Hybrid work approaches require more enhanced review of the logs to ensure that there is no leakage of any sort. The security operations have gone up a notch higher in terms of people and in terms of technology to support such situations
At the recently organised Proactive Leadership Conversation Series powered by Pro MFG Media in collaboration with the Knowledge Partner InDAC – SM, Mahesh Ramamoorthy, CIO, Yes Bank, and Naresh Mirchandani, Sales Head Enterprise and Commercial Business- Proactive Data Systems Pvt Ltd. shared their insights on various relevant issues like hybrid working, zero trust approach, customer experience management, AI as well as measuring performance and RoI, in this conversation with Saikumar, Director, Pro MFG Media.
Pandemic-style working from home may not translate easily to a “next normal” mix of on-site and remote working. How do you secure your hybrid work world with a Zero Trust approach?
Mahesh Ramamoorthy: With remote working, there are impacts from the customer service perspective. At the end of the day, the bank deals with the customer from a money standpoint. So the service is always in some form of transaction and the customer needs an understanding of what’s happening to the data. The pandemic has forced the entire banking community to think as to how they can execute remote working and then move to hybrid working. So right now, we have people who come in the office everyday like the senior management. Then, we have people who work from home some days of the week and come to the office for the some days of week. And there is a smaller section of people that is fully working remotely. So we have essentially classified our roles, and people who fit into the roles have been given the options accordingly. On the back of this, we have deployed security because we deal with the customers’ information which is highly sensitive. We go with the zero trust approach where every level of access is authenticated. There is nothing residing on the computer at all and everything is under control.
We are also working towards certain capabilities to introduce a motion sensor based approach. This is being done to address a situation where a remote working employee is handling customer information and someone comes behind that employee. So we are working on a value adding technology to protect the customer information through this motion sensor based approach.
Nothing can be stored on the computers of our employees who are working remotely. That essentially prevents any form of accessibility to the information locally as they are working outside our network. The security level is first at the device, then at the network and then at the application. So, we go with a fair degree of security. Now we are going two steps ahead. One step is effectively the challenged response kind of capability. Secondly, we are also looking at automatically supressing of the screen if someone moves behind the person working on the system. We are now evaluating that kind of technology. If we continue to use the hybrid working model then we will invest in that kind of technology.
One is the classification of the work model and two is moving people accordingly with the kind of security overlays that we have put. At the end of the day, a lot of these hybrid work approaches require more enhanced review of the logs to ensure that there is no leakage of any sort. The security operations have gone up a notch higher in terms of people and in terms of technology to support such situations.
How does it all impact the overall digital experience management of the employee? Mahesh Ramamoorthy: It is true that there are more overlays when an employee accesses the system remotely. So it is the bank’s responsibility to provide the right kind of training, understanding and empathy. Obviously, the employees are still trying to work from their homes despite whatever personal challenges they may be facing. Everyone does not have a home office. In such situations, it is not just about training but it is also about helping them understand the risk and more about giving the right levels of empathy. We have been fairly good in getting to the employees in terms of these three aspects. Also, we do a lot of virtual get together sessions where there are talks beyond work. That helps. And now that things have opened up, we do call them in smaller batches for team building as well as team bonding exercises and give them a better understanding of how their services have helped us to deliver the right kind of capabilities and experience to the customers.
As a leading System Integrator (SI), what are some of the trends that you see in the banking sector?
Naresh Mirchandani: Today, a lot of customers are talking about how they can build a resilient digital strategy. We are also working with our customers to create that ecosystem. There’s a lot of focus on applications because that’s the core of any industry. Infra modernising is another area where we build a lot of automation, tools and systems in place to manage the infrastructure well. Most important aspect in the post pandemic era is about transforming your teams, where there are different solutions that you can build in from the collaboration standpoint. Then, it is also about the overall experience for the internal users, the external users as well as for the vendors.
And then there is security, which runs around the entire gamut of solutions that we talk about. It’s about the ‘zero trust’ factor. SASE is the new buzzword that we hear a lot from customers, where the customers are trying to integrate security and networking around that space. So these are some of the trends that we see.
How is AI changing the way banks are doing their business? And what’s the level of AI that will get into the banking segment in the immediate future?
Mahesh Ramamoorthy: Traditionally, AI has been used in terms of analysing data that the bank collects and in trying to understand what the next best action is. So, it was looked at with a data understanding approach. Now I see more intelligence getting generated basis AI models, which will be more driven towards the risk perspective as well. With the increase in digital transactions, and the fact that transactions could be originated from different devices and different end points, it is not the standard algorithms that we work with now. We need to have a much better AI overlay on top of it. In fact, these will become de facto as we start to evolve. Especially if you look at the retail side of the transactions, money moves pretty fast. So I think the evolution of the risk models and being part of the transactions itself is going to be very intuitive. This is where I believe AI will take us to the next level.
One is the front end in terms of helping any bank go through its next levels of cross selling products and up selling new services. Most of the banks already have many of these capabilities but then there are more possibilities. But if you look at the entire back office side, I think there is going to be a fair bit of capabilities in the risk side. Even in terms of back office operations, AI could give very intellectual understanding about how data quality itself is coming through from the new accounts. Overall, AI has very significant role to play in the banking sector and more importantly in the emerging digital payment infrastructure. It will be no more just good to have bit it will turn into something that is must have.
Are there any clear yardsticks adopted by the banking sector to measure RoI on Big Data?
Mahesh Ramamoorthy: When it comes to the RoI on Big Data, a bank has to state its metrices clearly. For example, if you look at the growth side, what is Big Data helping you achieve coupled with the AI capabilities and digital enablement in the front end? Secondly, with the amount of data you have and the analytics you throw on top of it using the underlying Big Data capabilities, it is about how many products you sell to a customer. If you are able to make the data feed into your process, and measure in terms of increase in wallet share, then that is a great KPI metric.
How are you ensuring that customers are successful in terms of their experience management?
Naresh Mirchandani: Customer is the entire focus of what any industry does. All the solutions that we build are focussed on the customer. We believe that customer experience management is extremely critical. While we have been talking about selling multiple architectures and cross selling architectures, but what is important is that whatever we sell, the customer needs to adopt it. So we work with the customer in the entire journey from the adoption perspective. For example, we sell collaboration solutions to the customers. Collaboration is a pretty complex architecture because we see customers using different solutions from a collaboration standpoint. We focus on how we can really help customers from an adoption standpoint so that finally the end user is happy and satisfied for using that solution effectively. That is one area.
Secondly, we also work with multiple OEMs where we are creating success tracks for customers. We look at how we can measure, for example the next gen intent based networking that most companies are adopting today. We look at how we can build an entire layer around it from a service assurance perspective and from a service management perspective. These are things that we believe, as an organisation, are extremely important for us to deliver. That is where the customer looks at you as a strong partner. That is something that we would like to take forward with our customers in the overall journey.
Watch the highlights of this ‘Leadership Conversation’ on YouTube at this link
