Sirisha Voruganti, Managing Director and Head of Data Ecosystem & Digital for the Consumer Bank, JPMorgan Chase – India, in a conversation with The Economic Times spoke on the key drivers of digital transformation and how J.P. Morgan’s tech centers in India are using data and cutting-edge technology to create innovative financial solutions for its global clients.
How are digital innovations disrupting the world of finance?
Digital innovation in finance is pivoting around creating faster, safer, cheaper and better experience for customers, eliminating existing friction points, especially on payments. Game-changing technologies such as big data, Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning, robotics, blockchain have expanded opportunities to drive transformation and increase personalization. The pandemic has only accelerated this transformation leading to unprecedented growth in online shopping, touchless payments and self-service tools.
At J.P. Morgan, technology is at the core of driving the firm’s vision of delivering exceptional client service. We are investing in innovative ways to attract clients and deepen their engagement, satisfaction and profitability through the use of digital channels. Our tech teams in India are leading from the front, developing cutting-edge technologies, particularly in areas such as AI, digital, big data analytics and robotics, across financial products and services.
What are the key drivers of digital transformation in finance?
Data. If you can picture this, J.P. Morgan’s data can take you to the moon and back 65 times. Across our four lines of businesses, operating in over 100 markets around the world, we have a unique mix of data that can be leveraged to generate numerous business insights and opportunities. Particularly in financial services, this data is very valuable and unique. For example, we use data in so much of what we do, including supporting our customers and clients with investment insights, product recommendations and fraud detection. That said, there is still a lot we can do as technology environments continue to modernize and create more analytical data in a scalable, secure and fast manner.
A critical enabler to this transformation is our cloud strategy. Expanded across private and public cloud, this platform allows us to access capabilities at a pace we could never have imagined before, helping us better serve our customers and clients.
What are the key facets of your digital transformation strategy?
Our digital platform today provides industry leading banking services to roughly 57 million active retail customers globally, which includes nearly 43 million mobile users. What differentiates us is our scale and ability to invest USD 12 billion a year globally in a broad number of technologies simultaneously, creating plenty of opportunities for us to develop creative solutions that deliver exceptional customer experience.
The primary facet of our digital transformation is to enable innovation at scale to continue to successfully compete with simple and complex financial applications. This meant we needed to change the way we build and deliver software by driving a Distributed Development model that would break out of our monolithic application and unleash the scale of thousands of engineers in India and across the globe. We achieved this by empowering individual teams to contribute to web and mobile customer journeys with autonomy and improved pace. We’ve also redefined our Software Development Lifecycle to be more opinionated about quality controls and observable to make sure that our engineers can see the feedback in real-time and as early in the development process as possible.
How important is customer experience in your digital transformation journey?
Our customer is at the center of everything we do. Across our four technology centers in India—Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune—customer obsession is a key fabric that brings our technologists on one common mission. Whether it’s developing cloud computing, integrating artificial intelligence or constantly improving digital banking, our technologists are transforming how our customers and clients around the world interact with their money and maximize value.
One such example is our next-generation risk, pricing and trade management platform—Athena. Athena provides an integrated data and analytics solution that aggregates data of financial products from numerous sources into one singular view, thus enabling clients who work with complex data sets to more effectively visualize, analyze and evaluate trades and investments, and gather insights on their portfolios.
AI/ ML technologies are transforming the way our clients and customers handle their finances. For example, globally J.P. Morgan processes USD 7 trillion retail payments daily. That incredibly rich data can give ML vast insights into how people and companies use their money and help banks learn how to better serve and protect their customers. By analyzing spending patterns, we can often detect errors or fraudulent transactions and halt them before they become a problem.
Ultimately, these cutting-edge technologies are transforming the way we engage with our customers and clients—making services faster, more efficient, and closely tailored to their needs and experiences.
Discover the stories of your interest
Disclaimer: Content Produced by ET Edge
