It’s been almost a year since Edelweiss Financial Services got a new Group CIO, Nitin Agarwal. He is reengineering the technology platform to be more nimble and agile. He has been deliberating with the top management of the multiple business groups on the way forward. “The conversations are not about why should we do digital. It’s always about how should we see our digital roadmap given the changes in consumer preferences,” says Nitin Agarwal, President and Group CIO, CTO and Chief Digital Officer, Edelweiss Financial Services.
The constant change in the customer choice forces enterprises to make their technology platforms flexible for change. For Nitin, gone are the days, when technology was about projects. Three-four-five year projects followed by RoIs. “Technology has to continuously deliver and that’s the landscape that we are changing at Edelweiss. It has to be agile. Thus the focus now is on how can we deliver something every week, fortnight rather than doing one-three-five year projects,” states Agarwal.
As a part of this strategy, “Edelweiss is adopting cloud native platforms; designing an API infrastructure; developing a data infrastructure. This is fundamental to building a digital organisation,” informs Agarwal.The general insurance business was on the cloud from the beginning however Agarwal has extended the cloud adoption across businesses.
The company has signed enterprise agreements with major vendors in the area of cloud computing. There are a few cloud migrations which are on. There are many applications which are being developed as cloud native – not even cloud ready or cloud first. It makes the company, faster in delivering business requirements.
The API adoption is completely a fresh initiative being undertaken under the leadership of Agarwal. “Businesses today have to operate as part of the ecosystem. We have announced multiple co-lending partnerships with banks, we work with 1000’s of financial advisors across our broking, asset management, insurance, and lending businesses. API have become an essential component for any business to share information securely with the ecosystem. We are developing an enterprise API gateway to provision for seamless and secure information exchange between organisations,” states Agarwal. The API infrastructure will be launched in the first quarter of the next calendar year.
The data infrastructure also existed before but it was scaled to a group level by Agarwal. “There are heavy investments being made in building a strong data infrastructure and analytics platforms,” he informs, adding that these initiatives will empower the businesses to deliver customer solutions quickly.
The core is getting smaller
Modern day enterprises own the external interface (interacting with customer, partner and regulator), delivering value through specific industry/ functional applications leveraging digital technologies. However, the enterprise IT core is shrinking now, catering to only basic functions like accounting, ledger, etc.
The setting up of a strong digital foundation will pave the way for Edelweiss Group companies to have a small core solution along with the rest of the solution that can be composed as per requirements. Agarwal and team is taking efforts in having a small core for every group business, be it general insurance, life insurance, lending, wealth advisory, brokerage or asset reconciliation.
The adoption of internet and the commerce conducted over it has grown at mind boggling rate in the last decade. The internet platform is natively flexible and provides a massive scope for offering features, choices to customers which weren’t available before. Thus the customers are also demanding user experiences similar to consumer platforms from enterprises. This has pushed organisations towards changing the way they operate. It requires a technology platform that can be customised readily and in short notice. “Increasingly it’s becoming difficult for the enterprise technology companies to work in an agile manner in the wake of commerce internetisation. As a consequence, increasingly the trend that we see globally is, a lot of technology design work and leadership across the enterprise is being done in house rather than being outsourced,” states Agarwal.
This trend is coupled with the change in the core platform of the business itself – it is getting smaller. Enterprises are buying the core platform from the vendors, however all the development work around it is being managed in house. The core now is becoming a system of records and anything that is done around it has to be managed by the native technology team without changing the core. For example, in the credit business, the amortization chart, general ledger function is the core and will be bought from a vendor but everything around it will be developed inhouse. Historically, the end to end process – right from customer interaction to loan booking to customer statement, everything was part of the core system, which took way too long to deploy and wasn’t change friendly based on customer preferences.
Core + microservices
The ideal practice is to have a small core system architecture surrounded with microservices, which communicate with a good API framework with a good data and analytics platform. It can be changed on-demand without impacting the entire ecosystem.
Technology teams
As a result of the efforts taken on building a strong digital foundation, technology teams are being reoriented to be able to work in a more agile environment. It requires different competencies.
“To that extent, over the last five months five thousand hours of training on various technologies has been conducted, just for the technology teams,” mentions Agarwal.