Digital proving to be a huge business enabler for Aditya Birla Capital

The Aditya Birla Capital (ABC) has successfully rolled out many digitally enabled interventions, which has given the company a considerable Return On Investment (RoI). To name a few, ABC has begun the journey with digital customer acquisition engines.

In H1 of FY22 :
The company garnered over 6000 cr of gross sale of mutual funds through the next best offer feature; of all the customers onboarded, 93 percent of them were acquired through the digital medium across businesses; 1.4mn customers who were sold lending products were acquired through eco-system partners and over 30 mn health insurance policies sold were again through eco-system partners. Mukesh Malik, Chief Operating Officer, Aditya Birla Capital speaks with EC

ABCL has developed an AI/ML-powered ‘MoneyForLife’ planner to help customers plan their life goals across investing, protecting and financing. 6.5 Lac individuals started planning, for their life’s goals on the Money Planner tool. Please elaborate.
All of us have wishes and dreams. But most people get so busy making money that they don’t have the time or the wherewithal to plan for their dreams. And so, they end up giving up on them. Not only is it heart-breaking to see people give up on their dreams, it’s also bad for our business. Because when people give up on a dream, they also give up on buying a Mutual Fund, a Loan or an Insurance that they would have bought to fulfil that dream. Therefore we created the MoneyForLife Planner.

Backed by robotic data advisory and intelligent projection techniques, the MoneyForLife Planner can help people hold on to their dreams and realize them. After a person enters a dream in the Planner, it considers their current and projected income, assets, liabilities, and inflation. And in minutes the planner draws out a simple step-by-step money plan with clear actionable:
• When, how much, and in which asset class of Mutual Funds to invest in.
• When and how much Loan to take.
• The right Insurance cover amount needed to protect the dream.

If one follows the plan diligently, they will certainly realize their dream, and it will also impact the business positively. Over 6,50,000 individuals have already started planning money for their life’s goals on the MoneyForLife Planner, as of now.

ABCL has launched an AI driven hyper-personalised communication for customers based upon ‘Customer Genome’. Please explain this initiative.
We at ABCL are using AI/ML to evolve from the typical approach of predicting the customer’s Next Best Product, to predicting what our Next Best Conversation with the customer should be. It determines the following for each customer (segment of size n=1)

-> The best reason to converse
-> The most appropriate content of conversation
-> The best suited channel of communication
-> The best time to communicate

Using ‘customer genomes’ based on 300+ characteristics for each and every customer, the AI engine determines the most appropriate conversation to be had with each customer, on any given day.

How AI/ML is used in policy underwriting ?
While rule-engine based underwriting has been prevalent in the industry and also in our insurance and lending businesses, we have been investing into AI/ML underwriting engines last couple of years. Our partnerships with fintech startup’s in this are now yielding results. Our machine learning engine in Life Insurance business ingests data from our last 7 years of claims experience, industry fraud repository, credit bureaus, social media to self-improve underwriting algorithms. This data driven approach also eliminates subjectivity in underwriter’s assessment of a case and therefore greater consistency. Overtime, this model will help us auto-underwrite over 80% of non-medical insurance proposals with shorter TAT’s, greater consistency, lower frauds & lower claim ratios. We have also developed ML/analytical model for credit underwriting in our lending business to generate pre-approved offers leveraging alternate data from social media and digital payments.

Aditya Birla Capital is extensively using Robotics in back-office processes. How does it help in scalability & cost efficiencies ?
We started investing in RPA technology a few years back and now have 460+ Robots in our mid and back offices across our businesses. We measure Automation Index for key processes periodically and follow a sharp framework to choose processes & sub-processes to automate using RPA. Processes involving repetitive tasks, multiple sources of data and/or multiple data formats (both in input & output) qualify for such automation. These robots help us achieve 24×7 customer service, faster TAT’s, consistency & zero error processing, remote functioning and scalability at low cost.

We also have Email Bots which successfully identify the customer and the intent / request in 80%+ cases and also auto-prepare responses to customers for select requests, including attaching documents like account statements, insurance policy cover etc.

Please elaborate on the below 
50%+ : Reduction in manual reviews for Digital KYC processes
We focus immensely on emerging tech capabilities and have been early adopters of several of them, including Video KYC, facial recognition, Digilocker, OKYC, CKYC and intelligence OCR across our onboarding journeys. Earlier, we used to collect scanned copies of KYC documents from customers and back office would manually verify the document including the photo match, address, DOB etc. but now we are auto fetching KYC documents using Digilocker/CKYC, using facial recognition technology for face match & liveliness check, OCR for auto extraction of KYC data and using fuzzy logic for address match. This helps our customers experience 24×7 instant gratification and error free account setup.

0.5+ Bn.: transactions through 1300 APIs routed through ESB in H1 FY22
We have built 1300+ services on our Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for faster integrations with our ecosystem partners as well as power our front-end digital assets such as Websites, Mobile Apps, Chatbots, WhatsApp, Voice & Visual Bots. This capability serviced over 0.5 Bln hits in H1 FY22.

2.5 Mn. : Customer interactions on audio visual voice bots in FY21
We believe voice Tech is the next frontier in customer service and we see this as a strategic capability to support our business growth. Globally, we are seeing a lot of interest in this space from companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google etc. We have built over 100 voice/audio visual bots across our businesses for a number of use cases like customer pre sales, insurance policy renewal, cross sell, welcome calling, MF SIP renewal, trade confirmation, EMI collections etc. and responding to customer calls at our contact centre. Voice Bots give us distinct advantages like 24×7 contact centre, visual appeal, much lower cost coupled with high scalability.