Turning

Adversity into
Strength
How India’s Top BFSI IT Leaders embraced the
New Normal
Acknowledgement
Looking back at 2020, one may wonder how we survived one of the most trying circumstances in recent memory.
But, we didn’t just survive; we came out of this stronger as organisations and individuals.

To all the IT leaders we had the opportunity to talk to, learn from, and watch their leadership from up-close,
we want to thank you for being the inspiration and foundation for this CIO Coffee Table Book.

Mr. Akshay Dhanak, Mrs. Anjali Malhotra, Mr. Arpanarghya Saha, Mr. Ekhlaque Bari, Mr. Goutam Datta,
Mr. Gururaj Rao, Mrs. Kirti Patil, Mr. K. V. Dipu, Mr. Mukesh Malik, Mr. Nitin Agarwal, Mr. Parag Kulkarni,
Mr. Prasanna Lohar, Mrs. Puneet Kaur Kohli, Mr. Rupesh Mehta and Mr. Subhojit Roy
We salute you for having transformed not just the industry but also the country in times of this crisis.

While the roles of IT leaders changed almost overnight, it wasn’t an easy task to find pockets of time in their busy
schedules to share their stories with you. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to their team members who
helped facilitate the interviews, including Ms. Anuja Sharma, Mr. Atit Shah, Ms. Clarissa Gonsalves, Mr. Hitesh Shah,
Ms. Jasmine Nair, Mr. Kanwar Singh, Ms. Megha Rohatgi, Ms. Raveena Tauro, Ms. Sakshi Talwar, Ms. Sargam
Sharma, Ms. Shraboni Fernandes, Mr. Shreshth Bhatt, Ms. Siksha Kapoor, Ms. Trupti Suvarna, and Mr. Vinit Kapahi.

To the entire team of Aditya Birla Capital, Aegon Life Insurance, Aviva India, Bajaj Finance Ltd. (Auto Finance
Division), Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance, DCB Bank Ltd., Edelweiss
Financial Services, Fullerton India, Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co. Ltd., Magma Fincorp Ltd., Mahindra &
Mahindra Financial Services Ltd., Manappuram Finance Ltd., Nippon India Mutual Fund, and SBI Asset
Management - you have not only withstood the test of the pandemic but emerged as leaders in revolutionising
India’s BFSI sector with grit and ingenuity. People will reflect upon them for decades to come. Thank you.

And finally to the teams at Vymo and CAI, who toiled hard and managed many different threads, to make this vision
a tangible reality.

Thank you.
It’s an understatement to say 2020 was unprecedented. The World shut down. People panicked.

Financial Services organisations that were the lifeblood of the economy, though, continued to function unabated. Apart from the minor
inconveniences, credit was available, premiums were paid, new to bank customers grew despite the fact that relationship managers couldn’t
even meet their prospects. How this all happened is a story of grit and ingenuity that people will reflect upon for decades to come.

In this book, it was our privilege to profile 15 Changemakers whose actions helped their organisations turn adversity into strength and
leapfrog into the future. These are leaders, many of whom function at the overlap of Digital, IT, Security/Infrastructure, and Business, and
were tasked with ensuring business continuity at organisations like Aditya Birla Capital, Aegon Life Insurance, Aviva India, Bajaj Finance Ltd.
(Auto Finance Division), Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance, DCB Bank Ltd., Edelweiss Financial Services,
Fullerton India, Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co. Ltd., Magma Fincorp Ltd., Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd., Manappuram
Finance Ltd., Nippon India Mutual Fund, and SBI Asset Management.

Described in the following pages are stories of how these leaders galvanised their teams and prioritised actions from the time of the
lockdown to enable remote operations for the organisation, almost overnight. They also speak of the impact the pandemic will have on their
functions and the business going forward and what it will mean for their teams in the future.
As many said, the often contentious issue of Business and IT alignment collapsed into a single whole in 2020.

Vymo and the CIO Association of India salute these leaders for having transformed not just the industry but also the country in times of this
crisis. We hope you will like reading these stories and insights as much as we enjoyed compiling them through deep-dive conversations with
India’s leading IT Changemakers.

Yours sincerely,

Yamini Bhat,
Co-Founder & CEO, Vymo

Amarinder Singh,
Chief Involvement Officer, CIO Association of India
 Business & IT teams had realigned
their priorities as Business Continuity &
enabling Digital Channels became the
#1 agenda
Alignment between IT & the rest of C-Suite when
it comes to org-wide strategic decisions
BFSI businesses were fairly quick
to roll out remote work infrastructure and
continue critical operations and customer
engagement activities.
Half of the respondents agreed that IT plays
a key role in executive management.

50%
Alignment between IT & the rest of C-Suite when Very tightly aligned:
it comes to org-wide strategic decisions IT is an integral part of
executive management

33.3%
Tightly aligned:
aligned on most
decisions, but have
a roadmap for more
alignment

16.7%
Well-aligned:
some gaps exist but
increasingly getting
more aligned
The primary focus for IT leaders during
the initial phases of the lockdown was
ensuring that core business applications
were securely accessible as employees
started working remotely.
30.4% 30.4%
Access to internal IT Concerns around
systems for remote information access
personnel and security
Top hurdles to moving to remote work

21.8%
Access to physical
infrastructure/devices/
equipment

17.4%
Challenges with
team visibility and
collaboration
For BFSI, being a high
customer-touchpoint business,
remote selling was a first. 81.8%
One of the first priorities for Remote engagement
tools with safe data
empowering sales teams was accessibility

to provide them with

remote customer engagement
solutions, followed by
63.1% 64.6%
productivity boosters & Intelligent
data insights. Deep reporting
and analytics
preemptive next
action suggestions

Enabling remote sales

9.1% 9.1%
Secure Digitized sales
device-independent journeys
applications
 90.9%
Managers knowing when to intervene Data-driven insights on
and coach their teams were priority interventions

considered the main drivers for sales

productivity during the lockdown by
over 90% of respondents.

Empowering sales managers

63.6% 63.6%
and supervisors to drive
WFH productivity

Real-time visibility Empowering

into distributed low-performance

54.5% teams’ activities team members

towards success

Collaboration tools
(meeting notes,
whiteboarding,
approvals, etc.)

9.1%
Customer
engagement tools
Building a strong and secure cloud
infrastructure and advanced data
analytics will continue to remain
technological priorities for IT Leaders
in 2020 and 2021.

Key technologies that organisations are

investing / keen to invest in

81.8% 81.8% 72.7% 63.6%

Cloud infrastructure Data analytics Chatbots and Remote engagement
and solutions conversational (AI) & collaboration

63.6% 54.5% 45.5% 9.1%

Mobility solutions Machine learning Robotic process Others
(ML) & artificial automation (RPA)
intelligence(AI)
When it comes to partnering with the start-up
ecosystem, 81.8% of business
& IT leaders want platforms & solutions that
are scalable & reliable.

While evaluating new-age solution-providers

(as opposed to legacy incumbents), IT
leaders are most concerned about
81.8%
Scalability, reliability,

72.7%
and security

Quality Assurance

63.6% & Support

Product /
Solution Roadmap

9.1%
Assurance of
business continuity
Akshay Dhanak Anjali Malhotra Arpanarghya Saha
Chief Information Officer, Ex. Chief Customer | Marketing | Chief Digital Officer,
Magma Fincorp Ltd. Digital & IT Officer, Aviva India Nippon India Mutual Fund

17 29 37

Ekhlaque Bari Goutam Datta Gururaj Rao

Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information & Digital Officer, VP & CIO,
Fullerton India Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd.

49 59 69
Kirti Patil K. V. Dipu
Joint President - IT & Chief President & Head - Operations & Mukesh Malik
Technology Officer, Customer Service, Bajaj Allianz General Chief Operating Officer,
Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co. Ltd. Insurance Company Aditya Birla Capital

77 91 101
Parag Kulkarni
Nitin Agarwal Chief Information Security Officer, Prasanna Lohar
President & Group CIO, Bajaj Finance Ltd. (Auto Finance Head Technology - Digital | Innovation |
Edelweiss Financial Services Division) Architecture, DCB Bank Ltd.

113 123 133

Puneet Kaur Kohli Rupesh Mehta Subhojit Roy

Former Chief Technology & Information Vice President - IT, SVP & Head - Information Technology,
Officer, Manappuram Finance Limited Aegon Life Insurance SBI Funds Management

145 157 169

Digital
Obligation...
Akshay Dhanak
Chief Information Officer, Magma Fincorp Ltd.

17
Akshay Dhanak
Chief Information Officer
Mr. Akshay Dhanak brings over 23 years of IT Solutions
& Services delivery experience in the BFSI sector. He
has led diverse functions for business transformation,
enterprise architecture, product design & development,
and incubating centres of excellence.

Akshay has been instrumental in driving digital “Digital is an obligation, not one of the
transformations & tech modernisations. He has led
implementations of group-wide CRM for sales & levers for differentiation anymore.”
servicing, Hybrid & Multi-cloud infrastructures to better
align with business performance & imperatives, API
Gateways for FinTech & ecosystem engagement,
Akshay Dhanak
Hyper-personalization & Hyper-localization for risk and
performance initiatives. Chief Information Officer, Magma Fincorp Limited

Before joining Magma Fincorp, he served as the Vice

President of Business Systems & Technology at HDFC
Life Insurance and delivered multiple digital initiatives.

19
What was 2020 like for
the business
Magma is in the 33rd year of retail financing business
with a well-diversified product portfolio covering
Asset-backed finance (Cars, CV, CE, Agri Finance, Used
Assets), SME finance, Affordable Housing Finance, and
General Insurance. The organisation has 69% of its
Customers from rural and semi-urban areas, spanning
21 States.

The focus for FY21 Q1 was on strengthening the

balance sheet through better management of
collections and strengthening controls for operating
expenses. The retail disbursement was reinitiated with
tightened underwriting norms and the engagement
deepened with the existing Customers. The Asset
Under Management (AUM) remained largely flat on
a quarter-on-quarter based on COVID-19 induced
lockdown in various parts of the country. Magma
carried a comfortable liquidity position, offering a
moratorium to the Customers but did not require a
moratorium for any of its borrowings.

FY21 Q2 observed a continued thrust on controlling

operational expenses. There was a gradual pickup in
disbursals of Used Assets and Affordable Housing. The
COVID-19 provisioning was increased to adequately
cover any spike in NCL & NPA ratios in the second half
of the fiscal. The organization sharpened its focus to
improve NIM, RoA and RoE.

20
 What were some of the new
initiatives that were launched?
The transformation journey continued in 2020 with a
strategic focus on delivering significant improvements
in productivity and turnaround time. The analytical
rigour continued to drive a sustained pace of progress
in the quality of the loan book through controls
embedded across the user journeys for sales,
collections, and operations.

The Loan Origination Solutions for Asset Finance,

Housing Finance, and SME Finance lines of business
were modernised to simplify lead-to-disbursement
processes. It was made highly efficient through BYOD
applications, automated workflows, FinTech
ecosystem engagements, and seamless application
of risk & operational controls. The precursory process
reengineering exercise challenged the status-quo,
conceptualised the core tenets of value delivery,
streamlined the controls, and crafted pragmatic &
resilient operating models to engage, enable and
empower user communities for superior Customer
Experience delivery.

21
The sales journey was transformed with real-time
analytics to provide timely and reliable eligibility and
Were sales
loan sanction decisions. The Credit Assessment Engine operations disrupted?
embodied both policy rules and analytical scorecards
based on Magma’s 33 years of retail financing
As the Indian economy went into a complete lockdown
expertise in serving Customers from rural and semi-
towards the end of March 2020 and partial lockdowns,
urban markets. The engine provides straight-through-
the most affected segment was the grassroots. Magma
processing, the economy of scale, and consistency in
serves this grassroots economy that comprises
credit decisions.
new-to-credit customers who had not too long ago
been individuals with relatively low financial and digital
The potential of new-age Channel Partners and
literacy.
FinTechs demand clarity of engagement constructs,
micro-result orientation, flexible pace of evolution, and
2020 served as a crucial period to reshape the
above all, ease of integration with the enterprise.
portfolio by increasing the focus on products and
The Enterprise Integration Portfolio covers a range
customer segments. While the disbursements to the
of loosely coupled platforms and solutions based on
new Customers slowed down, the cross-sell portfolio
Microservices architecture and secured exposure/
continued with its healthy contribution to the revenue.
consumptions of APIs.
SaaS-based CRM solutions empowered the Customer
Service and the Branch Operations teams to effectively
Solutions requiring a high degree of elasticity in
execute cross-sell in collaboration with field sales,
infrastructure capacity were deployed on Cloud. The
systematically and iteratively covering all the four
databases of systems-of-record were consolidated in a
phases of campaign design, segmentation,
unified platform and deployed in a private cloud setup,
execution, and feedback analysis.
while systems-of-engagement and the systems-of-
insight in the public cloud. We employed RPA to deliver
The health and the safety of Employees, Customers
efficiency at scale for banking and
and Partners continue to carry prime importance in all
back-office operations
the initiatives across the process clusters.
The digital capabilities enabling no-touch and low-
touch interactions observed accelerated delivery,
adoption and benefits realisation. E-sign, WhatsApp
for business, Chabot and digital payments saw
considerable spikes in uptake.

22
What were some of your The business process engineering exercise carried
out during the initial phase of transformation and
business priorities during its manifestation in the delivered transaction and
analytical systems covered the major ground of
the crisis? digitisation. The COVID-19 induced need for no-
touch and low-touch sought a critical relook at
At Magma, we took a landmark decision to go deep each Customer-facing user journey. The two cycles
and wide by reaching out to most of our Customers of the moratorium and the subsequent one-time-
who belong mainly to the informal and new-to-credit restructuring saw a significant jump in the volume
segment. We engaged with them to ascertain their and of Customer engagements and changes to loan
their family’s safety and were committed to agreements. The configurability in the systems of
understanding the concerns, the business viability, and record and agility built intrinsically within the delivery
the cash flows of over 300,000 customers. We conduct paradigm for the systems of engagement provided
Voice-of-Customer engagement every quarter out of a necessary thrust and responsiveness by IT to each of
sense of sectorial responsibility. Direct feedbacks were the stakeholder functions, covering products, sales,
captured through BYOD mobile application used by operations, accounts, risk, and Customer service.
over 5000 field officers. Data points such as “60% of
commercial vehicles/construction equipment were With the revenue streams slowing down in the first
deployed for which the load utilisation was nearly half” two quarters, the drive to bring about required control
and “bumper Rabi crop harvest and timely government in operational expenses came into the centre stage.
interventions enabled farmers to improve crop sale/ Budgets were recalibrated, and the action plan was
cash flows” were then processed to derive insights on organised under three broad categories – Cut,
improvements in payment cycles, projected decline in Optimise, and Defer. The key IT Partners lived up to the
moratorium volume, increase in tractor demand, spirit of our partnership and extended the necessary
loading of commercial vehicles across specific routes consideration & support to help realise this objective.
and low beta segments within the The elasticity of the cloud and its direct bearing on the
transportation sector. cost of operations strengthened the alignment with the
business verticals.

23
 How did you manage your
distribution ecosystem?
The distribution ecosystem in the rural and semi-urban
markets carries a huge potential for digital disruption.
The adoption of web and mobile applications covering
the key functionalities such as empanelment through
self-service, lead management, tracking of loan
application status, document uploads, contests, and
payout/incentive reports, is in the early stage, though it
is growing at a modest pace.

Many FinTechs have shown commendable initiative to

bring lenders and borrowers on their easy-to-use
aggregator platforms. The sale of secured loans in rural
markets requires last-mile outreach for critical risk
controls. Yet, the emerging and fast-evolving
aggregator platforms hold the potential to drive digital
inclusiveness for many DSAs, NDSAs, Connectors, and
intermediaries. The emerging standards such as OCEN
are sure to accelerate the much-needed inclusion for
the under-served segments.

COVID-19 has reignited the thread of empowering

Channel Partners with multi-lingual loan origination
and servicing solutions with highly simplified digital
journeys and completely transparent controls.

24
What are some of the business Secondly, these Engines have critical features to
underwrite applicants with no formal job, no formal
tools that your IT teams source of income, new to credit profile and no asset.

have developed? The loan origination efficiencies and the loan servicing
stack of processes are facilitated through APIs from
The enterprise architecture at Magma is robust and established and reliable ecosystem players. The
constantly evolving. The governance rhythm assures underlying controls and performance enablers are
appropriate application of core principles while the derived from the data marts for cross-selling, risk and
underlying solutions, platforms, technologies, and finance. A selective rigour of RPA is applied to bring
tools are paced for systemic changes in tandem with efficiencies in portfolios that evolve at a slow pace and
stakeholders’ strategy. The recent wave of yet, necessitate the operational modality of the swivel-
transformation embodies structured migration from a chair syndrome.
small number of large systems with long shelf-life to a
large number of small systems with short shelf-life. The solutions bearing sharp seasonality of
infrastructure capacity demand, having high variation
The field force was empowered with BYOD mobile in user concurrency, or being subjects of
applications that operate in both online and offline experimentation with operating models / new- age
modes to enable productivity. Several analytical partnerships are deployed in the cloud. This continues
capabilities embedded within the loan origination to deliver great alignment with business in
solutions, such as lead allocation, daily-journey plans, proportionately managing operational expenses of the
eligibility checks, credit assessment, and deviations portfolio.
workflows, collectively contribute to individual
performance and build a sense of achievement. The business systems, the data centre services (the
sum total of public cloud, private cloud, and on-prem),
The business rules platform and the analytical the End-user computing services, the network
scorecards constitute the Credit Assessment Engines services, and the standard infrastructure services are
that deliver straight-through-processing, consistency all protected through best-of-the-breed security
in credit decisions, and economies of scale for loan platforms that collectively ensure confidentiality,
applications processing. integrity, availability, control, and resilience.

25
How do you see AI and Cloud The digital obligation can be fulfilled at scale by
leveraging AI/ML and Cloud to meet the following key
taking shape going forward? Customer expectations with hyper-localisation, hyper-
personalisation, and hyper-responsiveness:
Being easily accessible and available, being relevant at
Both AI/ML and Cloud will see an unprecedented
the point of need, engaged through phygital media &
adoption in India in the coming three years.
language of choice, ready with aggregated-bouquet-of-
Organisations still need to apply common sense when
partner-offerings, and all these at an affordable price.
reading stats in whitepapers, when hearing insights
The B2C, B2B2C, and purpose-built operating models
from their advisory/consulting partners, observing
will demand frequent experimentations, aggressive
peers share success stories in prominent forums and
time-to-market, accelerated feedback, and low cost of
when determining which platforms, technologies,
failure.
and tools are right-fit for the problems they strive
to address. Technology has already become a basic
AI/ML is a viable enabler for accelerating the feedback
necessity for the corporates, competitive leverage for
loop, i.e., processing sentiment, behaviour, transaction,
the mid-sized firms, and budding aspirations for the
operational, and control data points for improving the
small companies to drive growth in revenue and
operating model and process efficiency at a rapid pace.
margin.
Cloud, like a Siamese twin to AI/ML, is a great platform
for IT solution & service marketplaces to develop,
Digital is an obligation, not one of the levers for
interoperable API economy to flourish and squeeze
differentiation anymore. The objective of accelerating
both time-to-market and overheads of
financial inclusion by growing outreach & engagement
managing tech operations.
is attainable through a light-touch regulatory
framework, unconventional partnerships, active
nurturing of our start-up ecosystem, and easy access
to affordable AI/ML and Cloud platforms. The domestic
tech firms are tapping this great opportunity and
actively contributing to inking the India growth story.a

26
Moving on to 2021, what are The elevation of performance baseline for critical
business roles through smart virtual assistants
your priorities going to be? continues to be an area of promising potential and
exploration. Platforms for collecting, organising, and
expeditious analytical processing of a growing base of
COVID-19 pandemic placed a difficult choice for the relevant structured and unstructured data to powering
world – life or livelihood. While everyone is constantly these assistants is an evolving body of work.
striving to strike the right balance between the two,
most have accepted the reality that the work culture, In-line execution and enrichment of an existing set of
ways and means of collaboration, productivity tracking, operational and fraud risk controls is crucial to
and broader team engagement have evolved to the having timely visibility of early warning indicators and
next norm. enforcing critical actions for building a good quality
loan book.
Enhancing the scorecards for credit assessment and
boosting the collection efficiency through machine
learning algorithms is high on the priority list. These
will ingest and process non-traditional data points from
the digital partnerships & surrogates while leveraging
the organisation memory of retail financing.

Digital empowerment and financial literacy won’t

be a drive or a content-flow but serve as a practical
approach to deepening relationships and having
purposeful & fulfilling engagement for our Customers
and Channel partners. Many digital properties
with flexible user journeys, duly complemented by
transparent controls for risk management and security,
will be rolled out.

27
Customers on
one side, tech &
digital on
the other...
Anjali Malhotra Nanda
Ex. Chief Customer, Marketing, Digital & IT Officer
Aviva India

29
Anjali Malhotra
Nanda
Ex. Chief Customer, Marketing,
Digital & IT Officer
Ms. Anjali Malhotra holds almost three decades of “I’m sitting on the confluence of
experience in media, FMCG/Retail, and BFSI sectors,
in diverse roles for Revenue, Marketing, Sales, Digital
marketing, strategy, and customer
Transformation, Customer Experience, Product, on one side, and tech & digital on the
Analytics, and Technology functions. She is a customer other. Straddling both of these helps
evangelist with a proven ability to build business and
marketing strategies in highly competitive markets, bring the arts and sciences together
especially in early-stage businesses. in some form. It’s about nurturing
Her current interest lies in organisational
the empathy factor along with tech
transformation by embracing technology and building enablement.”
culture towards its adoption.

She is a certified Coach and a Certified Independent

Director. She has been recognised by the industry Anjali Malhotra Nanda
as “Cx100” and “Digi 100”, “Top 10 CDO, “Digitalist
Thought Leader, “Marketer of the year- Media & Ex. Chief Customer, Marketing, Digital & IT Officer
Entertainment”, & and “Best use of Technology in Aviva India
Marketing” over the years.

31
How did you go about managing illustrations, OTP based verification of customers and
even video KYC to make it convenient for users. These
so many functions back when initiatives helped run the sales engine.

the lockdown was imposed? Alongside, we ramped up our cybersecurity measures,

including aspects like mandatory password changes,
Operational Changes: One of the key challenges of weekly vulnerability scans, and patch deployments.
the Insurance ecosystem is the reliance on in-person
meetings for the last mile customer connect in order There has been a marked increase in usage of the
for sales to mature. In addition, Indian consumers rank customer self-serve portal - not just in terms of
low on financial literacy, and that makes it tougher to registrations but the volume of transactions that
“purchase” highly jargonised and sometimes complex happen, such as renewals, find swaps, etc., 80% of
insurance plans. During the covid period, our priority incoming payments were now digitised.”
was to enable that sales chain digitally while keeping
it simple for customers & agents to understand and
consume.

In addition, the entire workforce had to be enabled to

working remotely to ensure business continuity. since
the ecosystem was not fully equipped with an intent of
100% work force to be fully functional remotely,
a large part of the initial effort went into deploying
devices and setting up VPN’s and VDIs
(Virtual Desktop Interface).

Digital initiatives: One of the biggest transitions for us

was embracing the end-to-end digital sales processes
using our mobile sales tool. Adoption numbers went
from 35% to 97% in a matter of days. The application
was further strengthened with many additional
features to enable a completely paperless process.
These included integration of policy features & benefit

32
What were some of the Aviva has launched this service for its customers
online, free of cost, with an aim to encourage everyone
new customer engagement to create their will with ease. By promoting fi nancial
independence and literacy for customers of all ages,
initiatives introduced in 2020? this service will help customers create a will for
their assets in just 3 simple steps - just a 15-minute
Aviva Kidoscope – Discover and Nurture Your Child’s process.
Real Interest: We all have big dreams for kids, but at
the same time, it’s important to recognise that every 30 min Claim Settlement Service: A Claim is the
child is unique with their own ambitions, desires, and real moment of truth for customers - they face dire
goals. Early childhood education is not just about situations & they need instant help. This too needed
schooling; it’s about exploration and learning and to be delivered remotely. A digital interface for claims
observations that play an important role in meeting the was set up along with industry-leading processes for
developmental needs of young wizards. fast-track claim processing to deliver a settlement
decision and fast track disbursement of funds up to a
We launched Aviva Kidoscope, a first of its kind digital certain limit.
platform that helps parents identify & nurture a child’s
unique aptitude & talent at an early age. This initiative
was aimed to help parents choose a career best suited
to the child’s passion and interest, in addition to
enabling a financial plan for its fulfilment. The usage of
these engagement tools has increased drastically
post- COVID-19

Aviva Will Writing Service: It’s difficult to build a

legacy, easy to pass it on. People put off writing a will
because they find it a costly and tedious affair. With
Aviva’s Will Writing Service, customers can create their
own personalised will and ensure peace of mind for
themselves and their loved ones.

33
Did you partner with the Likewise, enhancing the use of AI-led bots, not just for
the lead funnel but also for service skills and unique
ecosystem or build any new innovations around video bots are also on the anvil.

in-house tools?
It was a mix of both. Suffice to say, COVID-19 has
accelerated the pace of digital transformation and
adoption for most organisations.

The reason some tools work better as completely

indigenous is that they can deliver a customised
experience for the specific business case. The truth for
the insurance business is that Simplicity is the name of
the game in order to aid the adoption of the category
itself.

Many indigenous tools that were built earlier gained

substantial traction during the pandemic – people just
adopted them out of compulsion to start but soon
realised the ease and benefits of using them. Now, the
change is here to stay.

There are also a number of new initiatives that are in

the pipeline as we continue to scout the market and
partner with providers that can assist in delivering
business KPIs more effectively. As an example, for the
frontline personnel, we are in the process of creating
an engagement tool using which the productivity of
the last mile can be strengthened through bite-sized
content on steps that need to be taken on a
day-to-day basis.

34
What are some of the initiatives
you have planned for the
coming year?

The future is more digital, more data, more analytics,

& more AI.

Engaging with the entire CXO suite and having every

function head work with you closely to create their
own specific roadmaps - it cannot just be one function
leading the digital and tech game.

How do you become a paperless organisation? We

were forced to become one during COVID-19, and we
survived. We’re looking at processes that don’t require
paperback and automating as much as we can.

We plan to build a strong Application Programming

Interface (API) platform, so we can plug and play,
quickly integrate with newer partners, and provide
solutions - tech and digital upgrades.

35
Feet on the
street became
fingers on
the screen...
Arpanarghya Saha
Chief Digital Officer, Nippon India Mutual Fund

37
Arpanarghya
Saha
Chief Digital Officer
With 20 years of experience, Mr. Arpanaghya
Saha’s expertise lies in the Digital Business and
Transformation mandates in Financial Services &
e-Commerce start-ups. “Feet on the street became fingers
on the screen. We wanted to enable
Arpan has initiated multiple projects within Nippon
India MF to deliver best-in-class innovative digital our salesforce with the easiest, lucid
practices while providing a frictionless experience applications where consumers can
for customers. He is also responsible for developing
deeper integrations & stronger alliances with digital
be served effortlessly - this is what
distribution partners to drive greater penetration and really worked out for us. A phygital
digital inclusion across real Bharat. experience is the way forward!”
Prior to joining Nippon India Mutual Fund, Arpan
worked with the E-Commerce Unicorn Snapdeal and Arpanarghya Saha
was spearheading their Go-To-Market Strategy &
Chief Digital Officer, Nippon India Mutual Fund
Digital Transformation.

39
What were some of the With the philosophy of building our Digital presence in
line with the preference of our investors, we extended
immediate challenges that were our Digital footprint to WhatsApp, the largest social
addressed when the lockdown chat application, and created a new Digital Channel
for the masses to provide a full-spectrum capability
was imposed in March-April? with a best-in-class transaction experience. We also
commissioned a full spectrum Digital asset for the
Institutional Business segment which gave us the
We focused on trying to pin a nail on where the current capability to run Digital campaigns, generate leads,
consumer mindset lies, the evolution stages of their drive conversions, as well as onboarding, transactions,
needs, and how we should be servicing them. and servicing.
Some customers still prefer to visit the branch for an We strengthened our focus on Conversational
in-person experience. We worked on migrating them to Commerce, our new age voice-based interface, to
offer a pure and seamless phygital experience, and we promote a touch-free transactional experience. This
were pretty successful. solution, developed in partnership with Google and
the first of its kind in the Indian BFSI industry and
As a first for the organisation, we rolled out many New across APAC, has paved the way for increased market
Fund Offers purely through Digital channels since our penetration of mutual fund products and enabled our
branch and physical distribution infrastructure was business to ride the next wave of digital adoption.
shut due to nationwide lockdown.

40
 Along with getting in steady numbers through our
Digital assets, we also nimble-footedly built many new
features, integrations, and enhancements and
introduced many intelligent interventions across
various customer journeys with the objective of
creating a positive business impact.

We developed DIY, system-driven nudges like SIP

Pause (for investors requesting SIP cancellation)
or Switch to Liquid Fund (for redeemers) to guide
investors to make informed and prudent choices &
prevent panic cancellations and redemptions.

We also integrated Unified Payments Interface (UPI)

as a payment option across all our assets to bring in
more choice, convenience, and better user experience
and developed the Smart Payment Retry feature for
investors who encounter payment-related errors or
failures during online purchase to prevent potential
drop-offs during transactions.

We introduced online purchase for a new investor

segment – Hindu Undivided Family & Sole
Proprietorship – to bring in newer business
opportunities digitally and addressing the investment
needs of a strong segment that could have been left
under-served due to COVID-19.

41
How did you enable your Initiatives: We built & upgraded an application called
Business Easy 2.0 for our sales teams and distribution
Frontline workforce to respond personnel. Here all the customer history, information,
interaction, and engagement details are accessible
to the challenges and needs of on a mobile device in real-time. The sales personnel
the customers? can trigger one-to-one product suggestions and one-
to-many campaigns to investors via email or SMS.
Such triggers have all relevant investor details pre-
Challenges: The concern of our salesforce was how embedded, and all that the investors have to do is
they should be reaching out to their leads, and how confirm and authorise, hence delivering a one-click
they would cater, and can they help advise and guide investment experience.
the customers with the right products.
On the service front, we have embedded a fully self-
The biggest challenge was automating the customer serve environment on our Investor App and Website.
experience, journeys, and touch-points virtually This service bouquet helps investors explore our
(Phone, SMS, WhatsApp). Also, in making the whole products and also undertake many servicing related
user experience frictionless, seamless, intuitive, tasks like downloading statements, altering/modifying
and reliable. their plans, and placing service requests which get
taken forward in real-time by the sales or customer
service teams.

Response: With us automating a major chunk of the

processes and engagement, customers are extremely
satisfied that they have access to all that they need at
their fingertips through their mobile devices,
in real-time.

42
What is your strategy
for data analytics for
customer engagement?
The mix lies in business intelligence & machine
learning. We’ve always had our own data pool, now
we’re looking at smart data identifi cation measures
& data intelligence to create powerful digital
experiences. By enabling real-time data access and
enabling on-the-fly data assimilation, we also are
learning how to give customers the best
recommendations across their choice
of digital platforms.

43
How many of the systems built
were internally developed vs
integrating with a third-party
provider?
The priority was ensuring that the business and
revenue levels don’t drastically fall while fortifying
business continuity. Next, leaving customers hanging
clueless is never an option. We made sure that
customer service & engagement were tracked and
maintained.

In terms of integration, we had to integrate with a few

tools and systems - more of a hybrid model. We bought
and developed systems to make the sales-
force/distributors and customer experience frictionless
through Chatbots, AI, etc.

Third-party collaborations allowed us to further

understand the behaviour of our investors and develop
stronger customer propensity models; reaching out to
them with pre-filled forms electronically helped with a
high success rate on the engagement front.

44
What does your alignment The new customer base: New customers who are
predominantly millennials believe in taking matters
between Business and IT into their own hands, and for them, everything is “do it
yourself”. . It is no more a B2C or a B2B; it is more of
look like? an integrated commerce methodology where we
engage with customers across a myriad of touch-
Understanding the role of IT: IT is a huge support points across the digital landscape. Each interaction
system in ensuring that a particular branch gets fueled. adds incremental value in helping them arrive at a
In terms of business strategy and digital penetration, suitable investment option and finally investing in it.
80% of our transactions happen in a zero-touch mode.
Business is automatically aligned as workflows, and For folks who are new to mutual funds and for those
tech is aligned as a mode of driving business. who have been in the ecosystem for a while now - AI-
enabled services will rule various components of the
In the Mutual Fund Industry, Nippon India Mutual Fund diverse ecosystem. Building this infrastructure along
has the highest percentage of digital contribution in the with intelligent algorithms are already something we’ve
overall business mix. We’re at a penetration percentage started doing in-house.
where 55%+ of our sales happen digitally – either on
our proprietary assets or through integrations with While on the other hand, we have the new &
various strategic Digital distribution partners. millennials for whom everything is “do it yourself”.

45
How do you see things
evolve in 2021?
Tech is available in the market - what we need is to
drive the adoption of this tech. Customers would not
want or like to meet physically for the next two years,
at least (the fear of COVID-19).

One major thing is how we want to increase our

adoption levels. The second is definitely how we want
to use AI to serve customers in an automated
fashion. Thirdly, we want to make the best use of cloud
infrastructure.

Feet on street teams now have to become fingers on

screens. Partners and agents can keep collections
intact by enabling customers to adopt platforms like
ours - a full-service suite.

There is going to be a definite dip in real-world

interactions and, therefore, a decline in the need for
physical infrastructure and a steep rise in cloud
investments, digital infrastructure, and cybersecurity -
making firms more agile and nimble-footed. More
importantly, it’s about gaining customer trust,
providing valuable & frictionless experiences, and
ensuring their comfort levels on the engagement front
are catered to.

46
We at NIMF have clearly established ourselves as a We are excited at the opportunity presented by the
Digital leader in the Indian Financial landscape, yet infiltration of vernacular in the Digital space. We are
there is a lot more to be accomplished, and hence building a scalable technology solution across all our
we always remain in perpetual beta. Reshaped by assets that will provide multi-lingual capability in both
the COVID-19 pandemic, the trends observed in the text and voice avatars. This will help us engage and
country’s financial landscape, and in the way our convert new investors from the masses of real Bharat
business is panning out, we firmly believe that Digital by conversing with them in a language they are most
is going to be the preferred medium of choice for the comfortable with.
Indian consumer going forward.
Our three big bets for Digital Bharat would be: ‘Intelli-assets’ – AI, ML & IOT

Beyond barriers: Conversational Commerce 2.0 The third dimension that will fuel our growth is
the embedding of Artificial Intelligence & Machine
We believe that voice is going to usher in the next Learning in our apps and assets to not just enhance
wave of digital adoption and engagement. We are experience but to redefine it. We want our Digital
now looking at voice-based digital technology as our assets to become astute and intelligent so as to give
preferred medium to give people the opportunity to our investors accurate recommendations, suggestions
create wealth and achieve financial prosperity as voice and nudges on-the-fly to aid them in making quicker,
technology has the power to break down the barriers smarter and well-informed decisions on how and
that make people hesitate to visit websites and where to invest their money.
download apps

For the masses: Vernacular Framework

The advent of smartphones with vernacular

capabilities has started redefining India’s internet.
Millions across India are now opting for a language of
their choice on their smartphones, and new users
are now opting to access the internet in their
regional languages.
The tremendous
fillip
Ekhlaque Bari
Chief Technology Officer, Fullerton India

49
Ekhlaque Bari
Chief Technology Officer
Mr. Ekhlaque Bari has over 22 years of experience, “The Digital way of building
working in senior leadership roles both in India and relationships was given a tremendous
abroad. He has played a crucial role in Fullerton India’s
evolution as a digital-first organisation, implementing fillip during the pandemic when
the latest technologies to drive revenue, reduce cost, customers couldn’t visit branches, and
and improve customer experience.
sales reps couldn’t visit customers’
Before joining Fullerton India, he was associated with homes. As a credit lending firm, our
leading companies like GE, HT Media as group CIO endeavour was not only to transform
and, more recently, with Max Life Insurance as EVP &
Head IT. our digital capabilities rapidly but
create an experience where even
Mr. Bari is known for his digital transformation
expertise, design thinking, UX, core applications, and
though the process was seamless and
ERP. His keen understanding of how technologies touchless, a sense of community built
interact with human behaviour has enabled him to over years of trust was the underlying
drive transformational mandates, delivering tangible
business outcomes as a consequence. emotion.”

Ekhlaque Bari
Chief Technology Officer, Fullerton India

51
What steps did you take to When we resumed our sales efforts from July 2020,
we started at just 10-20% levels of pre-COVID-19
ensure that business was not numbers. Collections would determine how much the
lockdown truly impacted us. But what we did learn was
impacted during the pandemic? that there were three permanent shifts -

Initial reaction: March is the busiest month of the • The need for office real estate reduced drastically
year for us from a sales perspective, and last year was as we moved to a secure WFH culture
no different. While we were aware of China’s rapidly
developing situation, I guess we were all in a state of • While the number of meetings with customers went
denial, hoping that we wouldn’t be affected. However, down, the number of digital contact touch points
things completely changed when the lockdown was increased manifold
first announced. What transpired next was a period of
tremendous uncertainty for everyone – both personal • COVID-19 has been a catalyst for digital
and professional. transformation

Change in priorities: The biggest priority for us was Everyone is talking about how the pandemic ushered in
to not just facilitate a remote workforce but to equip a new normal for digital transformation. But the things
them with all the necessary tools to work comfortably that built the new normal - reduced branch visits,
from the safety of their homes. A huge effort went increased website activity, were already happening,
into ensuring the mental and physical wellbeing of albeit at a slower pace. COVID-19 gave a turbo
the entire workforce as we gradually started driving charged boost to digital adoption. Smart Technologies
our sales efforts again. One of the biggest inferences like video-KYC, OCR, WhatsApp, and so on have seen
we made was the critical need to have a secure IT tremendous adoption in this pandemic.
infrastructure and ensure that our customer and
employee data wasn’t compromised. We worked to Data Monetisation: Leveraging data analytics came
ensure exactly that. As a lending company, portfolio to the forefront because it became difficult to acquire
protection is vital, with our revenue depending upon new customers. Whether it is protecting your portfolio,
our customer base. If the customers are impacted, we minimising losses, launching products, or scaling a
would be impacted as well. So a lot of effort went into business, you need to leverage analytics to segment
maintaining the sanctity of our portfolio. your customers in a way that maximises profit
potential.

52
How did you enable your
workforce to work from home?

Operational: We equipped the entire workforce with

laptops and increased our VPN bandwidth, which
was authenticated with additional security layers. We
also introduced Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDIs) for
people logging in via their personal devices.

Customer Servicing: We developed an automated

voice bot to call customers and remind them about
upcoming payments. The VDIs also had a dialer
integration system so that customer-facing teams
could securely receive or make calls to customers.

53
 How do you decide what
Do you think there is a better technology to build in-house
alignment today between and what to acquire from
business & IT leaders because the ecosystem?
of COVID-19?
A big concern for business and IT leaders is the
India was going through a much-needed Digital dominance of Big tech software providers. Considering
transformation before the pandemic anyway. I don’t the economic challenges that were stacked against
think there were any detractors - people were either us, we asked some of our vendors to give us some
indifferent or supportive. However, with the pandemic, leeway on the annual costs. But none of the big
promoters have strengthened their resolve towards companies budged, only the start-ups & other small
relying on tech-based solutions. People who were companies understood the situation. So the question
earlier indifferent now see technological integration as really is – Should you be at the mercy of large software
an indispensable part of their organisation. companies or look to build your own organic systems?
I guess there needs to be a balance between the two.
The adoption of our internal sales app increased 10x
since the pandemic set in. I don’t think the pandemic We want to build tech in-house. But at the same time,
has fully aligned IT & business leaders, but it has we have to be cognizant of the fact that we are not a
definitely made digital tools a part of every business tech or a software company. Building tools in-house
leader’s lives. needs a high level of product understanding and
engineering, which is not our focus as a lending
company.

54
Like websites & portals, we mostly developed systems
of engagement in-house, whereas systems of records,
we mostly purchased. Our core loan origination system
is also built in-house.

When it comes to cloud solutions, we need to decide if

we want to go for cloud-captive applications or cloud-
agnostic applications. We lean on the latter side.

Divorcibility: One also needs to consider the total

cost of ownership (cost, effort) of the platforms in the
future. Let’s say you want to migrate from one
visualisation tool to another. It is some effort, but you
don’t have to rebuild everything from scratch. In this
case, divorcibility is high. But say you want to change
or upgrade from one infrastructure provider to another,
divorcibility is very low. It’s not easy to migrate.

55
 What were some new initiatives
on data analytics?
Ability vs. Willingness: We continue to build and
streamline algorithms that help us identify customers
based on their ability or willingness to pay. As the
moratorium period lapsed, we saw that many of
our customers were unable to repay. We tried to be
empathetic towards customers who lost the ability to
pay but developed different strategies for customers
who lost the willingness to pay. We developed
algorithms that helped us with that. Accordingly, we
also provided relaxations and tightened collections.

As we enter 2021, what is going

to be your top priority?
Digital adoption: It is considered that urban
customers are more digitally savvy than rural
customers. But it is not as true as one may think it to
be. In tier II & III towns and villages, many people
use WhatsApp & Tiktok. These are also technology
platforms. So why would they use these platforms
and not your mobile applications? Because it is not
as easy to use. We need to make engagement within
applications as simple and intuitive as possible.

56
What used
to be ...
Goutam Datta
Chief Information & Digital Officer
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance

59
Goutam Datta
Chief Information & Digital Officer
 “The pandemic has only been a
catalyst in enhancing our Tech service
delivery on a much larger scale
and building resilience across the
Mr. Goutam Datta joined Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance
in November 2018 as the Chief Information & Digital
value chain in these unprecedented
Officer. He brings with him over two decades of times. We continuously innovate
experience in IT, where he successfully spearheaded using technology to provide more
large-scale technology operations and implemented
innovative technology projects. A proven strategic convenience and ease to our
leader and an astute believer in the ‘one team’ model, customers through our digital
Goutam is known for leading teams to achieve desired
business results collectively.
touch-points and increase customer
stickiness through safe and
Prior to joining Bajaj Allianz Life, Goutam led the digital contactless digital offerings. Our focus
innovation team at ICICI Lombard General Insurance
Company, where he enabled processes and systems is to be agile and future-ready to
for smoother customer onboarding and experience. meet the expectations of the evolving
business environment and the evolved
customer. ”

Goutam Datta
Chief Information & Digital Officer
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance

61
With the onset of COVID-19,
what has changed on the
Customer Experience, User
Enablement, and Partner
Enablement front?
The one major transformation, in my view, has been
the adoption of digital modes. There have been
notable changes in the adoption of technology not
just by organisations but also by customers, insurance
consultants, employees, and partners as well and I
believe this trend is here to stay.

Business Continuity: In March, all our

implementations for Business Continuity Planning
(BCP) and Virtual Control Program Interface (VCP)
were customised for a seamless transition for a
remote working environment. We enabled all critical
functions of the company to be able to WFH, including
the call-centres, while ensuring data security for the
organisation, cloud integration for partners, and safe
digital touch-points for customers. This enabled us to
continue to support our customers and enable them to
be on track with meeting their life goals, even remotely.

62
Capitalizing on our existing digital infrastructure: It is a first-of-its-kind co-browsing service in the
We have a robust tech setup that enhances industry. This revolutionary service helps our sales
efficiencies across the value chain and ensures force and customer connect virtually for real-time
customers’ convenience at the same time. assistance to continue their life goals journey while
We’ve been able to smoothen the tech, digital following social distancing protocol. We’ve seen good
transformation, and IT enablement for our agents adoption by our sales managers and our partners on
and customers by further strengthening our core this platform.
systems and bringing in multiple safe and smart
tech interventions to enable customer onboarding, Onboarding partner ecosystems in the tech stack
engagement, and servicing digitally. Our focus have also been turned in the digital direction.
is on integrating and enhancing our core system
through service partners and moving to Cloud to take Overall I must say that our teams are incredibly
advantage of scalability and elasticity. hyperactive and in-line with the initiatives that
need to be taken in real-time. We have internal and
Cloud-based applications: Cloud has been crucial external experts handling risk functions, setting
for flexibility through the pandemic. It helped us to a up policies, and ensuring that every change and
great extent in streamlining work-from-home set- up, alteration is verified.
ramping up firewalls and security, and providing
safe access to employees and partners to our overall
digital ecosystem. We provisioned secure virtual
desktops and new systems and 4G dongles with
security measures to our employees and sales teams.

Our Sales teams and partners were empowered to

carry out their daily functions digitally even before
COVID-19. In the current pandemic environment, we
focused deeper on ensuring smooth deliverance of
contactless services and interactions with customers;
hence we launched Smart Assist.

63
What were some of the new
initiatives your team rolled out
in 2020?
We continuously focus on providing smart digital The most recent launch in our digital initiatives that
services relevant to the evolving business environment focus on providing customer delight is i-SERV on
and customer needs. We introduced the WhatsApp WhatsApp. i-SERV, another revolutionary service
service in Feb 2020, which is backed by an AI-enabled in the industry, is a video-calling customer service
bot as well as human support at the back-end. A total designed to enhance customer experience and provide
of 5.86 lac transactions happened in the first eight swift resolutions to their queries digitally. This service
months of launch. We recently also extended our has now been made available to customers
Whatsapp Bot for our sales teams enabling them to on WhatsApp to provide them ease and convenience
provide customer query resolution and an overview of amidst the pandemic. Earlier, the service was available
their performance and business. The response to this to customers across 125 Bajaj Allianz Life branches
bot has also been overwhelming. In just one month of in 112 cities and on our Life-Assist mobile app and
its launch, over 7,000 sessions were conducted by the portal. With i-SERV, customers can carry out financial
sales team. transactions like paying renewal premiums, update
+ customise payment styles, get information related
Furthermore, in August 2020, we launched a first- to their policy such as premium amount, due date,
of-its-kind revolutionary technology service in the duration of the policy, etc. Customers can also update
insurance industry, ‘Smart Assist’. The service enables personal details such as contact number, email ID,
customers to connect with the Company through a PAN, bank account details, name correction, and
secure screen sharing feature and avail real-time nominee change. Additionally, the service is available
assistance on their insurance needs. Through Smart in 11 languages.
Assist, customers, especially first-time digital users,
can conduct virtual interactions with the Company.
Smart Assist is also seeing a very positive up-tick
across our sales force, partners, and customers. Within
a month of its launch, we have seen over 24,000
sessions by 4,600 unique users transacting
on Smart Assist.
64
How did you enable your agents We also launched WhatsApp Bot for our Insurance
Consultants to enable them to engage with customers
to support your customers? in real-time, address customer queries, and view their
business performance, earnings, and rewards. Within
one month of its launch, more than 1500 ICs have
Life insurance has traditionally been sold through face- used this bot in over 7,000 plus sessions. While we are
to-face meetings by agents. These meetings went focusing on introducing digital sales enablement tools
virtual when COVID hit. However, for the final sale and for our teams, we are also imparting regular training to
onboarding process, a meeting was essential, but there ensure they’re on top of these tools to sell and service
were restrictions on physical meetings. Hence we customers.
launched Smart Assist, a first-of-its-kind safe co-
browsing service launched in the industry. Through We have also seen customers increasingly use our
Smart Assist, our sales representative can sit in his/her digital channels for their policy servicing requirements
home and engage with the customer, who is also sitting as social distancing became the norm. At the same
in his/her home, explaining to them every step in the time, we are also ensuring that our digital access
purchase journey. The innovative tech-enabled service points are being enhanced and upgraded regularly.
moved face to face meetings to screen-to-screen The transactions on our self-servicing portal increased
meetings, providing a safe, contactless, yet by 86% in H1FY21 over last year, and our call-centres
personalised experience to customers. The co- have seen a 60% increase in call traffic. Self-servicing
browsing facility brings transparency throughout the by customers on Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
sales process, thus helps in building confidence in the Systems has also increased post-COVID for several
customers. Since its launch, we have received a policy-related services. These tech-led strategies have
massive response to Smart Assist. There have been enabled us to stay committed to our customers’ life
over 58,000 sessions by more than 6,000 unique users goals safely and smartly.
transacting on it.

65
How have you reached out to
and service customers who
aren’t tech-savvy or who don’t
have access to user computing
or smartphones?

The pandemic has encouraged most customers to

move to digital avenues in the absence of physical
meetings. This has resulted in many first-timers,
primarily senior citizens use our digital assets for
various policy-related services. Further, the digital
interventions launched by us are very simple and easy-
to-use. For instance, to simplify the annuity pension
claim process for senior citizens, we have enabled
a digital life certificate process wherein pensioners
can submit their Certificate of Existence (COE) via
i-Serv video calling facility available on the Life Assist
customer portal, app, and on WhatsApp. All they
need to do is come on the video and submit their Life
certificate digitally, rather than visiting our branches
during the pandemic. We also understand that some
customers still prefer F2F (face-to-face) interactions.
In such cases, we do facilitate in-person meetings with
safety guidelines in place.

66
What would branch in the coming
future look like?

The COVID-19 effect: We’ve decided to remodel our

distribution network and introduce the concept of
‘shoppes.’ Under ‘shoppes,’ our branches will be
replaced by ‘Digi Serv’ infrastructure model, which is
essentially smaller sized outlets (say about 400 sq ft)
that will offer digital services through digital touch-points
to customers.

Closing Remarks: This is a year of tech platforms. While

Tech is interestingly fun, it can also put you in a silo.
Hence we must not lose sight of having a human touch
and building trust with customers at the same time. If we
place the customer at the centre of things, we can cross
this bridge by designing tech interventions that enhance
customer needs and experience.

67
 The
lockdown wasn’t a
big issue...
Gururaj Rao
VP & CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Limited

69
Gururaj Rao
VP & CIO
Mr. Gururaj Rao is an MMS from Jamnalal Bajaj “From an operational standpoint, the
Institute and an Engineering Graduate from Mumbai lockdown wasn’t a big issue. On the
University, with two decades of BFSI experience. He
joined Mahindra Finance in 2011 as the CIO. Prior to business front, our focus was on rural
joining Mahindra Finance, he served as the Head of strategy; we have a large branch-
Technology Management with ICICI for 9 years and
with Birla Sun Life Insurance for 7 years.
employee force in these areas, close
to 20,000 employees on-field. And as
In addition to Technology roles, he has handled an organisation, we’re used to
business roles in both, Banking and Life Insurance.
He was instrumental in getting the first private sector working remotely.”
insurance license in India and in setting up the first
Bancassurance operations team in the country.
Gururaj Rao
VP & CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial
Services Limited

71
 How did you manage remotely
engaging with your customers
& workforce, especially with a
Large Distributor Network?

Being omnipresent: Our distributor network is present

in almost every district of the country - more than
1100 of our branches have been fully functional
& operational since June. The idea is that remote
working didn’t take as much of a toll on the operational
front as expected.

Collections: More than 60% of our collections come

from cash transactions, which is where employees
need to be on-field to interact with customers on a
regular basis, and physically be present to
nurture engagements.

The goal is to still stay in touch with customers,

understand their ability to repay, and understand the
winning behaviours of our employees and how best
they can cater to the customers’ needs, especially
during a pandemic.

72
How were you able to translate
some of the data insights into
operational strategies?

Collections: Customers primarily repay in cash. It is

essential that employees and managers maintain a
close relationship tracking customer activities and
sentiments to understand when the cash flow comes
in. Building trust is key, whether it’s on the employee or
customer front. The focus also lies on local operations
and localised decision making; understanding what’s
happening on a micro-level gives leverage to strategise
macro-level and global strategies.

Technology: There is a lot of intelligence we can get

from field-level data, which can be used for route
mapping, allocating cases optimally to the best-fit
employee, and driving productivity. Transactions
happen on the devices used by the agents with the
required security and privacy measures for both
customers and the frontline. For customers, we’ve
strengthened our digital payment platforms, which has
now become about 25% of our current transactions.

Another notable development that has helped us

weather the pandemic is our complete on-cloud HRMS
distribution system. Moreover, our consumer durable
platform, along with the new core lending platform, are
hosted on the cloud.

73
Retail Lending has gone down in
the past 6-7 months. How have
things shaped for Mahindra
Financial Services Limited?

Rural Lending: Overall, at a macro level, rural

economies perform better than the urban economy.
Based on the YoY analysis, we’re sub-par to where we
were last year. On the brighter side, the Agri-Income
didn’t get too affected - rains were good, leading to a
decent harvest season. The major challenge was the
non-agri section of the rural income.

Automobile lending: One of the biggest concerns

today is what if people don’t want to invest in
Automobiles? So, on the automobile front, we work
with a few SME’s - the sector itself came to a complete
standstill. In April - May, the sales were between
0-1%. Even today, there are constraints in terms of
Supply and Demand. Companies such as Ola & Uber
are have also brought around one of the biggest
disruptions in the business. Customers are gradually
not buying their own vehicles anymore.

74
How do you plan on improving What is your focus for the
work productivity? coming year?

We’re empowering partners and the field force agents • We want to become ‘cloud-first’ in our strategy and
by enhancing mobility solutions to make processes also, streamline our cloud hosting.
more efficient and seamless. The solutions primarily
focus on sales & collections.
• Enable DIY culture to a certain extent where we
While we’re shifting on improving functionalities eliminate the management of devices for ourselves.
for a remote work environment, enhancing mobility
solutions for offline field forces and customers
is the priority. • Enhancing customer experience by adding
functionalities for our frontline and the customers
with mobility solutions.

75
Drawing a
balance
Kirti Patil
Joint President - IT & Chief Technology
Officer
Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co. Ltd.

77
 Kirti Patil
Joint President - IT & Chief Technology Officer
Ms. Kirti Patil is the Joint President - IT & CTO at
Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co. Ltd. (Kotak Life).
Having joined in 2003, she has been instrumental
in giving Kotak Life’s tech strategy a cutting edge by
“One thing is for sure that branch visits
implementing several transformational initiatives, are not going to stop; however, we’re
including mobile-based selling, video-based customer drawing a balance between digital and
calling, OCR/ICR-based BPM, RPA, BOTs, etc., to
improve customer experience. physical touch-points for assisted or
intermediary led businesses.“
Driven to build excellence through tech, Kirti has been
an early adopter of several technologies like data
centre virtualisation, hyper-converged infrastructure,
flash storage, data reduction technologies, and block-
Kirti Patil
level replication, to name a few. Joint President - IT & Chief Technology Officer
Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co. Ltd.
With over two decades of experience spanning the
manufacturing and BFSI sector, Kirti has won several
industry accolades for her initiatives.

79
What was the first set of
challenges that you tackled as
the pandemic hit?

Identifying the core problem: We have first to

understand that critical checkpoints between a
prospect agent or prospect customer mostly happened
in person. Even though we had invested in tech
solutions for over two-three years now, they were not
built for a completely virtual working model. It was
challenging to reach out to customers or prospects.

Enabling a smooth transition to WFH: Luckily for us,

we already had a BCP set, which was always flexible
from a WFH standpoint. As priorities for our
employees, agents, and customers changed overnight;
we immediately identified all critical stakeholders and
ensured they were provided with the required tech to
continue daily operations and activities.

80
Secure technologies
Secure such such
technologies as VDI
as&VDI
VPN& access across
VPN access acr
locations were already in place to continue on-going
customer engagements and provide channels for our
customers and prospects to reach out to us. Most
aspects of these technologies were already tried a
tested internally. But to ensure a smooth large-scale
transition, our crisis management committee would
meet twice a day to handle situations that needed
immediate fixing and bridged any technological and
operational gaps.

Sales Activity Management: We implemented a CRM

system to improve our sales force productivity and
manage customer servicing a few years back. But
during such a time, the benefits of a cloud-based
platform became a necessity as we transitioned to
WFH. We pushed sales and customer service teams to
take advantage of the platform in managing their day-
to-day activities - pushing leads to reps, scheduling
customer calls and meetings, keeping track of key
metrics, etc. Despite being in a remote environment,
we had complete visibility into how our agents were
coping up as everyone transitioned to a new working
environment.

81
How did you enable your teams
to work remotely?
Mobility: Mobile and API have been our focus and
philosophy for some time now. All the tech
development and software were mobile-ready and
responsive. So, from a sales perspective, mobility
wasn’t much of a challenge.

However, in the back-office, there was still a large

scope of developing mobile solutions for the back-
office - mobility solutions for call-centre agents; for
example: while DoT relaxed regulatory guidelines, none
of the solutions in the market were built to support
WFH. The number of calls we were receiving was also
increasing during the period as customers realised the
need for insurance products. So, not being mobile-
ready in this space was a challenge.

With 1 lakh + advisor base & 7000+ employees, we

conducted regular sessions to gauge WFH pulse and
ensure that agents and employees are informed about
the latest regulations & Information & Cybersecurity.

82
Did you need to rework your
distribution strategy?
Third-party distribution: We mitigated the remote
work challenges fairly well in TPD as we were ready
with APIs & cloud technologies. We were able to move
group businesses quickly due to a digital-first approach
to working.

Digital Distributors: We onboarded more digital

distributors during the first two quarters of FY21 than
we did in the past two fiscal years.

Agency: The pandemic most impacted the agency

channel. New businesses in the past have been coming
in through new agents, and now that licensing of new
agents was at a standstill, existing advisors were
expected to sell more. We had to spend some time
understanding how best we could empower our agents
to close more deals while WFH.

83
Doubling down on cross-sell: We had a cross-sell
model in place wherein we matched our existing
customers to best-suited offers. But during the
pandemic, the influx of new leads did see a drop.
Analytics started playing an increasingly important role
as cross-selling to customers became critical.

‘Selfie with customer’: We believe that the person

in regular touch with the customer plays the first
underwriter’s role - be it a bank RM or an agent. You
truly know whether a customer is healthy or not when
you meet them. But since this connection was not
happening physically, we got into remote verification.
When agents met their clients, they were asked to
click a selfie with the customer and share it with the
underwriting team. This gave the underwriting team a
certain level of comfort that the customer is real.

Ecosystem Integration: We have API integrations with

IIB (Insurance Information Bureau) that manages all
insurance customer data. Through it, we were able to
conduct various checks on prospects such as existing
insurance policies, any prior claim rejections, and so
on, which helped expedite underwriting processes.

84
Do you think business & IT Data analytics: Analytics was identified as a key focus
area when we were preparing blueprint plans for the
teams will work more closely fiscal year. We tested out the various use-cases we
wanted to deploy it for. Earlier, we had been using
going forward? analytics extensively for customer retention through
external partners. We then created a small analytics
Project teams working with digital tech won’t reach team in-house for frauds and claims analytics,
optimum performance and productivity levels unless expanding its scope in 2019 to areas like cross-selling,
the adoption reaches a critical mass. We see across the next best offers, advisor and employee retention, etc.
industry that it is not realistic to survive in this We didn’t want to invest in a platform and then identify
competitive market without this alignment. And this key focus areas.
alignment will only grow stronger when we start
measuring tangibles, like adoption rates of new
platforms and see promising results.

Business teams are now more open to co-create

solutions along with the IT team. But it ultimately boils
down to what the requirements actually are as
compared to just creating fancy flows that aren’t useful
or serve the purpose.

Build tools in-house vs. acquiring: We prefer to test

and gauge requirements first before implementation.
After testing it, we decide which aspects of the
platform we can afford to build in-house and what we’d
need external help with. The platforms are built for
scalability, robustness - we have the API and
an EBS philosophy.

85
Let’s talk about cloud adoption
at Kotak Life.
Challenges: Pre-COVID-19, we didn’t have an
extensive cloud integration; we integrated with a
stack of SaaS solutions - cloud or API, based on
requirements. On the cloud adoption front, cost
still remained a challenge coupled with regulatory
requirements.

In 2019, we implemented a CRM for our sales teams,

customer servicing teams, and agents from an activity
management perspective. The activity management
tool was available on mobile. However, the challenge
here was adoption. To close the gaps quickly, we
enabled managers access and platforms to view
the CRM reports to track leads, push, and handhold.

86
Initiatives: We’ve implemented video tech for our
agents, employees, and customers with a secure
Managers have played a crucial
verification process. role in ramping up sales teams.
We realised that it was time to build our own solutions How did you provide the
if we wanted to keep costs in mind. Not just that, we
aspired to build a brand name of our own and nurture a
support they needed?
trust factor that provided comfort, convenience,
and flexibility. L&D: We had a SaaS Learning tool that proved to be
very efficient for our needs. Training content is built
Last year, we implemented Conversational AI, and around themes and topics customised to better enable
which is being used by our distributors & agents. We the sales teams - especially during a pandemic. We
started with using ChatBots and then shifted also built WFH modules to coach employees across
base to WhatsApp. functions to improve productivity and balance while
working from home.
We also built a mobile app for our agents that takes
care of everything from engagement, information about Reporting & Analytics: Reports and dashboards were
the business for referencing, notifications on how to created from the CRM based on how we needed to
respond to nudges, and better convert them to leads, marry reports to the required data sets. A few other
earnings, attendance, applying for leaves, and much dashboards we looked at were for lead fulfilment,
more. We had it custom-built for our requirements. visibility across teams and functions, number of
From our experience, user journey paths are working hours, lead conversion rates, and more.
essential to drive engagement and build meaningful
relationships with customers. The nudges sent to agents and advisors were
transactional based on their goals, incentives, or
targets.

87
 What are you looking forward to
in 2021?

One thing is for sure that branch visits are not going to
stop; however, we’re drawing a balance between digital
and physical touch-points for assisted or intermediary-
led businesses.

We’re looking to work with partners with a more agile

approach, and our operating models will change.

Start-ups should have a traditional approach,

especially from a risk security, sustainability &
continuity point of view, and these aspects should be
intrinsic to their offerings, individually. Everybody may
certify for compliance, but it’s left to the CTO to figure
out the best way to cater to the company’s and
customer’s needs.

88
Show care
and empathy.
K. V. Dipu
President & Head - Operations & Customer Service
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company

91
 K. V. Dipu
President & Head - Operations &
Customer Service
Mr. K. V. Dipu has spearheaded multiple digital
transformation programs leveraging start-ups from
fintech/insurtech globally while leading a team of “There are decades when weeks
~1000 people in 220 locations.
happen, and then there are weeks
With 23 years of experience, Mr. Dipu’s forte is merging when decades happen. You can
digital transformation with deep domain expertise digitise processes as you fast forward
& six sigma rigour to redesign the business model for
operational excellence and customer delight. Bajaj into a digital future, but you cannot,
Allianz GIC has twice been awarded “Digital Insurer of not show care and empathy.”
the Year” across Asia.

Mr. Dipu is also a keynote speaker on transformation K. V. Dipu

& innovation at various domestic & global industry
forums (such as Finovate). With 0.6 million readers, he President & Head - Operations & Customer Service
writes monthly columns in 2 New York-based websites
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Company
on leadership & the digital world.

93
How did you tackle the initial
challenges of the pandemic?
Customer needs: We’ve always invested in the
digital transformation space. When COVID-19 hit us,
honestly, we weren’t unaware. We quickly migrated all
of our users to customer-facing digital assets through
WhatsApp, our mobile app, and an AI-driven bot.
In terms of validations, 80% of our servicing happens
through digital assets, and our complaints by 90%. We
also picked up five global awards during this period.
That way, it was indeed a strategy that held us in
good stead.

Customer feedback: We closely looked at all the

customer feedback flowing - and when you look at
it actively, you can better understand & place your
customer’s needs in a way to stay a step ahead. The
feedback helped us gain visibility to undiscovered
data, business functionalities, new product launches,
endorsements, and more. It’s never bad to take
feedback to improve the experience for managers,
agents, and customers.

94
With the onset of COVID-19,
what was new in your role?
We’ve been in the digital space for a while, so when the
pandemic hit. In all honesty, we weren’t unaware. We
were able to implement quick changes and migrate our
users to customer-facing assets.

Now, to answer your question on “what’s new?, firms

initially (around March) focused on the Copy-Paste
approach. You give them the necessary tools to enable
smooth transition - laptops, bandwidth, cybersecurity,
etc. When you shift to a new paradigm, new needs
always emerge in areas that customers find hard to
articulate.

In my role, I break down all the customer feedback

that flows in - and when you look at it actively, you
better understand and re-prioritise your customer’s
needs - and this is also where we were a step ahead.

With the right tech by our side, we launched various

customer initiatives to deliver value in their lives during
such trying times.

95
Did you launch any new A little ahead of our time, when Google Assistant &
Alexa were launched in India, we were among the first
initiatives during the pandemic? few to integrate our AI-driven chatbots with voice-
based tools. To make it simple: you can ask Alexa for
a copy of your insurance policy, request information
Being proactive to customers’ needs: We launched a on the nearest hospital, and more. With customers
self-assessment tool on a mobile app with multiple knowing that they had the choice of mobility, we saw
language options so agents, customers, and employees an increase in traction and engagement.
can get tested in the comfort of their homes.
We’ve implemented family engagement programs,
With the Doctor on Chat feature, all one has to do is log WhatsApp groups for personal and professional
in, block an appointment, seek a digital consultation, purposes. Surprisingly, employee engagement was
and procure the medicines if required. very high, higher than pre-pandemic.
Even before the launch of the Aarogya Setu app, we
developed our feature called “Social TrackBack”
- in case someone contracts the virus, users have
information on who to get in touch with and keep track
of who they’ve met in the past 48 hours. These were a
few ways through which we tried to meet customers’
unstated needs.

In reality, no one wants to hold doors, shake hands, or

even press elevator buttons (the list can go on). From
a UI/UX perspective, though, we want to focus on
creating a touchless experience.

Two quick examples: For customers walking into a

branch, we launched QR codes that customers
scanned and raised requests. (this could be anything
from asking for an insurance policy to placing a refund
request)

96
How did you go about building
these tech?
We’ve been proactive with Digital Transformation over
the last 3-4 years. The fact that we’re already digitally
invested meant that when this User Acceptance
Testing (UAT) happened, we rose with flying colours.

Everybody has to work with partners. It’s not just the

conglomerates; the ecosystem also has important
contributions providing a better understanding of how
partner engagement works. For example, Insurance
Sales is a distribution led product; they work hand-in-
hand with hosts of partners. Similarly, on the servicing
front, contact centres are outsourced to third-party
providers, and the same applies to digital tools.

Lastly, think of a Pizza. Let’s assume this pizza is sliced

into 12 pieces. With every slice, we ask the make vs.
buy question. If it makes sense to make, we make; if it
makes sense to buy - we buy.

Let’s say slices 1,2, and 3 are made in-house. Slice 4,

we bought. Why? We understood the processes, the
expertise, tools required and so on. Leveraging the
right partner in the value-chain provides the best of
both available in the marketplace.

97
BAGIC is considered as one of What are some of the new
the early tech adopters in the initiatives you are working
industry. How did you go about on for 2021?
building these processes?
I can’t share much here, but we’re looking at Touchless
UI/IX, Voice-based servicing, a new hospital initiative
I’ll be realistic here; these features could not have with a phy-gital dimension, and a few more things.
been built overnight. We deployed a blockchain-
driven claim solution and travel insurance. We built an
entire infrastructure for digital servicing outside of the
contact centre.

On the servicing front, the contact centres are

outsourced to third party players, and the same goes
for digital tools. With assisted automation, we started
using bots as well. We deployed Artificial Intelligence
(AI) and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Completing the feedback loop: Post-feedback, the

smart thing to do was scrutinise inventory of systems
and processes - mainly to ensure customer satisfaction
and delight is at the centre, and for employees too.
We’re offering services in languages other than English.
The implementation of this feedback is both taken
internally and externally and catered to
specific requirements.

98
Plan of action
Mukesh Malik
Chief Operating Officer
Aditya Birla Capital

101
Mukesh Malik
Chief Operating Officer
Mr. Mukesh Malik joined Aditya Birla Group in July
2016. In his role as the Chief Operating Officer, ABCL, “As a result of our “Hitting the ground”
Mukesh is responsible for setting the vision, strategy,
policy formation, and execution for Information initiative, we ensured our investments
Technology & Operations to enable long-term growth. in new technology didn’t slow down.
He also leads Quality & Business Excellence across
Service, Sales, and Operations.
To enable our digital transformation,
we crystallized the Top 10 New
Before joining the Aditya Birla Group, Mukesh worked Technologies which in our view would
with Citibank for ten years. As Managing Director,
he steered Citi’s Operations, Customer Service, and shape the BFSI Industry in years to
Technology organization in South Asia. In his last come.”
assignment, he was Country Operations Head across
all its businesses.

Having worked with large global banks for 25 years, Mukesh Malik
Mukesh brings rich experience from very diverse Chief Operating Officer
leadership roles in business, operations, technology,
customer service, finance, client analytics, human Aditya Birla Capital
resources & financial modelling in the consumer and
corporate banking space.

103
What was your first priority
during the lockdown?
We were relatively quick on our feet pre-lockdown.
Late February, our CEO was in New York and
understood that businesses were planning to work
from home soon. We swung into action soonest and
scaled up our ability to help all our employees work
from home. This was a big ask since our BCP plans
were not designed for such a situation.

Our telecom service provider helped us double our

primary internet network bandwidth, and we also
contracted 10,000 VPN licenses. Before rented laptops
became a scarce commodity, we had procured most
of our required no’s. Two of our scale businesses
already had VDI infrastructure for core systems access
which proved most useful for highly efficient remote
safe access. So by March 18, well before the national
lockdown, all our 21,000+ employees/support staff
were operating from home rather seamlessly.

104
Did you introduce any new
initiatives during the time?
Early April, our CEO launched the “Hitting the Ground
Running” initiative across all businesses and functions
to identify our challenges and opportunities. We felt
our customers needed us more than ever before. Our
wide set of products like mutual funds, life insurance,
health insurance, loan moratorium, and wealth
management were of immense value to them, and we
wanted to be there to help them. Over the last few
years, we invested heavily in building a wide array of
digital assets, which gave us the strength and courage
to forge ahead very strongly. Since we had a leg-up on
working from home already, we saw an opportunity
in adversity. We focused more on delighting our
customers and distributors with much enhanced digital
offerings for a lasting impact. And we did it!

105
How did these initiatives A large part of our business is distributor sourced.
We have created a large ecosystem of digital assets,
benefit your customers including portals/apps for distributor onboarding,
distributor-assisted customer onboarding journeys,
and distributors? and distributor servicing. In FY21, over 85% of our new
distributors were onboarded through digital platforms
providing a contactless and hassle-free experience. We
We became the first scale BFSI player to host its also launched WhatsApp for distributor servicing in Life
entire call centre on the public cloud, which helps our Insurance and Mutual fund businesses.
inbound & outbound service/sales agents operate
from anywhere and scale up rapidly. We have followed Thanks to regulatory changes, we were able to
a multi & hybrid cloud strategy with a good mix of accelerate the implementation of digital KYC solutions.
applications on-premises and on the public cloud. We We were among the first to adopt video KYC solutions
currently host 87% of all apps on Cloud and continue in our NBFC and mutual funds business. This allowed
to rapidly evolve this mix more from on-prem to us to provide a remote and contactless onboarding
public cloud. experience for our customers. Over 90% of our
customers across ABCL businesses have been on-
We focused early on in Q1FY21 to enhance our boarded digitally in FY 21.
services coverage on 24x7 self-help digital channels
for customers, i.e., websites, mobile apps, chatbots, We also launched an audio and video-enabled
and WhatsApp. By May 31, 2020, we had expanded co-browsing / screen-share platform to help our
this to 94%, up from 67% pre-lockdown. We now distributors & employees engage with customers
have the industry’s best and most comprehensive remotely to provide contactless onboarding and
interactive WhatsApp channel with over 200 services service assistance.
across ABCL businesses. The customer service
interactions on WhatsApp/Chatbot crossed 4 million
in Q3 FY21, which is a testament to the popularity of
these channels with our customers.

106
How did you approach
digital transformation
during pandemic?
Identifying areas to digitize: As a result of our “Hitting
the ground” initiative, we ensured our new technology
investments didn’t slow down. To enable our digital
transformation, we crystallized the Top 10 New
Technologies, which in our view would shape the BFSI
Industry in years to come. Some of these we have
been working on over the last couple of years. We feel
it’s imperative to focus on various voice technologies,
including bots/biometrics, various digital KYC solutions
including facial recognition, cloud telephony, intelligent
OCR, hyper-personalization with omni channel service
orchestration, AI/ML backed underwriting/analytics /
claims mgt, email bots, robotics process automation
and cloud leverage which I mentioned above.

107
Replication of Technology solutions: One of the key
differentiators for ABCL is our ability to replicate
What value has digital
solutions across our various businesses at a high pace, transformation delivered for
in spite of these housed in different legal vehicles. So,
once we succeed in one, we quickly spread wings to ABCL Businesses?
all! This is how we are building industry-leading assets
like WhatsApp, Robotics (RPA), voice bots, call centre
ABCL’s performance during this financial year and in
on the cloud, AI/ML backed insurance underwriting
the months of lockdown demonstrated that with the
and more. This year alone, we have implemented
company’s digital assets, it can onboard its customers
60 use cases for Top 10 technologies across our
and distributors, provide service, and effect
businesses with speed and agility. We are the only
collections. I referred to several of these in earlier
financial services group with such varied lines of
sections. Our NPS scores are looking up, confirming
products and still have one integrated website, one
the strength of our initiatives.
toll-free call centre number, single sign-on our website
across all businesses, an integrated ABC chatbot &
To add a few more, our Health Insurance business
WhatsApp. This approach gives us speed, consistent
issued 97 per cent of policies digitally. Life insurance
customer experience across various product lines at a
business acquired 20% of the first-year premium by
lower cost.
leveraging analytics to develop pre-approved sum
assured (PASA) products and using simplified clicks
Re-engineering Customer Journey’s: With our
digital journeys to offer products to its customers. As
customer-first approach, we worked on re-engineering
we entered the lockdown, our mutual fund business
over 100 customer journeys across our businesses,
acquired 50,000 customers per month. Our life
across pre-sales, onboarding, service, and exit. We are
insurance and health insurance businesses have
excited to see the results of our implementations and
gained market share during this period. The lending
how customers are receiving the experience.
and housing finance businesses extensively leveraged
voice bot technology for collection and
moratorium calling.

108
Do you build your tech stack
in-house?
Over the years, we’ve relied on vendor partners
to build new technology solutions. Our software
development is about 95% outsourced, which comes
with its set of challenges, including delays in project
timelines, cost overruns, etc.

In late 2019, we set up a Digital Technology Centre

(DTC) in Chennai, where we started building high-
quality tech solutions internally with better speed to
market at a lower cost. The plan is to develop more
capabilities and create the right balance between what
we build with our business partners and what
we do internally.

We also work very extensively with new-age start- ups

for several of our tech solutions. Being part of Aditya
Birla Group, we have access to its Bizlabs
program under which we identify startups globally with
innovative solutions and strike strategic partnerships.
Several of our digital assets are an outcome of this very
successful program.

109
What are some of your
key bets this year in
digital transformation?

I did spell out earlier various tech initiatives we are

focusing on. Let me elaborate on a couple here.

We are now betting heavily on voice technologies.

They can have such pervasive use across all customer
life stages, which makes this a great opportunity. Like
I mentioned, we have migrated our entire call centre
to cloud telephony. We have launched intelligent
voice bots in several of our businesses to help with
EMI collection, insurance renewal premium payment,
welcome calling, SIP renewals, etc. Biometrics
through voice recognition will soon automate
customer authentication in our call centre. Building
conversational UI/voice solutions, both in inbound
and outbound channels, should give us a competitive
advantage with the most consistent customer-friendly
experience at a lower cost. Much more to come in this
space in the coming months!

110
One other focus is hyper-personalization using AI/ We focus on building scalability and resilience in our
ML models of the next best action for customers and systems very extensively. We need very robust systems
omnichannel orchestration to make the customer to service our 20 million customers. We will continue
experience consistent across multiple channels, following a hybrid-multi cloud strategy. We have laid
including contact centre, branch, web, WhatsApp. out a roadmap with each of our companies to migrate a
Customer should not have to explain its needs each fair bit of capabilities to the cloud. We are also working
time he/she reaches out to us on any channel. on the replacement of our core technology platforms in
We should be able to predict customer needs. We are our health insurance and NBFC businesses. Our entire
currently live with 20 such services across our inbound health insurance tech platform will go live on the public
channels which customer journeys are inter - cloud in the coming months. We plan to achieve an
connected. Let me give you an example – if a customer optimal balance between private and public in the next
tried making a payment on our website and for couple of years. Automating our mid and back offices
whatever reason did not complete it, next reach out to also is most important. And has all our attention. We
us on any channel will acknowledge what the customer are extensively leveraging robotics across our process
went through previously and instantly offer possible automation. We have 300+ robots; our robots in back
solutions with one click. offices ensured uninterrupted running of processes
during the pandemic and produced consistent
AI/ML is one space no one wants to miss out on! We outcomes for our customers. We will continue this
have been investing in this last couple of years and are focus in years to come.
now seeing several advantages in building intelligent
bots, voice bots, intelligent OCR, motor
claims processing - we have several use cases in place
and many more in the pipeline. 85% of our customer
emails are auto-curated and answered by intelligent
bots. We have built an ML-based underwriting model
in our life insurance company. In our mutual fund
business, AI/ML-based genome-based model is
helping in sharp customer segmentation, hyper-,
personalization and offering the next best product the
customer needs.

111
If there’s anything
that can’t be done
in 3 months, it’s
not worth doing...
Nitin Agarwal
President & Group CIO
Edelweiss Financial Services

113
Nitin Agarwal
President & Group CIO
Mr. Nitin Agarwal has over two decades of experience “We work very closely on the business
in global service and IT project delivery across strategy, the outcome strategy, and
banking, retail, and healthcare companies in APAC,
Europe, and the USA. the ROI framework for implementing
any technology initiatives. Tech is an
Before joining Edelweiss, he set up three companies
as a founding member - BrainVisa Technologies
important tool and method to reap
(eLearning Platform and service for Global Fortune results. If there’s anything that can’t
500), BigShoeBazaar (Yebhi.com - eCommerce), and be done in 3 months, it’s not worth
Incred (NBFC & Housing Finance Company). He has
also been associated with providing tech solutions for doing. It is important to break down
UPS, Microsoft, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Morgan initiatives in smaller cycles to enable
Stanley, and Citibank.
speed and continuous innovation.”
Nitin is a Silver Medallist from IIT Delhi. He is an avid
traveller and enjoys squash.
Nitin Agarwal
President & Group CIO
Edelweiss Financial Services

115
 Edelweiss was well equipped
to handle the initial challenges,
wasn’t it?
We were already on a path to tech transformation,
focusing on -

• Low touch infrastructure

• Zero-trust architecture
• Secure content, a typical approach in BFSI

When COVID-19 hit, what we had to execute in 2

months, we did in 48 hours. From the infrastructure
standpoint, we moved to a cloud-first, cloud-native
approach.

Our software & infrastructure was capable enough to

handle the load, so we didn’t invest in hardware for
server & compute on-prem for over a year. We were
on-path to implement zero-trust security (end-user &
application), which is now live.

116
Tell us about some of the
initiatives undertaken in 2020.
Product innovation: During COVID-19, we launched
a general insurance product where customers can
switch on and switch off their car insurance. It was
conceptualized and launched during COVID-19 in
2 months and was only possible because the cloud
infrastructure was ready.

API infrastructure: We developed an API

Management solution for managing data exchange in a
secure, easy, and quick manner within the organization
and with our partners and customers.

Self-Service: We’re looking at minimal documentation

processes, developing an informative and learning
approach to enable self-servicing for customers.

117
What was your customers’ “In credit business, the moment
COVID-19 hit, moratoriums were
reaction to the sudden shift to
enforced. Customers are, of course,
digital channels? worried - and they need to be spoken
to. Within just a few hours, agents
A customer’s needs are fundamental:
who used to close 3-5 calls in a day
• Need for an easy-to-understand seamless service needed to make 20 calls, irrespective
• Seeking a quick onboarding process, depending on
their urgency.
of whether they needed to avail the
moratorium or not. It’s not that we
We had a self-serve portal to address most of the faced a challenge with agents; agents
customers’ concerns. For customers that had difficulty
using the platforms, we had agents. need to give the customer the entire
context. Our team’s turnaround time
Customers have been proactive and open to change
while adapting to digital platforms; naturally, they
to develop and launch the mobile
are more comfortable with face-to-face interactions. application was three days. We built
Today, the adoption of digital channels has more than this for our entire credit workforce.
doubled what it was a year back.
And we rolled this out to 1000 people
in 72 hours.”

118
How did you enable your How important is it for business
workforce to work remotely? & IT teams to drive digital
transformation within
It was a priority for us to enable our workforce to
work from a remote setting. Relationship Managers & the organization?
sales teams needed systems and information access
regardless of where they are working from. By moving
the application workloads into the cloud and adopting At Edelweiss, we have always had strong coordination
a zero-trust security model, we quickly and securely between the business & IT teams.
enabled remote access for our workforce.
A leader needs to understand the business, operational
Earlier all meetings and selling were done through and technological aspects. This is where the alignment
physical branches. The need for physical documents between an idea and the business comes in. It is those
was a requirement then. But as we shifted to a WFH one or two leaders that help brings in ideas and help
scenario, we prioritized digitizing all our close the gaps.
workflows and processes.

119
Do you build or buy the Should financial services
tech stack? work more closely with
service providers?
From a broader perspective, we choose to build.
The requirements keep changing, and we want to be
incredibly nimble and agile. It doesn’t mean we build There are many emerging opportunities, new products
right from scratch, but we use no or low code platforms & fresh ways of undertaking business at much cheaper
in our ecosystem. costs than before. At Edelweiss, we have improved
acquisition, improved risk management engineering,
We use a lot of cloud-native cognitive services. and more. We actively participate in the technology
We’ve adopted a low-code platform for it that we and digital ecosystem.
continuously optimize based on the requirements.
Financial products sold at the point of purchase have
While we build the platform and the ecosystem, we shifted to digital ecosystems. Businesses should now
may integrate with an API or service providers, but we know how well they can integrate with this ecosystem,
never will put the entire ecosystem into a third party. providing services at their customers’ convenience.

If we see that innovation is stagnating and we cannot Evaluating a vendor: If you partner with a service
add much value by making changes ourselves, we provider, the first thing you should look at would be
partner with the ecosystem. how open and seamless their platform is, assess how
the API network is, understand how much internal
If it’s something that doesn’t alter customer interaction is needed or whether it is
experience and core systems drastically, it’s better to a self-serve platform.
buy. But if we feel that is going to impact the customer
journey, we build it in-house. Quick TATs: Fail quick, fail fast, fail cheaply. Right? It
comes down to how much you can integrate and at
what speed. Tech is changing quickly today, and we
can’t leave it to chance with a 5 or 10 year period.
Support and response times are an essential part of
the ecosystem.

120
What is your main goal
for 2021?
Within every business channel today, we can
confidently say that we have a very well laid out
roadmap in terms of our data journey.

We have divided data into various buckets, classifying

them in terms of financial data or operational KPI data.
These buckets are also compliant with the GDPR laws.

We have KPIs right from lead management to sales

and customer functions, lead onboarding journey for
our customers, and the customer service functions.
Our idea is that every year, we need to shave off 10%
to 20% on the cost, TAT, or productivity of our topline

121
CISO’s role
will evolve
to a more
thoughtful risk
management
job...
Parag Kulkarni
Chief Information Security Officer
Bajaj Finance Ltd. (Auto Finance Division)

123
Parag Kulkarni
Chief Information Security Officer
Parag Kulkarni is an Information and Cyber Security “CISOs role will evolve to a more
professional with 16 years’ enriched experience.
Heading the corporate Information Security function thoughtful risk management job.
for the Auto Finance division, he established & A more comprehensive business
implemented enterprise-wide information security
programs covering 5000+ users across 40+ locations
continuity plan and evaluating
in India. Before joining Bajaj Finance, Parag served technical risks pertaining to scenarios
as Information Security Consultant with Wipro similar to COVID-19 need to be
Technologies.
considered in Enterprise
An inspiring leader and strategic planner with a Risk Management.”
constant drive to make improvements, he is valued for
his technical acumen and a positive business approach
to managing risks. Parag Kulkarni

Parag was awarded the InfoSec Maestros Top 100 Chief Information Security Officer
CISOs in 2019 and CISO Platform Top 100 CISOs for Bajaj Finance Ltd. (Auto Finance Division)
three consecutive years from 2018 to 2020.

125
What were some of the digital Enabling vendor partners: The pandemic has
impacted every business type, regardless of which
implications COVID-19 had on industry you belong to. Along with our business
continuity planning, we had to be mindful of how our
your organization? third-party vendors handled the situation and were
capable of supporting us. It was a balancing act to
see how we achieved a win-win situation, meeting
Business Continuity Planning: Like every other business requirements at our end while ensuring our
organization, ensuring business continuity was the top vendors’ business continuity.
priority. To a great extent, it was a smooth transition for
us as we had periodic testing mechanisms in place
- even though we never imagined we would face a
situation like COVID-19.

Introducing new digital channels: As offices were in

lockdown, we had to introduce new digital channels
like WhatsApp & Chatbots to enable communication
channels between our customers and us. This was
especially important in the customer servicing
front. From an IT perspective, we were proactive in
identifying potential cybersecurity risks and
mitigating them.

126
What was the biggest ask from
the business teams during
the lockdown?

Enabling the remote workforce: It is difficult for a

sales or collections agent to imagine a situation
where you cannot directly meet the customer. Most of
the time, they would be out on the field and come to
the office only for reporting purposes. But since
dealerships and regional offices were closed due to the
lockdown, we arranged for the teams to work remotely.

Enabling laptops, provisioning remote VPN access:

IT Security was taken care of with MDM, Hardened
Laptops, DLP, Cloud Web Proxy, Network Access
Control (NAC), Multifactor Authentication. We also
put a lot of emphasis on user education, so they
specifically knew security risks and
how to safeguard themselves.

127
How have digital communication
channels strengthened
customer experience?

The COVID-19 situation has surfaced the importance

of digital communication channels for engaging with
customers. Even post the lockdown, these channels
will continue to play a crucial role in daily operations.
We have also seen customers preferring these
communication channels over visiting branches or
home visits.

Social media channels have played an increasingly

important role in widening the customer base
and serving existing customers better. Developing
proper and active social channels boosts customer
confidence, thus helping in business growth as well.

128
How did you ensure remote
sales productivity?
We have an MDM (Mobile Device Management) process
in place, and the majority of our customer-facing teams
were already equipped with laptops. As we moved to
work from home, the number of people who needed
mobility tools increased manifold.

Traditionally, we would have regular meetings with

the sales teams to discuss productivity metrics such
as the number of meetings/calls per agent, number of
customer touch-points required to close a deal, etc.,
and so on. But as we started working from home, we
had to move away from the existing ways of
performance management to adopting digital platforms.

Earlier, trainers had to travel pan India to deliver

classroom-style training sessions. With digital
conferencing platforms in place, it became much
simpler for the management to engage with employees,
not only for performance management but also to
communicate strategies and discuss execution plans.

129
Going forward, what would you
add to your vendor evaluation
criteria?
Mandatory BCP planning: One thing that COVID-19
has taught us is the importance of having a sound
business continuity plan - be it in terms of resources,
remote services, development, etc. We have made
it mandatory to list their BCP for our service areas to
make it legally binding.

Periodic reviews: We have also made regular vendor

risk assessments mandatory for our partners to review
their BCP plans and performance periodically. We have
checkpoints in place to identify and address potential
risks on time.

130
Imagine tech
enabled masks?
Prasanna Lohar
Head Technology – Digital | Innovation | Architecture,
DCB Bank Ltd.

133
Prasanna lohar
Head Technology –
Digital | Innovation | Architecture
Mr. Prasanna Lohar brings with him over 20 years of “Today, we have mobile devices in
experience in Digital Transformation, Innovation
Implementation & Architecture Orchestration. At DCB
hand. Tomorrow your glasses can
Bank, he has been instrumental in delivering India’s become ‘the device,’ or even biometric
first Aadhaar & biometric-enabled ATMs, Paperless A/c identity for that matter - if it turns
Opening - Zippi, India’s first Omni-Channel Framework
for Bank, Blockchain-based ATM Security, and multiple out to become a long-term mandate,
other initiatives. imagine your eyes performing a
He has also launched the global innovation program
financial transaction or your smart
– “DCB Bank Innovation Carnival” brings in a car visiting the nearest fuel station to
unique experience of innovation generation through refuel. Future is beautiful.”
hackathons & accelerator programs in India.

In 2017-2020, he was recognized as the most

Prasanna Lohar
Influential Payment Professionals, TOP 50 CIOs, Top
100 Innovative CIOs, Digital Leader of the Year, and Head Technology – Digital | Innovation | Architecture,
Top 20 BFSI Leaders. DCB Bank Ltd.

135
What did your priorities look
like during the lockdown?
The banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI)
industry have been at the forefront of adopting next-
generation technologies to optimise operations
and enhance business effi ciency. The outbreak of
COVID-19 has further made the adoption of digital
solutions a necessity for banks to ensure business
continuity and cater to their customers. Our key
priorities would be as follows:

Business Continuity: Firstly, we focused on managing

operational activities, enabling our employees, agents,
and customers to integrate and function from a WFH
scenario seamlessly. We made sure that laptops and
VPNs were made available for every employee. 70-
80% of the teams worked from home for more than
8-9 months.

Customer Satisfaction: For us, taking care of

customers has always been a priority. While we were
onboarding new customers when the pandemic hit, we
rigorously went about increasing our metrics such as
customer satisfaction or NPS, acquisition, retention,
and servicing.

136
Employee Engagement Satisfaction: Any Pandemic Electronic daily sales report (E-DSR) usage has
era is everyday learning. Each day comes with its increased, as most of the business takes place through
own set of challenges. It was crucial for us to engage remote means of communication. The system is
our employees who are working from home. I think adding a lot of value to the process of acquiring new
Emotional intelligence has played a significant role customers and keeping tabs on
in keeping employees motivated to work to meet employees’ productivity.
expected performance.
Video KYC: Cloud technology is now a means for quick
Open Innovation: We identified innovation areas for deployment, for instance, the video KYC process.
Bank. We looked at how we can see an opportunity of The technology team has had to re-evaluate BCP
automation, a new business model, operational execution, uptime, and performance monitoring
excellence with either with-in Information Technology at data centres.
or externally with fintech & startup companies.

Tell us about some of the

initiatives DCB has undertaken

The leadership has undertaken some realignment

for reformed digital acceleration. Greater visibility,
influence, and communication by the senior
management have been driven through
collaboration tools.

137
 Mobile Banking: We encouraged our customers to go Social Distancing App: This was developed to manage
digital to reduce footfall in the branches. We social distancing between employees – the number
relaunched the DCB mobile banking app during the of employees occupying desks at any given time, staff
lockdown period with updated features such as card capacity, and much more.
blocking, self-registrations, fund transfers to DCB and
non-DCB bank accounts, and many more options. This WhatsApp Banking: We launched Whatsapp Banking
considered the needs of customers in particular as the for interacting with customers for their banking
lockdown restricted customers’ visits to the branches. queries. It has helped the contact centre team to
The new version added more services digitally through streamline customer support.
simple steps. This helped us increase the Play Store
rating of the application to 4.8. We also significantly
improved the UI and user experience (UX)
of the application.

The DCB Zippi Online Fixed Deposit: It is a one-of-

its-kind facility that allows anyone in India, even a
non-DCB bank customer, to open a DCB fixed deposit
account online in a 100 per cent contactless manner.
The account can actually be set up in half an hour from
end to end, under ideal conditions.

DCB Remit: This Digital app facility allows anyone in

India to transfer money online to over 20 countries,
from any resident bank account in India. This product
is paperless and offers an online remittance facility
with zero fees. DCB Bank has eliminated the need to go
to a bank branch for this.

138
How did you enable your Was productivity impacted?
sales teams? The Covid-19 pandemic situation is extraordinary
and unique. It has taught us many things, one of
It’s very important to support front-line staff with digital which is adapting to a new normal. When it comes to
applications. We have implemented a few of them within operations, we have been resilient in serving
the time for them. customers by adopting the best safety measures and
ensuring the workforce’s utmost comfort. Because
• With Zippi - The Digital App that we launched in April many people from the bank are on the front line,
2020, we shifted our Fixed Deposit sales operations we could not shut down branches, except when
to a digital platform with thelaunch of Zippi. government rules required the banks to follow the
orders of the authorities dealing with the pandemic-
• DCB Bank’s mobile banking app. The app also induced lockdowns.
allowed customers to recreate most of the facilities
available at a physical branch. The pandemic has emphasized the vital role of
technology and innovation for supporting remote
• With Centralized Video KYC Application, we became working, scaling digital channels, and measuring
one of the five banks that launched video KYC.It productivity. COVID-19 has significantly accelerated
helped a lot in ensuring that we were able to acquire the shift to digital for most businesses globally,
new customers remotely. including enabling employees to work from home
overnight.
• Even the collections team found the app most useful;
it helped reduce most of their workload in terms of It was a challenge to keep the productivity benchmark
document collection and logistics. high, and I think productivity impact was on the
positive side with more business for us through
• We have Mobile Apps for tracking leads for various frontline staff. We have transitioned to remote sales
Business Units. It was very useful during and service teams and enabled digital outreach to
the pandemic. customers to make flexible payment arrangements for
their customers. We digitized to a large extent to
safeguard their employees and serve customers facing
mobility restrictions as following the pandemic.

139
How would you go about
building the bank of the future?
We have seen how consumer behaviour has changed To create a seamless customer journey, DCB Bank is
during this pandemic and the implications for building an ESB. The ESB will house the bank’s four
the continuity of that behaviour. Customers will core systems – the core banking application, the
subsequently want to be serviced anywhere and at any finance application, retail lending solution, business
time. It is important to understand that technologies correspondence (BC) software, and the treasury
such as IoT, AI, 5G, and blockchain do not work system. It will have a flexible architecture, enabling
independently. They have to work together for enhanced communication between multiple applications and
customer usage. can easily integrate with other systems. The whole
Cybersecurity will derive tremendous benefits from AI, connected banking concept will gain momentum in the
biometrics, and blockchain in the future, while 5G will days to come.
bring in much-needed services for IoT. The new-age
customer will be a combination of a human being and We have seen how consumer behaviour has changed
his/her smart device. Devices will talk to back-end during this pandemic and the implications for the
systems and need to be programmed with blockchain to continuity of that behaviour. Customers will henceforth
work independently and serve customers. Imagine your want to be serviced anywhere and at any time. The
refrigerator ordering ingredients based on inventory and virtual customer will drive business. Those who can
your electric appliances paying bills on the due date. blend personalised services into their digital products
will have the winning mantra, and how our employees
These days, customers prefer contactless or interface- and supervisors perceive this will make a world of
less immersive experiences, and this is where difference to customers. Going paperless and digital
blockchain and AI will have better adoption. and achieving a seamless marriage of technology with
Blockchain will also help reduce costs and operational business are the way forward. That said, our internal
inefficiencies. Post-5G adoption, we will see more use customers will also need to adapt to virtual technology.
cases of IoT such as smart homes, smart cars, and
wearables. Two crucial technologies that will be utilised
are AR and VR. We can build a virtual experience of a
complete branch where customers will have invisible
interfaces to interact with banking channels.

140
What are some of the new
initiatives you are working on?
People: A s a bank, we are building skilled employees,
enhancing and automating processes to optimise
operations, and adopting the right technologies.
Customer expectations are high and ever-changing.
They expect services 24×7. We are aware of this
dynamic and use big data to understand and serve
customers better. The bank uses API and open banking
collaboration with fintech companies through the DCB
Bank Innovation Carnival program for the tech edge
necessary to bring new products to our customers.

Intelligent Process Automation: On the operational

side, automation is something that we’re investing in.
Heavy-duty tasks accompanied by lengthy processes
are prone to more error and increased costs. Our goal
is to identify these processes, behaviours and get a
head start on automation.

141
 IT Infrastructure: The sector has consistently been Customer Experience: It will be the virtual customer
working on making better and more structured IT plans, who will drive business. Those who can blend
and businesses are working to ensure their customers personalized services into their digital products
experience a seamless journey. IT Infra & Engineering will have the winning mantra. How employees and
practices like virtualisation, Dev-Ops, Application supervisors perceive it will make a world of difference to
Monitoring are helping us to meet these expectations. the customers. Paperless, digital and seamless marriage
of technology with business is the way forward.
Emerging Technology Adoption: Looking at the Having said that, our internal customers will also need
change in customer behaviour & expectation it, is very to adapt to virtual technology. For our new joiners,
important to meet these expectations. Adopting documentation and offer and appointment letters are
emerging technology like artificial intelligence, Big data, already being done virtually.
Blockchain, and the Internet of things will be way ahead
for the next-gen Banking. We are aligned
with this agenda.

Compliance: The risks of virtual networking,

cybersecurity, and remote data sharing pose additional
IT security threats. Moreover, we are tightly governed
by compliance, due diligence, and adherence to
regulations. In all these areas, the most fundamental
challenge is communication.

142
Need of the hour...
Puneet Kaur Kohli
Former Chief Technology & Information Officer
Manappuram Finance Limited

145
 Puneet Kaur
Kohli
Former Chief Technology & Information Officer
Ms. Puneet brings over 25 years of extensive
experience in Information Technology across
esteemed organizations. She has worked in various
leadership roles in her career and was associated with “Whenever I join a new organization,
Bajaj Cap, Motricity, Bharti Airtel. She has worked I consider myself as the daughter-in-
internationally in countries including the USA, UK, law of the house who has to create an
Canada, Dubai, and across APAC.
acceptance for herself.”
She is also a leading Security Evangelist with rich,
versatile experience in Information Security, Data Puneet Kaur Kohli
Privacy, Risk Management, and a regular speaker &
Former Chief Technology & Information Officer
panellist in professional public forums and
Manappuram Finance Limited
different domains.

147
 Recognitions
• To be crowned as top five women entrepreneur in India in June 2021 in the United States

• Awarded the title of the Global CIO of the Year amongst 100000 women in
• Tech in 102 countries
•
• Received the “Jewels of Punjab” Award from Dr. Manmohan Singh
• (Former Prime Minister of India)

• Recipient of ‘Best CIO (Insurance)’ award at BFSI Innovation Technology Summit, 2020
•
• Won the Business Transformation Leaders Award from Tech Circle, 2020
•
• Won ‘NBFC Tech 100’ award for Disruptive Technologies In 2019 and 2020
•
• Honoured with the Global Excellence Award by the House of Commons, UK.
•
• Received ‘Achievements Award’ at Manappuram Finance Limited.
•
• Recipient of ‘Top 100 CISO’ Award for the years 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015
•
• Recipient of ‘Infosec Maestros’ award 2014
•
• Recipient of ‘Hall of Fame CIO Award’ for 2017 (for bagging CIO 100 for
• four years in a row)
•
• Recipient of ‘Business World Award’ for ’IT Acceleration for Innovation in Storage’
• In 2014
•
• Recipient of ‘CIO of the Year’ 2006 In Manufacturing Segment

148
What were some of the
immediate priorities for
you when the lockdown
was implemented?
Converging people, process & tech: We received With our agile approach, projects that would take
an RBI mandate to build a Business Continuity three weeks to complete were now closing in 3 days,
Management System (BCMS). We had come up with and 3-day projects were now being done in 3 hours.
a BCP plan not only for HQ but for all our branches Microsoft teams were deployed for 29000 employees
and operations - right from the availability of critical in only five days, and we created a virtual desktop
business applications to loan disbursal and adhering to interface for a device-agnostic approach. Initially,
timelines. We are very central-operations heavy cybersecurity became a concern, but we managed it.
and need to carefully monitor audit functions, risks &
compliance, along with human resources. We called Kudos to our infrastructure team that comprised 20
the heads of the functions or their representatives and members who were supporting 29,000 members.
immediately mapped out tech dependencies. On average, a single person was catering to the
technological needs of 1400 employees.
Remote work, VPNs, were created, but issuing laptops
were a challenge. So we contacted all OEMs and
asked for whatever was available, which were later
configured by our internal teams.

149
How did the digital tools
that you already had in place
become relevant now?
Strong IT backbone: We were able to disburse Rs.
360 Cr. worth of gold loan during the lockdown
period because of our strong IT infrastructure. We had
put in place a mechanism for online gold loan disbursal
two years ago. There was no new client acquisition.
Existing clients who were already online with us were
utilizing top-up loans based on the day’s gold prices,
and within a minute, the sanctioned amount was
credited to the customer’s account via ECS, NEFT, etc.

Implementation of eye-ball monitoring: Even

though the branches were closed, we had physical
gold deposits in the branches, and it had no physical
security. Even though the police were everywhere,
we were vulnerable to robberies. We had a 24/7
centralized real-time feed from our branches that
were connected to intrusion detection systems, facial
recognition software, etc.

150
Robotic Process Automation: More than 130
processes were automated in terms of bank
Considering the business is
reconciliations, dashboards, and so on. All core dependent on branch-based
transactional systems were integrated with visual
dashboards in real-time so that the CxOs and operations, how do you see the
concerned people could see how the business was
doing daily and how much revenue was
model changing post-COVID-19?
being generated.
Physical branches will definitely be present, but we
Reaching out to customers: Most of our customers can use centralized digital lockers and IoT in certain
are from rural areas who do not have email ID's or are areas.
usually open to interactions. So, we put in place
contact bots via WhatsApp that was equipped in 14 We are hopeful for RBI to introduce gold disbursal
vernacular languages. Even customer response cells ATMs like that in Dubai. It is the need of the hour.
were interacting with customers through these bots.

We also introduced door-step banking wherein our

mobile units would go to the residences of people who
couldn’t come to the branches. The purity & weight
were measured and the loan amount was instantly
handed over to the customer.

151
How did you enable your
salespeople and distributors?
Delegation of power: Before the pandemic, we had
introduced the concept of a paperless office. All
approvals and other sales-related operations were
done via mobiles. The tools were available on the web,
tabs, and mobile.

In rural areas where customers weren’t tech-savvy,

field reps were there to guide them. They were given
tablets that were hooked up to the cloud-based
corporate application.

We received feedback on what we should be doing

next through customers via digital channels like
chatbots and field reps.

152
How did you decide on what to
build in-house vs. acquire from
the ecosystem?
First, we need to understand our current tech stats
and biggest pain points and then start making small
changes that are acceptable to all. Slowly, we build out
use-cases that applications and then try building them
in-house, if possible, or we acquire from
3rd party vendors.

Introduced a build, transform, and operate model:

We had 15 teams with seven tech leaders with 10- 15
years of experience within the same company. We
moved them to the IT side because they were the best
people who had in-depth knowledge of the domain and
promoted them to be RPA heads. Alongside, we hired
college graduates to be part of the teams.

Occasionally, we floated RFPs to identify best practices

among startups to solve small technology challenges
and/or remove manual interventions.

153
How do you see 2021
panning out?
The pandemic has taught us the flexibility of working
from anywhere, making information & cybersecurity
the need of the hour. I think laws around data security
and privacy will become more prevalent in the coming
times.

Budgets will also get tighter. This will influence how we

interact with the ecosystem as well, on a technology
front, that is. More and more initiatives will start
coming in from the business side rather
than the IT side.

154
Find
opportunities
where others see
challenges...
Rupesh Mehta
Vice President - IT, Aegon Life Insurance

157
Rupesh Mehta
Vice President - IT
With over 17 years of work experience in leading
technology teams across different sectors from
Infrastructure to Telecom, from IoT to BFSI, Rupesh
Mehta is known for his business acumen and strong “Technology Leadership is all about
technical knowledge. having the foresight and finding
opportunities where others see
Being recognized amongst the top 15 thought leaders
by BFSI Innovation and Technology Summit, Rupesh challenges”
brings a rich experience of delivering complex
business-focused technology initiatives. In his
earlier role as CTO, Rupesh has been instrumental in
launching digital health insurance. In his recent Rupesh Mehta
deliverables as VP IT at Aegon Life, he has
successfully enabled his organization to Work from Vice President - IT, Aegon Life Insurance
Anywhere.

159
What were some of the Constant communication: The situation was new and
lacking any physical (in-person) interaction. Apart from
immediate challenges that were constant back-end work, one of the most important
aspects was to ensure continuous communication
addressed when the lockdown within teams and with other stakeholders. It could
was imposed in March-April? be as simple as getting on daily calls with the support
team to keep them motivated or sending frequent
communication to end-users for guiding them on
Focused approach: Challenges primarily arose due to various aspects, or reporting overall status to key
the uncertainty over how long the crisis would persist. stakeholders.
There was no clarity. The first decision that we took as
an organization was setting up a crisis management Scalable technology: The industry was facing
team (CMT), of which I was a part. challenges with choosing the right set of solutions or
CMT covered representations from all key functions scalability of solutions. Luckily, we did not face such
such as HR, IT, risk, etc. The most critical point was challenges because we already had our Virtual Desktop
active participation from senior leadership in driving Interface (VDI) infrastructure in place that helped us to
CMT interaction and discussion, which ensured our scale quickly. It was initially used for only BCP users,
approach was completely focused on dealing with this but we could quickly ramp it from 20 people to 200
unprecedented situation. and 200 to all organization teams.

160
“At Aegon Life, we never faced a single
day wherein operations or customer
services were hampered due to v.
Team members who went to native
places or employees who were using
desktops in the office were issued VDI
logins. Our technology could support
remote operations without any impact
on TAT or customer servicing, such
as policy issuance and post-issuance
metrics. All of these wouldn’t have
been possible if the entire organization
didn’t come together and motivate
each other.”

161
What were the biggest asks
from frontline teams?
Supervision: The sales teams’ primary challenge was
monitoring incoming leads and their conversions
- acquiring, traceability, contactability, conversion.
Unlike other functions where output is a good measure
of productivity, monitoring day-to-day lead & branch
activities in sales were critical.

Defining dashboards: We had to redefine our existing

dashboards to make them more relevant for the times.
The need was to have more real-time KPI covered for
better visibility across ongoing dynamics and quick
decision-making on the strategy front.

Managing 3rd Party Channels: The effects of the

COVID-19 impact were mitigated fairly easily in
managing our 3rd party channels because of our digital
readiness. It allowed us to fast-track and implement
various initiatives, such as reducing branch footprint
and operational costs in discussion for a long time. We
had the opportunity to rethink our digital strategy.

162
What were some of the
biggest learnings?
While we may plan and deploy technology for catering
to different scenarios, it may not be possible to
execute all the plans. The pandemic is one of the best
examples, which none of us could have thought of. So,
what matters most is to keep it agile and scalable.

163
How have views around
cloud adoption / Business-IT
Alignment changed?
60-80% of our tech is cloud-based. But in the industry, Organizations need to form cross-functional teams. At
we cannot have a standard fit for all. There are multiple Aegon Life, we have a squad-based approach where
aspects to CAPEX & OPEX that you need to consider, each team comprises marketing, tech, & business
which are often overseen. representatives. The entire team drives the project
instead of a CTO’s, CBO’s, or CEO’s office.
Tech is good. But the advantage of ROI needs to be
evident. Organizational priorities need to be properly You are a technology leader if you know which tech to
aligned with technology changes (business-IT use when and where; to simply know technology
alignment). The short-term & long-term gains need to can’t be good enough if we can’t think from a business
be in line with current priorities. perspective. Providing options of technology solutions
and developing the best tech solutions can also be
“You cannot force cloud implementation, even if it done by technology partners/vendors, but how it
is the way to go. When and why is something the can benefit business and blend with a long-term
organization should be able to answer.” technology roadmap is something only your tech
leadership can help with.
One should choose business technologies very
carefully. The goal is to let the technology enable
business, not the other way around. We may have the
latest tech like IoT, blockchain, etc. But if I cannot
make the proper business case for it,
then it is pointless.

164
How have partnerships evolved
with the startup ecosystem?
Every day I get around ten calls from people Is there a standard approach to build vs. buy? No. It
requesting a half an hour meeting for a product demo. varies from company to company. I believe that it is a
If i were to attend these calls every day, it would be as gradual approach. If you want to build something, test
good as me not working anymore. That’s the problem it fast, and evolve from that. If you fail, then fail fast.
with products. Reiterate on ideas and improve on them.

On the other hand, a platform is not something Personally, in my career, I have got opportunities to try
that you need to sell very hard. According to what I different approaches at different times. I have learned
understand, a platform is something that allows an that these decisions depend on so many other aspects
organization to explore by itself. that one can master only with experience. This can
be a game-changer for any organization if the right
Platforms evolve. Products do exceptionally well to decision is taken at the right time.
cater to a particular need of a customer. But how well
does it develop with changing challenges is what
determines how good a product is.

People are switching from cable TV to OTT because of

the flexibility it offers. So, it’s quite evident that we will
see more surge in on-demand feature consumptions
with changing times. Gone are those days where
people used to follow a standard format. Now it’s time
for personalized on-demand consumption, and this
trend is applicable across all areas.

165
What are your views about Fortunately, in my career, I have got a chance to work
on both scenarios a) Where a company was working
driving customer delight with legacy technology and the challenge was to shift
to digital b) We started the company with a digital-first
through a digital approach? approach. Both have got their flavours, challenges,
skills requirements but some of the common facts
As per my view, it must start with your basics right. I that I have learned
see many companies simply adopting different digital
solutions to drive customer delight. You can miss the • There should be a very clear vision and long-term
required impact if your overall technology landscape strategy in place, keeping customers at the center
has not been thought through to support the digital- point.
first approach.
• You need to stick with your strategy, and focus
It’s like preparing a perfect dish; now, you can find should not be lost in between, which is very
a recipe from so many places, but when it comes to difficult.
customer delight, you will see that it has to be the
perfect mix of all required ingredient or ingredients. • For managing stakeholders and keeping the
One needs to be careful about blending technology focused interest, it is very critical that we keep
and human interactions, personalized offering v/s not delivering short term benefits without impacting
to invade privacy. long term vision.

“We all know ultimately it’s all about the end

consumer after all customer is king, and you need to be
a kingmaker.”

166
Major outcome of
this pandemic is the
increase in adoption
of new technologies...
Subhojit Roy
SVP & Head - Information Technology
SBI Funds Management

169
Subhojit Roy
SVP & Head - Information Technology
Mr. Subhojit Roy heads Information Technology at “Most companies had invested huge
SBI Funds Management Private Limited, an Asset
Management Company for SBI Mutual Fund and the amounts of money in technology
largest AMC in the country as per AuM. He has been over the last 5 to 10 years. One of the
Chief Information Officer of the company for
more than 14 years.
positive outcomes of this pandemic
situation we see across them is the
With over 28 years of diversified experience, he has increase in the adoption of new
rich experience managing & leading information
technology and information security functions in the technologies, providing untapped
financial services domain. He has expertise in the business benefits.”
areas of strategic planning & budgeting, enterprise
architecture, technology evaluation, program
management, and implementation of large cross-
functional projects. Subhojit Roy

A postgraduate from the University of Calcutta, he also SVP & Head - Information Technology
has accreditations in systems management, project SBI Funds Management
management, information security, and
agile project management.

171
What has COVID-19’s impact All these can be seen in the increase in digital business
– there had been more than a 60% increase in digital
been on the company’s Digital business contribution to the overall business during
the initial months of lockdown. Some new features we
Transformation? introduced include:

• Chatbots are introduced in the digital platform to

The repercussions from the pandemic had been pretty help investors initiate transactions.
inexorable. Most companies were in a reactive mode
even in the months of January and February of 2020. • Introduction of different payment channels to the
Every human or business’s mindset has drastically investors such as UPI & e-NACH.
changed over the past year, and it isn’t a scenario that
will just solve itself. • WhatsApp bot has seen healthy traction among
investors & distributors as it offers statements and
We started adopting digital technology quite early, other features.
especially in the areas of sales, marketing & customer
servicing. This had helped us in a significant way to • Digital onboarding with Aadhar based KYC.
engage with the investors & distributors as lockdown
forced investors to use various digital channels.
Internal business transformations have hastened with Investments in technology: We’ve doubled down
remote working and more collaboration. on paperless approval systems. As of now, we are
implementing short-term processes and workflows.
However, this has given us a good vision for long-
term strategies. With shorter timelines and the need
for faster implementation, we’re working on solving
the disconnect and bridging the gaps between IT and
business decision stakeholders.

172
How has the perspective The level of digital maturity differs from company to
company, sector to sector. We were able to overcome
in which businesses view most of the challenges due to the adoption of digital
channels. It was a remarkable achievement for us to
technology changed due continue our business operations amid a pandemic
to the pandemic? situation without downtime. Many changes in
perspective about technology have happened in the
past year and are for the better.

Growing importance of IT teams: Most of the banking

and non-banking entities with a strong IT team were
able to better handle challenges compared to those
who hadn’t invested in technology. Our tech teams
were almost immediately able to overcome most of the
operational challenges. In the first month of lockdown,
there was tremendous work done by IT and InfoSec
folks to ensure a smooth transition to work from home.

Another realization has come of late that the way

employees will work in the future and also, the
behaviour of customers will undergo significant
changes.

Preparing for the long haul: If you look at the market

studies published, everyone is contemplating when
the pandemic will be over. I don’t think that it is going
to get over any time soon. But at the same time, we
have to run the economy. A lot of thought is going on
from the technology side for a long haul. Everybody’s
gearing up to that, including most of the companies.

173
What are some of the asks you
have received from your
sales teams?

Contextual data availability: Our retail sales are

highly distribution driven. We now have 1.3 crore
investors, including institutional investors and
corporates. In essence, sales teams need the right
contextual data analytics tools, and secondly, they
require information that will help them sell products
better. Providing them with these tools took us some
time, but we’re doing good now.

All teams, especially the sales teams, will have more

and more requirements for data-driven insights, which
will require more scalable, agile, and complex data
analytics capabilities.

174
How open are teams to
adopting new technologies?

In today’s world, not just customers but businesses are

hyper-active across multiple digital platforms. All
points of contact must be integrated for basic hygiene
and customer-centricity.

Technology has played a very important role. Most

companies had invested huge amounts of money in
technology over the last 5 to 10 years. One of the
positive outcomes of this pandemic situation we see
across them is the increase in the adoption of new
technologies, providing untapped business benefits.

Collaborative Tools: Collaboration platforms are

seeing the highest adoption numbers. Today,
everybody, in a personal capacity or otherwise, is using
some collaboration platform. Just a year back, the
adoption was almost 10-20%, but it has gone up
70-80 % in just a matter of months.

Other technologies: Technologies were already there

like AI, bots, blockchain, but applications solving real
use-cases were not there. We are doing a lot of PoCs,
and we are adopting these applications as per business
requirements. Going forward, cloud and data analytics
will be critical technologies.

175
Do you think it is easier to build It depends on many factors, and some of these factors
may change from time to time. Some of the critical
your own tech stack or partner decision points for me are technology vision &
roadmap, company’s maturity & culture, IT
with the ecosystem? organization structure & its position in the company,
skill sets of internal technology teams, fitment of
partners’ products & solutions in our environment,
trade-offs between products v/s services and few
more. We also need to look into different risk elements
while making such decisions.

For a company like us in BFSI, it will always be a mix of

both flavours. This mix will change as per the roadmap
and maturity. It is prudent to have our own technology
stack and stronger internal teams where
we require more control and agility. It is better to build
a partnership with the external ecosystem, where we
see value in product-oriented solutions and fitment
in our environment. At the same time, it is important to
have more experiments and partnerships with
start-ups.

176
What will your top priorities
for 2021 be?

We are juggling with so many critical issues at the

same time – business transformation at scale
along with running the business, as usual, meeting
fast-changing customer expectations & end-user
expectations, IT modernisation, data-driven insights,
the whole gamut of information security & risk
management, skill-sets of IT team and many more
micro-level issues. We need to get the priorities right.
The right type of cloud adoption is an excellent vehicle
for achieving many of these goals. But, we should not
look at the cloud journey in isolation as there are many
aspects, which need attention to be successful
on our cloud journey.

Data-driven business growth is the future, and in this

respect, cloud adoption can play a significant role in
terms of agility, scalability, innovations,
and cost optimisation.

Building a strong technology team, business-IT

alignment, and communications also play very
important parts in this journey.

177
#DigitalChangemakers

Building
tomorrow, today
#DigitalChangemakers
About Vymo
Vymo (getvymo.com) is the distribution excellence cloud for financial services, trusted
by over 125,000 salespeople across 60+ financial enterprises across the world. Global
leaders such as AIA, AXA, Sunlife, Generali, Allianz, HDFC Bank, and more trust Vymo
to improve sales and distribution efficiencies. Vymo is recognized by Gartner as a Cool
Vendor and is funded by Emergence Capital and Sequoia Capital.

Know more about Vymo - https://getvymo.com/

For more information:

Gunjan Saha
Vymo Inc.
[email protected]

About CAI
We started our journey as GreatCIO.com - India’s largest online social network of CIOs
with a vision to connect every CIO across the country. CAI has been credited with
many firsts – initiating the first CIO Book Club, conducting India’s first multi-city CIO
Boardroom (via TelePresence) with CISCO, CXO Golf Learning program spread across 7
cities, and democratizing CIO recognition with India’s Best CIOs Awards (in partnership
with Dell EMC). CAI works towards enriching the CIO’s Leadership Journey and was
instrumental in launching the CIO Academy, a first-of-its-kind initiative in partnership
with the Indian School of Business (ISB).

Know more about CAI - http://www.greatcio.com/

For more information:

Amarinder Singh
[email protected]
In this book, it was our privilege to profile 15
changemakers whose actions helped their
organizations turn adversity into strength and
leapfrog into the future.

These are leaders, many of whom function at the

overlap of Digital, IT, Security/Infrastructure, and
Business, that were tasked with ensuring business
continuity at their organizations.

They also spoke about the impact the pandemic

would have on their functions and the business
going forward and what it would mean for their
teams in the future.