Creating A Digital Future With Tech, Talent & Culture

Coursera, in association with Moneycontrol, presents the webinar series "Lead without Limits", featuring exciting discussions and insights from industry leaders on how new technologies can be leveraged to ensure better consumer experiences. As part of that series, a webinar on “Creating a Digital Future with Tech, Talent and Culture” focussed on how Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector can scale up its digital operations by creating a learning culture and skilling its workforce and how it has become indispensable for BFSI to be agile and future-ready. An esteemed panel of experts comprising Mr Ankur Varshney, Deputy Chief Technology Officer, IDBI Bank; Mr Swaminathan Subramanian, Chief People Officer, Fullerton India; Riyaz Ladiwala, SEVP and Head – Technology and Operations, Edelweiss Wealth Management and Mr Dulles Krishnan, MD, Coursera Enterprise India & ANZ discussed on bringing technology, talent and culture on a singular platform to facilitate this shift.

Ankur noted that digital transformation required IDBI to re-engineer their existing processes and systems, starting from feature definition to release, emphasising customer experience enhancement at each touchpoint. Delivering business-critical features with fewer resources, and tight timelines among COVID restrictions were some of the biggest challenges.

Riyaz noted how digital transformation helped the capital market ensure timely delivery of services, which was a key performance metric for the sector. With the entire infrastructure powering the financial ecosystem managed remotely, the workforce had to adapt to the “new normal”. Riyaz also emphasised that technically competent companies transitioned better to the “new normal” to keep pace with rapidly changing customer expectations.

Swaminathan noted how the pandemic made collaborative platforms essential to help create a digital value chain. With both customers and employees highly sceptical of physical interactions during the pandemic, it became imperative to educate employees responsible for last-mile delivery with the digital way of working.  Collaboration with other players in the tech space and knowledge sharing with experts across the globe helped in reshaping the mould.

Dulles noted that customer engagement models have evolved in the post-pandemic world, with the customers ready to part with more information if they see it as contributing towards more personalised, efficient services. With huge opportunities for scaling up digital transformation, he called for collaboration with tech companies to skill employees in emerging tech areas like AI, ML, Cloud and Crypto. This will prove to be a gamechanger in improving services to end consumers, especially in a remote working environment.

Dulles noted, “BFSI sector is focused on building two types of skills for their employees: human skills to engage with customers better and technology skills that help them build those skills to deliver more value”.

Ankur noted how contingency plans helped in dealing with uncertain times, along with helping the workforce through employee benefit programmes and building empathetic relationships. A remote-first approach also facilitated scouting for the right talent across the globe. “The staffing mindset has changed to embrace hybrid working model, with employees coming to office only to ideate and embrace design way of thinking to solve customer issues”, observed Riyaz.

Dulles noted that an organisation’s e-learning model for upskilling/reskilling employees depends upon its maturity level. Many organisations follow a guided approach to skill their employees based on market requirements and map them to their aspirations. This requires mapping of roles and the corresponding skills through benchmarking. This establishes a curated learning experience to scale the employees up the skill ladder and get them ready for the next role in the hierarchy.

Riyaz emphasised that BFSI companies working on cutting-edge technologies require structured training to streamline their operations. Dulles added how serving the right micro-content helps the workforce learn on the job, enabling ‘learning on the flow’. This helps employees in becoming aware of interest areas and undertake relevant deep skilling journeys with changing tech trends.

Effectiveness of automation initiatives, number of transactions done per unit of time and customer experience figure among the top metrics for Riyaz to track business impact from skilling initiatives. Ankur noted, “the success criteria of upskilling/reskilling initiative can be measured through reduction in escalation or complaint volumes”.

Swaminathan noted that learning outcomes should translate into business outcomes like reduced turnaround time and deeper collaborations with partners. He rounded off the discussion by noting, "We would all agree that a strategy that wins over the customer is the best. Building deep insights into changing customer behaviour through investments in data science is our key formula for success”.