Thrust on new technologies for streamlining stocks trading at Motilal Oswal

It takes a few microseconds for a stock to trade these days. But spurring the speed is not the only thing technology has changed about stocks trading. Technology has induced the ways to streamline the stock market with real-time access accuracy. In an exclusive interview with Express Computer, Pankaj Purohit, CIO, Motilal Oswal talks about how the group is devising new business avenues by adopting emerging technologies

How are you leading the digital and innovation course at Motilal Oswal?
The group is bullish about the new technologies. We are investing in voice technology, data science, and RPA to automate the traditional business processes. For voice recognising, we are trying to build a complete AI based system, where the stock market machine can talk to the end customers and offer an interactive environment within the customer and machine.

Currently, our advisors make calls to the customer for a certain research report published by our organisation, in order to ask the customers to invest in a particular stock.

The voice bots are presently in the pilot phase, where we are experimenting with the bots with the closed user group. The voice bots are AI backboned, once the flow is designed then machine itself will identify the customer’s resonance. Here the challenge is the flow as to how the machine will initiate the conversation and how the customer will anticipate the call from the machine.

At present, the bots are only supporting English as a language. Eventually, we should go live with the voice bots in the next three months once we are confident about the flow- the way machine interacts with the customer.

The voice bots are the partner integrated solution, where we have tied-up with a Chennai based company named Uniphore Solutions. The core execution and integration have been done internally.

What are business pain-points that you are targeting to resolve?
We are still targeting the basic business processes and have certain parameters defined under digital. The aim is to be accurate, establish the automation in the system and finally, the machine does the manual human processes.

What are the challenges being faced with the voice bots?
We received the feedback stating that the voice in more mechanical, whereas the customers prefer more of human touch. Hence, we are optimising the language, and modifying it to Hi-ng-lish (mix of Hindi and English languages). And gradually we would introduce the Hindi and Gujarati languages as well.

What are the other IT projects that you are driving under this digital wave?
We are focusing on improving customer support through digital. One and half year back we have launched chat bot services for the customers, today we have around 1 lakh transactions done through the chatbots.

Now we are moving to the second phase of it, building an email bot. Today customer quires, requirements, complaints or feedbacks are resolved manually on a small CRN model.

Hence, we are preparing a ML bases solution, where the machine could reply to these emails. It is at the planning phase, and are planning to take the email bots live by the end of May 2019.

What is your digital strategy?
We have segregated the teams into two segments- the Functional technology team and Technology innovation team. For us, the broking business is the key obligation to the trading system, which we treat as the Functional technology team. Technology innovation team is a separate entity which introduces the innovations and technical solutions to the trading systems.

What steps have you taken for preparing that digital workplace at Motilal Oswal?
We identify the eligible resource for the upgraded technology or the potential resource who can easily be upgraded and further train the identified candidates through our dedicated training program on a specific technology. Also, we have people partners conducting the people assignments based on the technology for Motilal Oswal.

Moreover, we have our own technology research team internally built, who search for the partners in order to help us to grow the specific technology.

In order to address the legacy application, we identify and bucket the application as per the priority to securely upgrade or replace the old systems.

Last year Motilal Oswal had rolled-out Robotic Process Automation, please share some insights of the project.

Infosys is our partner for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) implementation, an internal process automation at Motilal Oswal. We have identified around 600 processes across our organisation, out of which implemented 120 odd processes through robots.

Motilal Oswal is a financial domain company, hence our transactions have to be synced well with the bank statements. So earlier this process used to take approximately eight hours to perform manually and a lot of manpower were required in the process.

The manual process involved activities like, logging on to the bank’s portal, download the bank statements. It was like merging the eight statements in the single statement and comparing it with other statements, where we were more prone to human errors, had lack of accuracy and time-consuming.

Assist edge is the product which we are using to automate the processes.

What were the business outcomes from the RPA project?
After deploying the bots, we can assure 100 per cent accuracy. Besides, we are able to conduct bank consultations every two hours. The group has saved on time along with the enhanced customer satisfaction with the 100 per cent accuracy of the statements and bank accounts.

We have managed to save 30 per cent people cost or people time across the operation team.