Watch: Orion’s Anoop Gala on automating for dynamic customer experience and ROI

Anoop Gala, head of financial services at Orion Innovation, a digital transformation and product provider for companies such as Chase, Red Hat and S&P Global, discusses in this webinar how automation and artificial intelligence (AI) come together to create new digital experiences that can enhance customer experience. Gala explains how automation underlies digital transformation, enabling a more personalized digital experience for the customer. However, to achieve a dynamic experience, banks must shift their focus from simple task and process automation to orchestrating automation across all business functions. Find out how Orion is helping financial institutions digitalize and automate, and achieve a return on investment along the way. [toggle title="TRANSCRIPT"] The following is a transcript generated by AI technology that has been lightly edited but still contains errors. Loraine Lawson Hi, everyone. And thanks for joining us for this pulse of the industry event. I'm Loraine Lawson, Associate Editor Bank Automation News. And I'm proud to present our March Premium Plus Webinar. Premium Plus is our newest service that offers exclusive webinars like this, as well as access to our conferences, archive of conference sessions and startup demos. We really hope you enjoy it.Today I'm joined by Mr. Anoop Gala. He is the head of financial services services at Orion innovation, a leading digital transformation and digital product services company. Previously he led the banking financial services and insurance at SLK, a software and consulting firm. decade ago he worked at for more than a decade sorry, he worked at emphasis a large technology solutions consulting services and outsourcing company. And all Anoop has over 25 years of experience in IT outsourcing consulting products and services, including successfully leading FinTech startups and leading global organizations a new welcome. How are you today? Thank you, Anoop,Anoop Gala thank you for having me and appreciate your flexibility.Loraine Lawson Wonderful. So the topic of today's discussion is the automation trends relating to customer service and how to achieve an ROI with automation. We've got a lot to talk about today. So let's get started by telling us a little bit about the work you do at Orion innovation in regards to automation.Anoop Gala See, Loraine, at Orion, we are a leading provider of digital transformation and product development services. And my role leading the financial services vertical is essentially a business and technology transformation leader. What that means is I enable driving the clients agenda for digital transformation, and moving that forward into real outcome based digital solutions and services that essentially can then be consumed by their clients or their internal employees. And we do that by focusing a lot on domain centric solutions wrapped around the whole digital technologies that are available to us in areas of banking, consumer lending, corporate commercial banking, capital markets, wealth and asset management, FinTech payments, and insurance. But at the core of each solution that we provide to our clients is really automation. And in my mind, I would go a step further, it's around hyper automation, and providing a new set of digital experiences that essentially are driving higher ROI for our clients.Loraine Lawson Okay, now, hyper automation is a term I think Gartner coined does that correct?Anoop Gala Yes, that's very true. Gartner coined that very recently, given given the foray of automation that we are seeing and the convergence of automation and AI, creating this new set of digital experiences.Loraine Lawson Okay, so you're in a position to see the trends. What trends are you seeing in automation, as it pertains to the customers experience?Anoop Gala Not in the pandemic has really challenged all of us, right? It has challenged traditional business models, we saw that businesses that had not digitized, so much struggled. And today, the default requirement is digital. We are also seeing that it's not just efficiency and cost as a big advantage to enterprises, you should add probably two more dimensions of building for resiliency and agility so that we can prepare enterprises to face these kind of potential events that could even occur in the future. So what has this done to in terms of the trends, right, I would say the biggest trend that it has changed is shifting the whole idea of commerce to digital. And that's really what the pandemic has done. And more. So the idea of digital experience has also shifted from the channel to a more human centered form of design. And by this I mean, it's really enabling the digital experiences, experience using behaviors, preferences are so nice sentiments, so that you are then able to personalize and contextualize the experience for almost every customer and not just at a segment level. Right? In terms of automation, what does that mean? What it means is you're not no longer looking at just a process automation or a task automation. I think that was a very traditional approach to automation, you have to now look at a more unified and a cohesive form of automation, which goes beyond just the task and the process level. Essentially, you are looking at orchestrating automation across the business function. Right? Which means that you have to think about multi disciplinary teams, you have to look at fusion of things. You have to almost reimagine and reinvent your business process to make it purely and fully digital. NowLoraine Lawson So Tell us about three automation related initiatives or technology that you're prioritizing this year at Orion innovation to support that.Anoop Gala What is happening for our set around innovation, we are deepening ourselves in the whole digital transformation space, right and combining that with a very high degree of value creation on the experience and automation. For example, for a large bank, large bank National Bank, we have been working with them, helping them build out their next generation digital account opening. So be it retail account, be it a consumer bank account meet and loan account, that entire experience is shifting from the branch to digital. And in the process, we are not just automating the front end of the experience, but also automating the underlying business processes. This is used by a lot of AI lead automation, right. And that's one, the second thing that we are doing for a very large investment, financial and retirement planning company is helping them onboard clients, and also onboard new products and services. Clearly, we are we this this industry is extremely regulated, there's a lot of compliance costs. So there are things that we are doing through automation, is helping this client to automate the entire processing of participant enrollment and to using OCR and ICR technologies, and reducing the per unit cost from two hours to almost 10 minutes. That's the level of automation that we are able to deliver for another wealth and asset management company, we are helping them to modernize and automate their back office processes. They are moving away from a legacy third generation mainframe system to a cloud first kind of an approach, bringing a new platform. So it's not just going into a new technology infrastructure, but also into a new platform. So we are there integration and their automation partner for all of the testing that needs to be performed for this kind of transformation. Loraine Lawson And this projects where they go into n, especially with their automated ones back end, how long do those typically take a mate to do? Anoop Gala Save Typically, these these projects, and again, the this is again, coming from a lot of our learning is these don't necessarily need to be big bank, right? processes, we make sure that when we are working with our clients, we are creating tangible outcomes and deliverables that the businesses and their consumers can start using. So these are not projects, which are three year five year kind of roadmap, right? They are 18 months 24 month roadmap, but almost having very fixed deliverables in a phased manner. It could be six months, nine months kind of phases. But each phase has a substantial rollout. So for example, for management company, the entire back office rollout is happening in less than 12 months time. Loraine Lawson So that kind of brings us to automation and ROI. I know that's very important to any business to make sure that they achieve an ROI. So how does it Service Automation impact project ROI? He gives some examples of how things are achieving ROI with these projects. Anoop Gala Absolutely. So when you look at ROI, the 334 clear areas in which automation is significantly impacting ROI, right. One is a very improved and enhanced customer experience. Clearly, the idea of us using automation is to deliver what I would say a frictionless experience. So that's number one. Right? The second is productivity. But it's not just productivity alone, it's also delivering a lot of speed and agility to the whole business process. And we are starting to see that that's a big outcome of any kind of an automation. It could be straight through processing, or it could be significantly reducing the time. And what it does is it also creates lot more usage, because you're eliminating waste, you're eliminating a lot of duplication of effort, and eliminating a lot of human intervention. The third and I would say the most tangible result is really a lower cost of ownership. And it's very counterintuitive because you are investing in creating a new digital experience. You are investing in creating a lot of new automation, but what it does over time is you're taking away those repetitive cost of maintenance of the support queries, the cost to service is really coming down by providing a very high degree of automation, right. And the other tangible I would say, outcome to all of this is, you're now able to derive a lot of insights, that you can plug back into the business for better decision making. You can align and adjust your products and services, because you are now starting to create platforms and products, which are self learning, which are self managed, which are self healing, which means that you're starting to derive a lot of insight. And you're using this data to keep aligning and refining better pricing models, better marketing campaigns, more personalized marketing campaigns, and that's a significant ROI of any such automation. Loraine Lawson So have an open source tools play into this? Did they impact the ROI? How has that changed the landscape in terms of accessibility? Anoop Gala Laurie, for us, the way we approach this problem of is really we work with clients and see what is the best technology that is available for them to deliver any kind of integrated experience, right? So we we are that we're very agnostic to the technology, we understand. And we play in all all the relevant technologies and all the leading technologies. But at the same time, to me, it's not like a one size fits all. clients. Some clients are very forward in adopting open source technologies, some clients are still making decisions of whether open source technologies are right solution for them or not. We essentially partner with them helping them to say, here's the due diligence on this cart. Here's how the technology has advanced. Here's the kind of support that is available on this technology. But most important, is this the right solution for your business use case. And that's how we can create a more joint and unified solution for our clients. And we are starting to see the results of open source as well, in this space. Loraine Lawson Are there particular issues that you recommend banks think through when they're considering open source? Anoop Gala The biggest issue, which has always been back of the banks is what is the level of support for open source technologies, right. But we are starting to see that some of these open source technologies are also matured over time. And we then work with the bank as a partner to say we are taking over the ownership of this solution, which means all the underlying components of that solution, it could be open source, or it could be a combination of open source and industry standard platforms will be managed and owned and delivered through an Orion kind of a service. And that's that's our business model. And it's also a big differentiator for the banks, that takes away the risk of not knowing who's going to support these components down the line. And at the same time, some of the other issues banks deal with this, how compliant is this technology? Are there risk around cyber security? And that's a big risk that banks are looking at not just from a technology standpoint, but even from a business standpoint. And which is why we do a lot of due diligence, even before recommending technologies are any kind of components to our partners and to our clients. Loraine Lawson So are there any specific open source tools that deal with automation that you do like, Anoop Gala of course, so again, there are a variety of tools, meaning on just on the testing side, there are there are a suite of tools that we use for our clients. And for our some of our programs, like Catalan studio, for example. When it comes to a lot of API testing, we use soap UI. We use Selenium a lot for helping our clients develop testing frameworks. And over the period at Orion, we've also been very successful in developing these frameworks and accelerators, some of which are built on the open sources, solutions that I talked about. And we essentially bring that to significantly accelerate and provide a jumpstart to the client's digital initiative. Similarly, on the robotic transformation side, also there are a few of these open source platforms like like task Id like the robot framework. And essentially we bring this and say here is an standard which is almost comparable to an industry platform. It will help you reduce your cost of ownership and here is a tried and tested So here is a benchmark. And here is what other companies are also doing. Loraine Lawson Okay, I'm getting back to the ROI. You mentioned reducing total cost of ownership. But I know there are things sometimes the companies do that get in the way of achieving an ROI. What so what are the some of the biggest pitfalls you've seen companies and financial institutions make when automating? Anoop Gala So, one of the pitfalls I have seen, and sometimes we've, we have also been partners in crime, right. So we kind of see that together with clients. But this has been learning over the last several years of being in this space, is, we should be looking at automation in a more holistic way. Right, companies who are looking and partners who are looking at automation, and delivering ROI in a piecemeal fashion, struggled over time to scale those initiatives. And that is a big, big kind of challenge is what we see. The second biggest challenge that we see is this a lot. There are also a lot of technology risks, if you will, right, this technology, the area of AI, ml, machine learning kind of platforms that are available to us are evolving, as we speak, every six months, nine months, there are new technologies that are getting introduced. So clients should continue to look at their technology toolbox of automation and continue to adjust those components. It's not a one size fits all, you could use one technology for solving a particular business use case, but you may have to shift to a different technology. So to solid different businesses case, that brings to a different kind of challenge. Now you have a lot of technologies to deal with. So there are governance issues, there are sourcing issues you want to be, you want to be aware that you don't have a shelf where you have a lot of technology sitting out there, or there could be a cybersecurity or a vulnerability issue. And last, but most important in my mind, is measuring visits. It's not just about how many bots you created, whether these were service bots, and chat or chat bots. But essentially, it is about this automation result in creating a competitive advantage for you as an enterprise and for your clients. To me, that's how you measure results you measure results by did it lower your cost? Did it increase your revenue sales? Or did it drive better financial performance? I think those have to be KPIs. And not this created so many bots. And this is how we reduced the headcount in this enterprise. Loraine Lawson Very good KPIs. Thinking about the customer experience more broadly. How would you define, say, a dynamic customer experience? Anoop Gala So interestingly, Lorraine, as we were working before, will this large bank right, solving that complete digital account opening processes across lending retail, and commercial lines of businesses, one of the things that we did in that whole process was create what is called dynamic product pricing. And I'll give you a simple use case. This was, let's say, for the retail bank, and this is a customer who is coming to the bank on the digital channel wants to open an account. And in the most traditional world, what would have happened is he would ask a few questions and basis his responses, we would tailor a product and a service and a related pricing associated with that product and service. But what we did was we embedded a AI based model there as the client as the prospect was answering questions, we would tailor. And based on those responses, we would basically tailor additional questions. And these questions would then allow us to actually look at data which is available in the external world, on social platforms. Okay. And we realized that by the way, we are not never looking at that data, because we're always looking at those traditional data sources only. And then this this particular prospect, probably is also has a relationship with the same bank, but on the small business side. And banks have never looked at that holistically. How can you take advantage of this relationship that perhaps spans across other lines of business as well? So we were able to triangulate all this data in real time. And then project to this prospect. Here is a tailor made product. And this is a pricing and all of this was dynamically driven. And that changes the experience for this this particular prospect. And I guess it makes sense. Loraine Lawson It does. Yes. Thank you. How does automation help with that? Anoop Gala So where did we use automation, right? So behind, what we did was we used an AI engine, which was essentially looking at all the data that was coming from the customer inputs, the Prop, the inputs that the prospect was given. It was taking the data from the traditional sources that the bank had relationships, all the views that we had built, which were now not just siloed, within the lrB, but this was data available across all right, ello bees. So we could triangulate and say, here is a prospect who probably has a small business, it's a dentistry practice. And this practice is this is the kind of portfolio that this practice already has with the bank. So we could use that data and probably create a better service offering. But we went a step further, we went a step further. And we started looking at data which was unstructured. This is data from social platforms. And we started seeing that this particular prospect has potential high school senior who has just signed up for college. And the bank was then able to use that data in real time to say, here is a potential opportunity to offer a student loan. So as we are creating a more customized kind of a package, we were able to bring add on information that would not have been otherwise available to the bank. And this was done using AI. So we were able to use a classification model, we were able to do pattern recognition as we went and looked at images of certain things on social platforms that there was a celebration of a potential admit to a college. And that kind of gave a trigger, that there is a high school senior in this household, who might be going to college, sometime this year or later. And these were additional information that we were able to claw back in again, using a very high degree of automation, OCR, ICR, and AI and machine learning algorithms. Loraine Lawson That's amazing. I think that's a perfect place to wrap up a new thank you for joining us during this webinar. It was a pleasure. We look forward to following your work with automation. I want to thank all our Premium Plus subscribers for joining us on this episode of the Premium Plus pulse of the industry. But this video, you will see a full transcript of the conversation. We hope you enjoyed this webinar, please let us know how we're doing by emailing us at info at bake automation news.com. Or you can always reach out to us via one of our social channels on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thank you Anoop. Unknown Speaker Thank you, Loraine. Thank you for having me once again.

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