey. We leverage technology to make it happen. There are two distinct areas for us to focus on as far as digital transformation is concerned. There is a direct customer engagement interface with our product or services, and then there are backend processes that directly impactcustomers’ experience. We have made a significant investment inthe technology backbone to deliver value in both of these areas. As part of our digital transformation strategy, we have prioritized certain areas. At a very high level, I will highlight a few of these areas, such as (a) the digital communicationplatform Chatbot, powered by AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology stack, (b) AI-powered video analytics to make customer onboarding seamless, © RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to automate several business activities to make it faster and predictive, (d) Cloud-native system to make our system’s availability 24×7 for customer’s access, and (e) Business Intelligence and Big Data Analytics Platform with AI & ML at its core.

Please talk about your top-5 technology priorities and focus areas over the next 2 to 5 years?

AI and Analytics are one of the core focus areas. We are progressively building the AI and Analytics center of excellence to deliver value to customers and businesses. Our roadmap includes solutions around AI and Analytics to make customer engagement a pleasant experience at every touch-point. There are several use cases in which we are currently working with AI and Analytics as the core of the solution. AI is playing a significant role in data classification, data regression, and predictive data analytics. It is pivotal in the identification of fraud analytics. Our business is challenged by the volume, variety, and velocity of data. We have adopted a data engineering strategy using a big data platform with an AI-powered analytic engine. We also see the significant importance of AI in financial audit processes. As far as blockchain technology is concerned, we are evaluating through prototypes in various use cases.

I am going to talk about the top five technology areas which are strategic to our business. Just to clarify, they are not in any specific order of preference.

What is your technology outlook for the financial services industry over the next 5 years?

• The cloud-native platform is a priority focus for us to meet the scale of growth, availability, and performance. It requires changes in enterprise architecture, inclusive of infra and application.
• Microservices architecture is another key focus area, closely related to the cloud-native system. Microservices architecture driven system brings agility to change management and scale management at the same time.
• Cognitive RPA is going to be an area of focus. We spent significant effort in building native RPA solutions to automate several core business and back-office processes. Cognitive RPA enables the power of RPA exponentially.
• Distributed big data will continue to stay among the top focus areas. Integrating big data platforms with distributed computing is going to remain an area of focus. This is strategic in terms of data security, compliance, and regulatory mandates.
• Last but not the least, it’s AI and ML. I have spoken about AI and why it’s critical to our business.

Technology is going to dominate and drive the financial services industry. Technology is a natural disruptor in any industry; the financial services industry is no exception. Technology is going to democratize service platforms. Customers are becoming more demanding due to the impact of technology and innovation.

The financial services industry has to focus centrally on enhancing customer experience through the Omnichannel platform. This means the role of distributed and decentralized technology stack will emerge as the dominant architecture. The industry will consume data from diverse customer segments from multiple channels, which necessitates robust API-driven technology. We would see more collaboration between stakeholders through technology backbone, such as Blockchain technology. AI and Data Analytics will provide a competitive edge to financial services providers to interpret customers’ needs and fulfilltheir needs in the best possible way.

Originally published at https://cxotv.techplusmedia.com on May 25, 2022.