Staying Ahead of the Technology Curve Date:   Tuesday , October 30, 2012 Founded in 2004, Yes Bank (BSE: 532648) is a private sector bank with a Market Cap of Rs 14,733.12 Crores and employs over 5,642 employees as on March 31st, 2012. Today its is on the cusp of a major transformation. In a candid conversation with Amit Sethi, the CIO of Yes Bank, he emphasizes on the importance of an innovative mindset. We also hear his views about the transitioning role of a CIO and the absolute necessity for the IT team to transform to a business IT team. Here are some excerpts from the interview. Charting the growth graph Yes Bank began rapid expansion a year and a half back and has reached a different stage in its maturity cycle where we are on an upwards growth trajectory. Our aim is to obtain retail liabilities and assets and build an entire retail franchise for the bank from scratch. The atmosphere is exciting and filled with enthusiasm. The insights and learning from our past experiences lead to right choices today. This challenging environment needs us to come up with innovative solutions which will ultimately impact the quality, cost efficiency and also customer execution. Being at the eye of growth is the most satisfying point for any professional. But the frontrunner is always innovation. Yes Bank is a ‘technology bank’ with technology as an enabler and also a differentiator. Our sole purpose is to keep Yes Bank ahead of the technology curve. ‘Customer’-driver of transformations A customer’s expectation from a bank has changed drastically because of the way technology empowers them. Internet solutions are not enough and they want solutions on their mobile and on social media. Customers’ expectation in respect to customer service has also transformed. They require instant gratification of needs. Banks today are transforming using technology to keep pace with the customers. Apart from external customers the bank staff and people working in the back office also expect sophisticated technology to aid their functioning. Nobody wants to log into 10 different systems to complete one transaction. They want all their work to be done on a single screen. The entire technology landscape has evolved where we have cloud based deliverables both on private and public cloud. We are enabled to increase and enhance scale as the customer wants. The entire process has become extremely agile and fast. Changing role of IT There was a time when banks used to own everything, but today we function on partnerships. Banks maintain the core operations and product and sales infrastructure, but when it comes to technology servicing, the organization forges partnerships to help maintain the infrastructure and enable a smooth functioning. The role of technology is changing to ‘business technology’ today. It has become increasingly important for the technology team to understand the business domain and quarterly priorities. They must work closely with partners who will be able to deliver the right solutions. This provides more flexibility in terms of pricing, and also helps in increasing agility. IT is now measured in terms of deliverable values. Today, we do not talk about uptime or project timeline only; we talk about how IT has created business value by delivering a particular project. IT matrices are converting to business matrices. Enabling interoperability and scaling operations In India, the volume of customers is growing exponentially. The transaction volumes and the scale of growth have increased manifold. To cope with these volumes we maintain a private cloud environment where we can scale up as required. In terms of software, we have already got into a grid architecture which means there is no glance or a single application server to cater to everything. And as you scale up, it simply keeps up adding that to the application server so that you can take the load and scale up. There is a huge amount of unstructured data which is outside the core banking environment which could be residing on the web. Using various partnership models that do all the analytics that we require, we define what kind of big data analytics, and structured and unstructured data we want. They also help us to get data related to customer sentiment or lead management or getting feedback on how particular product is performing in the market or co-creation of the product in the market. We have started virtualizing our end desktop. Due to the inherent security features which virtual desktop environment lets you put, you can actually put a board of restriction. You have to patch up or the end user device has to come at a particular level before you can login into an infrastructure. Since everything rests in the central servers and nothing on local devices we are able to tackle any security issue surrounding BYOD. Strategies to battle challenges IT leaders face a plethora of challenges both internally and externally. Our technical man force cannot do only with technical skill set. They must also possess soft skills such as leadership and communication skills along with marketing and sales skills. Our biggest challenge lies in transforming the mindset of our technical workforce. They need to have a business outlook. The IT team is expected to not just reduce cost but also to increase profit. To bring forth the value from IT, we closely work with the business teams to showcase to them the business benefits that any IT project is bringing to the organization. This lends a hand to get funding for the whole project and also builds a good perception of the IT team. Convincing the management forms one of the biggest challenges. It is very important for the technology team to have an innovative mindset to come up with solutions that help us deliver better to the customer. We must keep an open eye to identify trends that will work for the benefit of our organization and ultimately fulfill our vision to become the ‘Best Quality Bank of the World in India’. (As told to Rachita Sharma)