Working towards the goal of customer ease, India's largest mutual fund transfer agency Computer Age Management Services Limited (CAMS) is looking at mainstreaming analytics, artificial intelligence and blockchain, says the company’s Chief Platform Officer Ravi Kethana.
Financial products in an era of tech-driven consumerism should be tailored so they are simple to understand, easy to subscribe and seamlessly integrate with partners, Kethana explained in an interview to PTI.
Dabbling in technology comes naturally for the leading registrar and transfer agency to the Indian mutual fund industry that serves close to 69 per cent of the average assets under management.
Excerpts from the interview: Q: The pandemic accelerated the digital transformation journeys of most enterprises. What are the strategic pillars you are looking to build CAMS’ digital strategy and growth on? A: Customer centricity, single source of truth, insights, inline AI (artificial intelligence), security, and straight through processing are the key pillars of digital strategy. In the era of consumerism, financial products are to be simple to understand, easy to subscribe to provide omni channel experience to customers, and seamlessly integrate with partners.
Analytics and AI models are becoming mainstream in core platform and help our customers in making right decisions based on data and enabling risk optimised processing.
Cyber security is important to us, and we believe it must be invisible to investors and at the same time provide safe and secure digital properties. We made right investments in cyber security.
Q: What are some of the emerging technologies that you are most excited about in the medium term (three-five years) when it comes to the mutual fund industry? A: Low latency analytics, inline AI and blockchain are the technologies we want to make mainstream in the platform.
We expect these technologies to proliferate and become mainstream in whatever we do. AI models are extensively used for form processing, Aadhaar redaction etc., We propose to build a blockchain based investor profile database which can be used by all the registered participants in the capital markets ecosystem. The chain will be owned by industry and can be governed by the regulator.
So every time an investor goes and updates their data on any participant platform, everyone else who is a participant in the chain will automatically get updated of this change.
Additionally, when an investor is moving to another platform, also a participant, they do not need to enter all details from scratch. They can just reuse the data entered on some other platform.
The benefits of the platform entail a uniform view of the user across capital markets. This saves users the inconvenience of entering data multiple times. Also, every data point updated is uniformly spread across all participant entities; this will create a very robust ecosystem against impersonation.
The chain can also make sure that validations are equally robust across participating entities. Besides this, an extremely secure blockchain tech can ensure that data is protected from leak.
Q: What are the traits of an effective chief information officer and chief technology officer, chief platform officer (CIO/CTO/CPO) according to you and how do you see this role evolving in the future?
A: CIO/CTO/CPO will emerge as business partners with goals relating to customer satisfaction, business growth, security, and compliance.
Q: What has cloud technology allowed you to do better?
A: Cloud native platforms enabled us to build digital first platforms to keep customer experience in the centre, speed to market, ability to scale seamlessly during peaks, reliability and robustness of the cloud platform along with integrated security, for bullet proof security.
Q: In terms of business outcomes, what benefits have you experienced because of running on AWS?
A: We decided to build our new businesses like central record keeping agency (CRA for NPS), mutual fund central (MF Central) on cloud due to the speed, agility, scalability and security that cloud allows us to achieve. We chose to go with AWS, who teamed with us on platform architecture, secure and cost optimised design.
We have benefited from AWS platform capabilities like multi-availability zone, fully managed services like containers, opensource databases, etc.
Benefits that partnering with AWS yielded include improvement in business performance, cost reduction, faster time to market, effective use of resources, decrease in latency, business operations improvements and management efficiency among others.
As a strategic partner, we work with AWS in architecture, solutioning, and security areas. It is a fruitful engagement, and we see benefit in strengthening further.
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