Final Exam

TOTAL MARKS: 83 out of 100Question 1:

Santander Bank would like to expand their market in Asia. After evaluating India and China population demographics they have decided to launch the Internet only Bank (IoB) in these two countries and they have secured relevant regulatory approvals. While talking to the press, CEO of the Santander Bank has indicated that they are planning to launch a variety of products suitable across various age group and demographics. They are going to invest heavily on technology and establish strong B2B & B2B2C network to generate leads and distribute the products. 

Answer

Role: Chief Technology Officer

As CTO of Santander Bank, I’m responsible for laying out the overall technical vision, and leading all aspects of the Bank’s technology development. I play an integral role in the strategic direction, development, and future growth of the organization. I’m also responsible for managing the organization's technology resources and support facilities, local, wide, wireless, Internet, and Intranet networks, telephone, and all related software programs. I’m also chiefly responsible to ensure Santander’s environment is secure and stable, commensurate with the best interest of shareholders, customers, employees, and the public. Briefly outlining my roadmap of Santander Bank’s Asia expansion plan as below.

Key steps DetailsApproach Since Santander is launching an Internet Only Bank (IOB), and all

regulatory approvals from authority are in place for both India & China, I would set up a task force to study all Technology, Systems, Networking, and Infrastructure requirements to run the Bank in detail. As a digital bank emphasis would be on emerging technology, and best-of-breed technologies. My approach would be to buy commercially off-the-shelf vs build, and as far as possible re-use IT & digital assets from the Group to save cost/time, and go to market quickly, enabling the Bank to launch LIVE operations in the shortest possible time, and in line with CEO’s vision.

- Taskforce would consist of Senior Techno-Bankers, Tier I consultants, Chief Architects, Data Center experts (networking, routing, firewall, facility, cabling), Security officers, Regulatory liaison to design & build out the IT firepower necessary to power the Bank.

- As CTO, I would emphasize use of emerging technologies to build my foundation blocks. Primarily a three-pronged approach viz, cloud, mobility, API economy

- COTS vs BUILD – Since regulatory approvals to commence operations are already obtained, I would prefer buying commercially off-the-shelf core systems, which will facilitate the bank to go to market faster. These systems may include CORE Banking systems, electronic & mobile banking platforms, Enterprise service bus, and API gateway, ATM, Back-end Operations (Account opening, payments, reconciliation, Risk, Trade, Treasury), Data warehouse

Dheepak Rajoo 111703

Final Exam 2

Key steps Details(Operational Data stores, Big data), CRM – Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and other supporting platforms like Finance, Legal, Compliance/Audit, Branch Licensing etc. A formal RFI/RFP process would be rolled out in accordance with the Procurement guideline of Santander Bank to shortlist, and on-board partners on the supply-side.

Solution - APIs : Since CEO’s vision is a new-age Digital only bank, I would ensure we have a robust API economy built on a service-oriented architecture to ensure both internal as well as external partner needs are fulfilled.

- In line with our Group philosophy, we will adopt a Open Banking architecture with public & private APIs

- Partners: I would leverage the thriving FinTech ecosystem to accelerate demand-side of customer interface (offer better user journeys, faster TAT, and better banking experience, overall. Some of these partners could include Bank Bazaar/Paisa Bazaar (customer acquisition/On-boarding), Pay U Money, Razor Pay (Payments Transactions, Wallets), ScripBox, FundsIndia (Investment), Coverfox (Insurance), Faircent, I-lend (Lending), Aditya Birla My Universe (Account aggregation), Milaap (Agri).

- Products: See Table below- Robo-advisory & Voice commerce: Since Santander’s focus is on

emerging technologies, and given India’s demography/segmentation i.e., Mass aspirers, Mass affluent, Active Traders, and HNI, I would offer Robo advisory to Santander’s customers to offer a seamless, end-to-end experience on sourcing, on-boarding, advisory, and transaction monitoring. I would recommend to CDO/Sales teams to work with FinTech partners like ArthaYantra, and Scripbox to offer such capabilities to customers.

- Voice Interaction through Chatbot – I would recommend exploring partnership with Amazon (and build out Alexa skills)

Final Exam 3

SegmentProduct Classes Details Unique Proposition of Santander

Retail Banking

Savings Account

Savings Customize, Select, Advantage, Smart Salary etc.

Create your own Savings account (Debit card, Minimum Balance, Account Benefit package)Choose your own Debit card/Interest in lieu of MAB

Individual      

Loans

Home Loans, Retail Business Loan, Car Loan, LAS, Personal, Gold, Healthcare Financing

Healthcare Financing - Financial solutions for Doctors, Nurses, Hospitals, Diagnostic centers for funding healthcare equipment.

DepositsFixed Deposit, Recurring Deposit  

CardsDebit, Credit, Pre-Paid cards (Jewelry cards, Multi-currency) -

Incredible India - Debit cum ATM card

Wealth Management

Investments (Mutual Fund, Structured Product (Derivative for Retail), AIF (Alternative Investment Fund like P/E, Hedge, VC), Equities (Direct, Index, Equity Derivative)

Online Succession planning services (EZWILL)

Insurance Life & Non-Life (Motor, Travel)  Locker Safety Deposit Locker  

Pension Government Pension SchemesNPS, Atal Pension Yojna, Jan-Dhan Yojna

Role 2: Start-Up Founder

As a Start-up Founder, I would ensure Santander’s customers have a unique, online, gamified experience from sourcing through transaction & servicing. I would approach the bank to understand the following aspects.

- Bank’s vision statement- Product stable, pricing, offer,

customer segmentation- Technology roadmap – core

systems, API economy available, ease of integration

- Access to standard operating processes of the Bank

- Legalese & commercials- Expectation from Proof of

concept, success criteria- Roll out & Implementation plan- Bank’s roles & responsibilities,

teams, governance- Administrative & logistics

requirements- Aadhar Integration requirements

– Presence-less/Permission-less

Final Exam 4

Question 2: Omega Insurance company is considering organization-wide RPA implementation. As a consultant, considering product wise   nuances (of 3 to 4 products max as an example) and based on the aforesaid information, you are required to prepare a report outlining the roadmap for the RPA implementation, its advantage, identifying processes which can be more efficient, challenges that one may expect to encounter and enumerate various cost-saving avenues. Based on the case study shared by Infosys BPM you are planning to recommend Infosys RPA agent for implementation. Further, you are also planning to implement smart contracts (using IBM's   Hyperledger   Fabric   Blockchain ) along with RPA to bring more efficiency and transparency in the overall process.  

Role: Consultant

Context & Background – Insurance is a heavily intermediated & fraud-prone industry. There is significant paper-work involved, and most often the process is not straight-through.

Analysis of Information: As can be observed from the documents presented in the case study, it is evident that a customer on-boarding process is laborious, error-prone, and inefficient as can be seen from the workflow below.

As a consultant, I have taken 3 Product categories, and explained the workflow as below

Insurance Category Curret Process Opporunity for automation

Motor Insurance Motor Insurance sourcing is done through Motor manufacturers, Agents, Bancassurance channels, and brokers. Often these intermediaries have their own platforms to source business. The proposal/consent form, and application form containing details of the motor vehicle, insured, risk profile, pricing information is captured by these players, and transmitted to intermediaries offline. In case of covernote issuance, policy is issued only after payment is received by the Insurance company. In addition, as given in the case study there are 830k cases of change

Sourcing process can be automated to ensure straight-through processing, improved customer experience, and better process efficiency.

Final Exam 5

Insurance Category Curret Process Opporunity for automation

requests both Financial & Non-financial that are processed manually by Insurance company. Pain points on both these scenarios results in signficant customer issues/complaints/low net promoter score.

Health Insurance Currently Health insurance is sourced mainly by IRDA certified agents, and digitally. Even in this case, customer proposal form & other documentation flows through to the Insurance company manually, and then entered into policy administration system. If there are medical requirements, policy gets issued only after obtaining clearance from medical practioner.

Customer sourcing & document workflow can be automated to flow into Policy admin systems directly. Also, tele medical clearance with audio recording can be implemented to ensure the process is seamless end-to-end.

Travel insurance Sourcing done through travel agent or through digital process

Similar inefficiencies exist in the process

Roadmap: After studying Omega Insurance company’s end to end process, as a consultant, I would recommend that they embark on the automation journey to improve straight-through processing of their key processes – customer sourcing/on-boarding, efficient management of endorsements (both financial & non-financial), and free up critical resources to focus on Insurance, and less on repetitive, mundane tasks.Advantages: As can be observed from Infosys’s Proof of concept, there has been a 70% improvement in processing time of policy change requests, ~50% reduction in manual FTE. These are clear bottom line savings to Omega Insurance, as it reduces cost of operations.Processes which can be more efficient (Phase I):

- Claim settlement – Claim settlement is the most laborious & time consuming activity in any insurance company. This is also a single-biggest touch point to measure customer satisfaction. Hence as a consultant, I would recommend that the entire claims lifecycle be automated to ensure maximum convenience to end customers, and speedy settlement.

- Pre-Inspection before acceptance of proposal and issuance of policy is a candidate for automation. Since agents use their own forms for submitting pre-inspection proposals, this process can be automated to save significant time in policy issuance, and recognizing Premium (revenue) without undue delays, and back-and forth.

- Pricing: Typically Insurance companies have several products, and it is time consuming to manually effectuate change in pricing adjusted to loss forecasts, reserving, incurred claims etc. As a consultant, I would recommend that this process also be automated to ensure market has a single price view of products available for coverage. This will ensure transparency, consistency, and importantly prevent any revenu leakage.

- Policy rejection – Currently the maker-checker activities for policy acceptance/rejection is manually requiring 4 eyes. By automating this process, Omega insurance can re-deploy FTEs currently occupied in this activity.

Final Exam 6

Challenges: RPA automation can only be achieved with textual data. In the case of claims, almost always the first notification of loss is done over phone, and this data cannot be auto transcribed unless we use voice to text technologies, which is a challenge, and outside the scope of this project, hence as a consultant, I will call this out upfront. Another challenge is to ensure changes in upstream/downstream activities are captured, and appropriated in the automation process, as RPA agents do not self-learn, unless combined with other advanced technologies, which is again outside the scope of this project.Enumerate cost saving measures: As a consultant, I will work with the business/operating teams to quantify & document the measure of cost saves as a result of automation.

As a Phase II item, I would recommend Omega to implement Blockchain using IBM’s Hyper-ledger framework. My approach to blockchain implementation would be based on the following six parameters:

Parameter CommentsMultiple parties involved Yes, Insurance involves multiple stakeholders as

enumerated above, hence would be a useful candidate to implement blockchain

Is the current structure transparent enough No, often Insurance lacks transparency, and trustCentralized data source No, same data sets are shared among various

stakeholders intermittently, and hence highly inefficient

Manual process/reconciliation Again, significant reconciliation effort requiredTrust Players do not trust each otherTime sensitivity Significant time lags in fulfillment, claim

settlement, on-boarding processEcosystem Bringing all players on to the same ecosystem will

make the process a lot efficient

Final Exam 7

Question 35: The outsourcing BPO and KPO trend are, slowly but surely, undergoing a change. After studying various micro-task websites like Mturk, Microwork, Microworkers, and Hivework you realize that people with basic technological skill can work on such micro-tasks. You are required to study the market nuances to validate your business idea and check if the business idea is viable, what should be the revenue model, how can it scale and how the ecosystem will evolve. You are also required to establish a relevant legal entity to operate this business. Based on your customer profile, demographic and location you are required to outline UI/UX considerations, service features, and applicability of various data privacy regulations. You are also required to formulate the strategy for financial and human capital requirements for this project.

Role: Consultant

Analysis of Information: Gen X & Gen Y Professionals are not satisfied with 9-5 jobs, and stable career progression. They like to experiment, travel the work, take risks, and live the good life. This is a fundamental shift in today’s millennial professionals. Based on the success of platforms like Remoteyear, Microworkers, more & more professionals are moving out of their comfort zones, and signing up for skill-based, short-term work.

Areas DescriptionMarket, Idea, Viability 40% of India’s population is less than the age of

25. The needs & aspiration of today’s working professionals are very different to Gen X or that of baby boomers. This is a sizable addressable market.Young professionals need:

a. International exposureb. Skill-based role vs Tradition-rolec. Project vs Functiond. Experience vs Compensatione. Work remotely vs travelling to workf. Short-term vs long-term employment

Revenue Model As a consultant, I would recommend Freebird to create a two-sided platform to offer the following:

a. Aggregate demand for projects/skill

Final Exam 8

Areas Descriptionrequirements from employers/organizations globally on their platform for a fee. Revenue – One-time listing fee for requirement

b. Sign-up young & aspiring professionals to match-make these skill-based opportunities or micro work based on their interests, availability, and fitment – Offer subsidized rates to create network effect.

Other fee based value-added services:- Background verification- Skill assessment- Assess quality of work- Performance guarantee- Advisory support

Legal Entity to operate Register the start-up as a Private Limited company under the Start-up India program

Outline UI/UX considerations As a

consultant I would recommend a human centric design approach of all digital assets. This will put the customer-first, and make the sign-up, on-boarding, transaction, feedback processes seamless, and straight-through.

Service features Sign-up, Listing, Matchmaking, Recommendation engine, contract, scope of work, work completion, feedback loop, payment, ranking

Data privacy regulations As a consultant, I will work with the Start up to identify, agree, and document PII (Personally Identifiable data), purpose of data collection, customer consent, specify data storage requirements, sensitive personal data, record keeping & audit requirements, data at rest, and data in transit, exception handling procedures, and

Final Exam 9

Areas Descriptionregulatory reporting of breach etc

Question 46: You would like to open one consolidated marketplace, named APIBazzar, covering all the emerging technologies. You plan to have a shared inventory model with marketplaces like Mashape, Rapidapi, Algorithmia, Kaggle, and Thingverse. Shared inventory model means search returns value from all the different marketplaces and presented to the user in a single view. You also want to support the OpenAPI initiative and would like to offer automatic API conversion using services likeAPIMATIC.

You are required to prepare the research report and revenue sharing model for such integrated marketplace of marketplaces.  How it can be marketed, different pricing models and target customers. 

Role: Consultant

API is a set of set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software and applications.Collectively, these rules define how computer programs transmit information between each other so that developers can formulate a request ("call") and receive a "response" that contains the desired informationAPIs have existed in computing for decades, but recent trends in cloud services, further development of internet technologies, and rapid mobile adoption have made APIs an especially relevant corporate topic

Areas DescriptionMarket place As can be observed from the case study, the start-up is keen

about the marketplace model, where they can aggregate API demand from across a cross-section of API platforms/aggregators. In a way, this represents a API of API model (like Trivago in the hotel industry). As can be seen below, there has been a significant growth in web APIs in the last decade. This is due to the rise of the commercial internet, sharing economy, open architecture, cheaper mobile phones, and increasing consumer demand for cool tech services.

While APIs exist in the industry, there are no marketplace models that aggregate APIs across industries. Hence as an independent consultant, I would recommend that the Start-up

Final Exam 10

Areas Descriptionshould go ahead, and implement the idea, as it is unique form that perspective.

Revenue Model Listing of all API providers under one roof and creating an aggregator of aggregator model. To illustrate,Kaggle – Provider of data sets based on machine learningRapid API – Which is a general-purpose API market place offering computer vision to Pintrest to YelpHuman API – Which offers health data of consumers to developers, enterprises, and users.Mashape – Which offers public APIs for consumptionApimatic – Which consolidates APIs into simple SDKs

Pricing B2B (typically for developers of start-ups and enterprises) Pricing can be free to get started, and upto 1000 calls/per user/per organization.Premium for unlimited credentials to access full range of products subject to minimum usage-based fees that can be determined by the start-upCustom offering for users requiring mega request/responses – say, government/quasi-government organizations.

Other revenue streams:- Fee-based value-added services for technical help,

trouble-shooting- Fee-based value-added services for maintenance,

change management, enterprise support- Dedicated account management teams

Target customers Governments, B2B (Typically developers of Startups), Enterprises.