Session Information:

Automating Resilience in Banking and Financial Services

Today Banks are facing pressure from 3 sides – interest rates regimes put in by central banks, slow recovery in economy across the globe and a post pandemic operating model that is testing their business resilience.

Industry has responded to this triple threat by looking at automation as a key lever for not only survival but actually to thrive in this new normal. Bain in their recent survey found more than 90% of the banks and capital markets firms have accelerated their efforts towards automation. In this session, we will discuss:

Session Transcript:

I'm very excited about our first guests.

We have a tremendous leadership team with us here, cross industry, financial services leadership.

And then, we're going to have this panel discussion with with this team today and talking about the issues that are relevant for financial services in a time of great uncertainty, rapid change, and rapid technological evolution.

So, I would like to welcome Amit Kumar Emit is the leader of the Financial Services Industry Practice at UI Path. He's based in New York, and he's responsible for business development and goto markets for financial services globally.

He has more than 20 years of business and technology consulting experience in the United States, Europe, and Japan, focused specifically on banking and capital markets. Amet will be the moderator for our panel to introduce our next two guests, and I met. what an honor, and what a pleasure to have you with us here today. Thank you for joining, beat those financial services Life.

Thanks, Joseph, for your warm welcome.

Hello everyone, and welcome to our session today.

Exactly, one year back, almost to the day, we all saw this wall come to a standstill, banking and Financial Services phones were some of the worst hit industries. As pandemic unraveled, We began seeing stories of how the industry responded, especially to the loss of continuity of operations, and one of the response mechanism was automation.

There was Massive use Case search, and there was success recorded across the industry, Which brings us to the current moment and topic of our session today. How did these banks and financial services firms, and then, it automation, right into their operational fabric?

And, to discuss that, we have a very distinguished panel today, do industry stalwarts and industry thought leaders with us.

And without further ado, I would start by inviting ...

Shah to our panel today benefits your file.

Thank you.

Good morning. She finally I'll, I'll start with a few words about your family for our audience. ...

is a managing director and head of Intelligent Automation at Corporate Investment banking at JP Morgan, Where she leads the charge for data driven solution.

She eats a charge for District Process Discovery, and there is an automation for CIP looking across all the three dimensions, whether it is the operational efficiencies improving client experience for CIP, as well as the risk reduction. Great to have you show value for our panel today.

Thank you so much, great to be here.

Our next panelist is somebody that we have been in close connect with ... and welcome to the panel is joining us from Alliance Data.

Hello everyone.

Great to have you Amber.

For our audience few words about Emmet ... is the Intelligent Automation, product manager and automation NCUA that aligns data.

Where he and his team had delivered half a million hours in 20 20 to 22 ND a lot using automation.

He has extensive experience in financial services, automation, and digital transformation.

We're super stoked to hear your journey at Alliance Data, and looking forward to the discussion.

Perfect!

We have, we have about half an hour to discuss simple questions, so I will not waste any more time.

And go directly into this question that I'm going to post to ... and ...

by saying that you have been one of the earliest adopter's, not the ODS adopted or all the automation at JP Morgan.

What has been that journey been like, and, you know, if you could also share some of the objectives that you've had seven when you started this journey?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And your reminder that we're into the pandemic and a lockdown, it's quite surreal, and it's an interesting time to discuss this so, thank you for having us here.

So journey, for me, with automation, started, specifically with RPA and intelligent automation, started as one of the consumer, and the operations head, needed this tool to enhance and optimize my own organization when I was managing operations.

So when this was introduced to us, to the farm with my technology partners, and the transformation team, I was the first one to sign up for it, not knowing what given RPA stood for four years ago.

And we had some very early success with our unintended, bought spin, on integrating those solutions into our organization, from then on having seeing the success and the capability and the evolution of this space, and industry, I took on a role as the Head of Intelligent Automation in late 2017.

And, from there on, my journey has been about introducing the solutions, and partnering with my, you know, operation leads, and the functional process owners, and the technology team, to continue to deploy this solutions to the organization.

Predominantly, the key objective of it has been to, you know, improve our, excuse me, improve our quality of our processing and free up our time for more complex and a customer facing, you know, transaction and volume.

And deliver that into a create efficiency in our process. Scalability in our process, and reduce the risk of, you know, control related aspect.

That's what's been our journey has been so far, and we're excited to continue this journey into the years to come.

I mean, I think it's going to do everything to note your journey from being a practitioner in terms of operations leader, to someone now, who is leading the charge of automation across the bank itself.

I think it's a, it's a, it's, it's fascinating to see that kind of evolution, as you, as you noted, It's kind of like, you know, taking your own medicine, or taking your own really, after, truly believe in.

It didn't have a sin working in it, working it, to be able to then deliver the value from it. So, yeah, it has been interesting.

Thank you, domestic, of them. But I know, personally, that Alliance data has some unique perspectives about how automation you could have, but I would rather hear from you.

And if you could share with the audience, what is the State of Automation program at Alliance Theater?

Before I get started with the Automation journey and Alliance Data, I want to say that back in 20 18, when we are in the midst of researching that, you know, we need to do process automation to the next level. I have been very close to process and process re-engineering process automation pretty much my entire career. And when we were exploring that, I was in conferences and such. And that's then Shift Alia and her team what they have been able to achieve.

And we're like, wow, that. That's amazing. You know, if it would be great to be able to get anywhere close.

So, we set a very audacious goal, we got, started in 20 19 and it was a unique, you know, setup where I was part of enterprise services group and our enterprise data science team understood that we are, there is an untapped opportunity being able to automate a lot of those repetitive redundant stuff, right? So how we did is, we had a coalition of different organizations, our chief data officer, as well as enterprise services, partnered and and took that initiative off the ground.

And in year one, just the year, we went live, we had tremendous support from our organization and the leaders and created a community of practice where IT and business partners and information security, they all came together That understood the enormity of the value that you need to deliver.

And in year one, we have been able to reach our target. And as you mentioned, last year, we had a high target of getting getting to half a million hours of our save and being able to give back that capacity to the business and we have been able to achieve that and exceed that.

A lot has happened in the last year, Know, it has been a tremendous journey where we had We had the support from our leadership.

We had the support from our organization, As you can see, that we have worked with our back office mostly, as well as in our collections area. Mostly, the reason being is that is where a lot of manual effort was there, and then the work was very defined. So, those were our low hanging fruit that we could go after. And, and in a very short period of time, we have been able to automate 38 processes that are in those departments, in addition to other areas in the organization.

We have taken that more of an enterprise initiative, rather than siloing it into any, any specific department, I think that's, that's a key difference that, that, I think, was contributing to our success.

And then, now we're pivoting more into intelligent automation.

Not just doing those repetitive, you know, mundane tasks, but also being able to perform some of those cognitive services, being able to understand what our current members are sending us in, in, in their letters, and documents, and their e-mails, and being able to understand and process that in a more intelligent way. That allows us to deliver a response to them better, faster, and also improved their satisfaction with their, with our relationship.

That's what I mean, These are great metrics. But I would say that the cross industry collaboration point, that you mention where, you know, you are aware of the sexes, the ... team, were having early success that they were having a cheap Morgan.

And that is quite fascinating for me to note, and for our audience to know.

You know, because these phones, you know, bank infectious, those phones can definitely collaborate at this forum to do, to get to know them. So, what is working and what is not worth nothing That is super fascinating. And I think you are paying it forward now in the whole Columbus area where you are going ahead and also talking to the other phones and letting them know about your lessons and the challenges that you may, you may find at ....

Absolutely. We have a very vibrant intelligent automation community here in Columbus, Ohio where we monthly get together and talk about, you know, what progress we're making. What are some of the things that we could be doing, you know, and, and, and really lend a hand to each other's success. If we are stuck in any questions, be it. You know, what kind of resources do I need to support this. This function this new technology that we're trying to onboard or or someone has already piloted a platform that is going to help us do some of those intelligent document processing or some of the other technologies that has brought success. We're eagerly sharing with each other, and and also helping us along the way to get to get to the success sooner and faster.

Thank you. Thanks, Emma.

Oh, thanks. Thanks for sharing that.

So, we'll pivot now to the actual, the main theme of this session itself.

And there was never a dull moment in 20 20 from UI path perspective, especially in banking and financial services.

Oh, we saw a massive of search, but I would request you finally, because you know, you had the best seed inside the largest bank in the US. What did you see? How, how did automation play a role, if you could share that with an audience today?

Yeah, absolutely. Trying times, you know, When, you know, being around the globe, right? The crisis that hit was around the globe in the past.

Yeah.

We have to know the business continuity plan, where we transfer work from between locations or between teams, But this was a paramount where we did not have that.

And we were all struggling around the globe to get settled to working from home and so forth.

So, our first, you know, look, was around making sure all of our team members are well settled. They were safe, they had the capability to work from home.

So getting all that done, and focusing God, got, along with our clients and customer was the key.

The second was to make sure Oliver Klein did customers who are taken care of, right with their needs, they were struggling as well with their own strategy around getting things up and running. So that was our focus.

And with automation, given our, you know, already established program and establish, you know, capability of leveraging automation into solution kits, that we app.

Not just RPA, but we're also leveraging other data transformation tools, like all tricks, except R and, you know, other internal product suite, we were able to leverage and bring those, that forefront. And we had teams who are aware of how these tools work around the globe.

So they were quickly able to either A, given the volatility of the market and the solutions we already had in place.

We're able to scale goes automation solution, so we added additional bots, for example, when the markets were three times as high volume in our markets, organization, which trades allocation, or trade confirmation, and so forth.

Um, so that was very easy to do.

When we were asked to gather a lot of additional matrix and data, you know, where the staff is, who's able to work from home, where is the law?

All of that matrix requirement, and getting that data organized and presented in decision making, we were able to leverage some of this automation tool in a rapid manner to produce that information up to be able to allow the management team to make decision.

So, that was a key value add.

The third thing, I think, being in the banking industry, as we all know, when the government around the globe, introduced the relief package relief, no programs, we were the one had to process those in a very rapid manner.

So, some of our team, not my peer group, in our corporate banking and consumer banking, also leverage automation to, you know, create processes, that support it goes relief program, to get the money and the capital to the small businesses, to the individuals.

So, those are some of the examples how we quickly adopted automation, having those, you know, foundation, cultural, engagement on it, to leverage the solutions. And from then on more opportunity has opened up.

As Teams realize where there are manual bottlenecks, where there is additionally, have to integrate additional solutions.

And, we're also advancing into, How do we make our operational user also be able to afford, you know, as a citizen developer, summit the solution with introducing more low code, no code capability, as well?

So, that's how we leveraged it, and it was very grateful to have this capability considerably up, But, you know, when people say scale, you know, outside, you know, they may not mean the world. But, for JP, Morgan scale is truly a planetary. So, you mean, I can't really, You can't really think of the number, as well as the, you know, as well as, the overall scale that you would add to your support. In. last one. Is a truly, truly fascinating, to hear that.

Will think, Oh, you were also super, super busy in 20 20. We did talk about a few months back. But, I think this audience would definitely need a refresher on what Alliance Data was working on when it came to using automation to address some of the patent related issues.

Absolutely. So, this pandemic has thrown a unique set of challenges. I would echo a lot of the sentiment that she probably has shared, organizations were found in and completely uncharted territory to be able to deal with it in a meaningful way, in a safe way. And making sure associates are safe, making sure that the customers are handled organizationally our, our care center where we have brought in. A lot of the automations had been on on premise setup, right? We had never in our remote thought had thought that we would be able to.

Have that setup done so quickly. And I work from home kinda thing.

So outside of intelligent automation and RPA, the whole organization came together to help figure that out. And less than two weeks, we were able to set up the entire process where our Care Center associates can work from home. And Oh boy, boy. You know, have we seen that kind of productivity you know, initial thought was if people are working from home. They would not be able to be as productive. And and with managing everything else. And and with this you know stressful situation of pandemic and fear and worry everywhere We We edit smell as our associates have come to the plate and has delivered on them.

one of the thing that we have seen in our industry is when the pandemic happened you know and and unfortunately, a lot of our card members affected, right.

Some of the businesses were closing and such and the volume of calls as well as, you know, inquiries had increased dramatically where organizations just couldn't respond in an easy way. not enough staff there to maintain that kind of volume to support, We had to step in and kind of come in and assist where we could let the card members, know how best they can communicate with us calling.

The current, the phone number, you know, the 1 800 phone number to contact us, was not a best setup for them anymore, because everyone was trying to call and our staff was just not equipped to handle that kind of volume. So, we stepped in and provided that information with automation.

And, and that brought a very quick really, we had to quickly deliver those solutions in a very short period of time. And, and provided those the solution.

And then we started thinking, you know, how do we need to now re-imagine ourselves and the work that we do? We have seen tremendous support from organizational leaders to really think automation in a different shade of lens, you know, where we are now questioning, why don't we automate things that are more repetitive? It was I believe this pandemic has accelerated the amount of automation that we as an industry ethic, as a country and as a nation that we have seen. Where we would not have imagined to be where we are and I after a year versus, you know if we if we didn't have if we didn't have the pandemic.

Factor in our, in our lives.

After them. And, in fact, I was reading a survey by being that they did last year, and they talked about 90% of financial services firms have actually accelerated, just as you know, the accelerated adoption of the automation. But I think I would also, you know, summarize, I conclude this, you know, this particular question is actually to human stories or human interest stories. I mean, she talked about how JP Morgan held commercial borrowers and gave much needed liquidity to know their customers as part of the government programs across the globe. And I think that, that pretty much the same, but their Guard members and ensuring that, you know, they are responding to those requests in time. So I think there is also automation for good as a theme that, you know, I would take away from this particular section.

Perfect. So, you know, for the audience, we're just getting warmed up.

And now we move into the second half, and this is, you know, this is going to be a feature, more like future forward, or take forward kind of a discussion where you notice that we see the automation at butcher of platform, widening of broadening, where process discovery, AI, NLP ML being added.

Oh, but, I would rather pose this to a practitioner, like ... first.

Chevallier, what, what do you think is going to be critical success factor, in terms of key capabilities for the Automation platform, in future, you know, from, from your vantage point.

Yeah, absolutely. It's, you know, accelerating and evolving, you know, journey, right. And I think this is a, not a program, or not, a one-time thing. It's an ongoing area that we need to focus on.

I think having been practiced this for last four years, right.

And we've kind of packed some stuff together along the way, as a platform, and as a solution, or as a practitioner. In your own farms, the capabilities are, I think, around not just the platform.

I always say it's people, process, and technology, right? So, all three has to come together.

Any, you know, you can't do one thing separately to the other night, and thank, you gotta have this great platform and it's just going to automate things itself.

So, for me, the continuous capabilities bringing to the people aspect of this, the educating our teams and our no process owners in the process do worse on this capability.

So, the, I think the education and adoption and understanding this toolset by our people is a critical and continued to upskilling the teams. Right. I read an article in New York Times yesterday or on Sunday, that bots are coming to, you know, take a, I forget the name, the article use in accounting, right?

And it's not the bots coming to take your job away, right?

It's around understanding what it can you harness as a human capability, creativity, problem solving, by doing your mundane task and automating it, so people is very broad, and factoring that into this capability.

The second is understanding your process and understanding your end to end process.

And where are the gaps in Why does this manual process manual steps exist in the first place into your process?

What's driving this mundane task and you know some complex tasks that are manual in your process so understanding and having the platform, having good capability process mining, tasks, capture tasks. Mining, is an integrated solution. I think it's a value.

As we go forward and as we look to you know continuously leverage these solutions.

Then the third thing is around integrating this capabilities, right, so you found where the manual tasks are how do we now look at it in automated in a streamlined way?

So, being able to code that automation in a more streamlined way, allowing our citizen developers, with low code, no code capability, to automate their own processes, so you're not queuing up, you know, the projects and initiatives, you know, for three months, six months, nine months, So how do we rapidly automate and get the process we know are not to be done manually with that having democratize capability around the farm, so people can learn and do it in a controlled manner.

The fourth thing is to bring this thing in a controlled environment, and try to be able to sexually govern and control what's happening, what people are automating processes.

We're identifying, I think it's a key and a platform.

And, finally, the fifth thing is, as these things are evolving, it's bringing in additional capability than, just, you know, traditional task. Task, pick a manual task.

Automation, It's also bringing in machine learning at some of the additional kind of advanced capability into the platform, like being able to understand and read documents, I think Matt mentioned that, right?

As you read e-mails, documents, how do we bring that capability to the platform, and then, finally, some of the machine learning capability as well.

So, those are the five things I would say are critical as we evolve and continue to leverage, especially those who are just starting out in the journey to take into factor, and date, each can work independently.

But I think having it work as an integrated solution, um, is a key, That's, that's pretty useful advice for someone. Oh, you're doing, in these firms who are either beginning or On the midst of doing automation? And I did read the New York Times article of Faith from accounting. I think Phil, was his name and my head nodding. When you said, you know, the transition from, you know, tour today, Who's doing it manually to an automation user? And the full journey to perhaps a citizen developer that was, a trajectory that was going through my mind, you know. Whenever they did not.

Perfect.

Oh, Then, when you are, one of the most unique programs where, you know, data science and automation sit very tightly together, just to build on your ... comments about those five pillars.

I mean, what, what's your perspective, you know, from ..., that perspective on the automation platform and the operating model of the future.

Absolutely.

And, and you are, you're very right about, you know, that the data science and us and analytics, sitting very close to to each other, and within the same line of business, has helped codify the idea of, you know. What is the art of the possible when it comes to automation gardeners Point, in terms of hyper automation, Is at the forefront of what we are all thinking about? It doesn't have to be always, you know, RPA. What are the different technologies that we need to bring in to the platform? That way, we are able to do straight through, processing the end to end development of the, of the workflow.

and being able to automate, wherever there is, manual intervention is there, which is our, which I would say, you know, the core RPA use cases. In addition, we're aware, are we able to leverage our cognitive services, Being able to figure out the intent of the e-mail from the customer, as well as understanding what work that we need to pass on. So, we have a very unique use case that we, I don't think it's very unique. We had a use case that we have implemented, and had received a tremendous success. So what we had done last year as we implemented a human in the loop. Automation setup for our care center where they are getting the customers secure e-mail messages and responding to them when the when we are in the midst of pandemic the increase of volume of all kinds of things, in addition to customers being falling behind and being late and has been an issue.

Um, and to assist with that, we are, we are getting about 110,000, or, actually, it's, it's much higher now that we look back, we're getting hundreds of thousands of free inquiry, is to say, you know, I, I was unable to make my payment, my job was affected, I got late. Can you remove the leak free?

And our associates had to read those, and process those.

The request is not very complex, but we didn't have a way to process that in an intelligent way. So, what we had done as we partnered with our data science team, and asked, what could we be doing to deliver that solution?

And, and that unique setup helped us kinda understand, figure out the way, too, figure out the intent of the e-mail, doing the NLP processing, and then pass that knowledge over to RPA bot, which already knew how to do those account Maintenance pretty well. Connect to all of our backend systems, perform those activities, and remove the late for you, remove the associated finance charges for the consumer, make them and make them happy. And then send them an e-mail response. What it did is it increased, the time they increase the adoption to SLA, we were able to assist our customers, and a much more, much better timeframe. And it gave business a unique perspective. Typically, when we come in with a solution, You know, and a lot of the thing, I call it, magic happens behind the screen. You don't really get to interact with that versus this setup allowed.

Our associates to actually interact with the prediction when the e-mail messages are coming in. The prediction was presented in front of them, saying, Hey, the cognitive service things that it is of the consumer is asking us to remove the late fee. Do you agree or not agree? And the moment the associate is agreeing with that decision that the activity is handed off to our unintended robotic process automation, where it's fulfilling all that act all that account maintenance person that they're disagreeing. We're storing all that information. That where we can go back and retrain our model. So we are making better decisions in the future. And the kind of support And then, the kind of partnership we have received from the business as well.

Since we have created a, gave them the visibility into how those decisions are being made makes me think that we would be able to take automation much farther and then automation works well. When you have, you know, the true partnership and, and, and, and we feel that having this sort of mentality and as well as the tools that we have been able to implement would really set us up for success here in the lines data.

It's It's great to see, you know, pragmatic and practical scenarios like these come up. Amazon and I think that is almost always possible when you have data science and automation, sort of working hand in hand. So, you know, kudos to you and team Atlanta!

Then one thing I would add, I think you and I probably didn't touch on, is around that partnership also with your core technology team, right?

Your underlying platforms, you know, as well. because that's where the data comes from, That's where the actions that are taken into transactions are updated. Right.

So having that partnership with people. and also your underlying technology team. as you've put in this, you know, integrated solution on the top of it or surrounding it is a key as well.

And great to see your success story with engaging the human in taking a decision as the box is suggesting, or the ML solution NLP says, suggesting it's a great use case.

But that partnership is such a key across the organization. Absolutely. We have a, We have a term for that is, the term is, you know, it takes a village to make automations happen and And and you know where you have the technology partners. You have the business partners, you have information security. You have the enterprise risk organization all coming together and really betting the solution to say, you know, does it make sense, should we be doing it and if we should know what is the best way forward.

Yeah, that governance is another key right outside the bank. We just went to a OCC exam, right to say, how are you doing all this solution?

What are you making decisions? So that control aspect is a central governance is a key as well. So it's a balancing of citizen developers. You know, we have companies, you know, that gives us watch for free right now.

You know, Microsoft just announce something, you know, UI Path has a great platform. Well, we need to put this enterprise wide.

Yup, community and a group of people come together in a governance structure to deploy it in a methodical manner, right?

Otherwise, you're going to have a very, you know, problem in your head with bots, just kind of out there individually, citizen developers developing it without having this partnership, and, you know, control could be a bad problem to tackle with. So starting out that in a right way, is a key.

Don't I think that's a, that's, these are all great. I mean, almost like a voice of customer, I would say, Chipotle, and I'm listening to you.

And fascinating.

eight, I know in the, given the fact that we just have 45 minutes, otherwise, this particular session should actually be 2 or 3 years given that, the depth that we need, I, I'll pivot to.

You know, it's almost like Vision said and both of you have that vantage point, but I'll start with ..., what's the true not on the one that you are seeing or other you would set in terms of the, you know, the end state, so to say in those, the automation of what would be that vision look like.

Yeah, I mean, you know, there is still a lot to do, right, but my vision and my, with my operations partner, and, you know, anyone who, I've done, manual processing myself, you know, in my early in my career, right?

So, my vision, and I think the enterprise wide vision, is, two, truly eliminate some of the manual processes and unnecessary, you know, task, and create a digital platform that is integrated as a single, you know, one office term.

We have heard in the past, that we, all these different organizations, different operating units, kinda come together on a single platform, that it's all integrated as possible.

Then it's truly driven by customer experience, right? What do we want our customers to have a need and want?

So drive all of our activity and processes for me. You know, customer point of view. Even we do it today. We can do more of it, right? And really tying in all these different organization and operations group together.

The second vision for me, is to truly free up our human capabilities and creativity by reducing and eliminating manual. I know my day not satisfying task and long hours that the teams work.

So we free up time for family, for me, you know, and so Jamie Diamond has said, Right, what do we, When we get down to 48, 8, 1, then a 6, 7 day work week that some of us just grind toward.

I think that that's kind of a north North star, right? But more and immediately continue to look for end to end processes.

Continue to look for data driven decision when you automate, so you know what impact you're making instead, those matrix, to measure that impact.

And it's not just how many hours or how many employees, you know, kind of reduced like that, but a true impact to the business, to the customer.

And then do it in this collaborative way, across teams, to drive the value, Bringing in your machine learning, data scientists, bringing in your, you know, citizen developers.

And so forth to continue to drive that business, and customer value, would be my vision for this practice.

I think that actually resonates, and I was listening to, you know, Jamie Diamond interviewing to move the other day, and I think you captured the essence of it.

You know, He was talking about return to work and what the future would look like in terms of automation, playing a role, you know, from employee, but more, also, from the customer experience standpoint, really resonates for a large, world-class bank like yours.

Oh, I think you guys have very ambitious vision as ..., equal to those perspectives with the audience today.

Absolutely.

So, one of the thing that happens within your organization is, you know, fragmentation with many, using many different technologies. So hopefully the automation will make things easier. You know, keeping the customer experience and our forefront and also making our associate experience where they're able to do the work in a more frictionless way, where they're able to deliver the best solution to the customer.

Easy and Comfortable way, I think, is is the Nirvana for automation?

Fully automated, our organization looked like we have a very audacious goal. Well, what I would say from the very beginning, we wanted to make sure that it's not something that we wanted to just do automation for the sake of automation.

It is tied with our long range planning to deliver on our commitments.

And, and this year, our target is to be able to exceed more than a million hours of automation and, and, and to devise that, what we feel that we would be able to get there, and we have implemented, some of those already, are how do we, in cluj the hybrid? Which is power user development. Where they are doing the automation development, be it, you know, RPA, as well as data science. And go into with the, with the, with the citizen development. Where we are able to achieve even higher goals, right. Going into 2022, which would be, you know, even higher than what we are planning for this year and next year.

So, fully automated organization would look like where associate, if able to freely move through the various systems where they don't have to worry about.

You know, I have to enter that information from one system to another. But in addition, where they are, you know, they are able to provide their abilities and to the more, you know, value added activity rather than things that just drain the energy as well as the time while doing of those mundane tasks. And, and doing more, retains all the knowledge within the organization that way future task, and automation becomes easier and better for us.

A million hours saved target, and it looks like a great clarion call for entire lands data. I think it's a, it's a great metric and target to look forward to.

I'm looking at the clock, and I think, you know, we can go on and on, I can just sit here and listen to both of you. But I think we just have about, you know, a few minutes to get, you know, Josie. And maybe at all, if he could, you know, share some of the questions that you've seen from the audience today. And then that could, we could, we could ask the panelists to respond to that.

That's terrific. I mean, thank you for that. We got lots of questions during, during the talk, which very insightful perspectives from leaders who are actually doing this level of automation, financial services. So, I'm gonna go right into it and the first question, comes from Katrina, come either. Katrina asks, how can you describe the operational model for, for RPA, specifically? But more broadly speaking for automation in your organizations, is centralized? Or, decentralized, model? Is managed by the businesses? Or some separate business excellence organization, or center of excellence? So, if you can talk a little bit about the governance and operating model for automation.

I'll take that first one, So, this is, we are managing our intelligent automation and RPA in a centralized manner, however, as we have heard, we are very quickly moving over to how do we do a little bit of federated and and going into all the way to the citizen development setup. The governance is a key factor, especially in the financial organizations where you have to make sure that the proper controls or their enterprise risk is, is thought of early on, and, and, and. and having that governance kinda ensures that.

So, the centralized setup kind of helps you get started easily in a controlled way. But now that we have the practices in place, now that we have the governance in place, now we can use that as a foundation and scale from there to go all the way up to the citizen development setup.

Similar at JP Morgan as well. Each business unit are very large, so each business unit has a center of excellence.

We have a forum like council that also governs all business units at a kind of macro level and then within each business unit, and under the Center of Excellence, we govern and support the platform, different solutions that we talked about, that we integrate in a centralized manner.

And then we have kind of decentralized federated model to idea generation, opportunity identification, and then managing the project execution in a rapid manner. And now we're evolving into citizen developer model as well, because centrally controlled in govern structure.

Excellent. I'm going to go on now to William Fuller, who asks, We hear a lot about low code, or no code application, and tools. And in general, even RPA, you know, a lot of people are talking about RPA is going to be like you gotta learn, learn how to use it in college. As, much as you know how to use Excel as an example. So, it's going to become very much kind of a day to day type of tool and acting in an application. So, the question is, if you can talk a little bit about your experiences with the learning curve for getting the stalls to be productive and the how you get the non technical employees onboard with this tools and applications?

Yeah, I mean, I can start, right? I think the key is learning.

And having that curiosity and that willing for our teams, at anybody who's interested in this to learn, and that's the key, and then other thing is the necessity and evolving your careers, right?

From a manually task doing to becoming gate, no solution developer and a builder. Thanks, I think that curiosity is the first thing.

So the way we have done at JP Morgan to have teams adopt Disses.

We have a program called Skills of the Future, wherever you have put together, not just learning how to code, but how to solve a problem, how to understand where the manual processes are, how they work, and then how do you actually apply this solution to that problem.

And then we have taught, you know, teams through boot camps, through hackathon to apply the solutions. And I know hand hold had along the way, right, as they do it to be provided office hours. We provided learning, you know, got the forums for them to do this.

I think it's an evolving, start with curiosity.

There's lots of free solutions and training classes available online, um, so learn, you know, that way and then being able to bring it to your day to day problem and apply it to your broader team.

It's the way I think we have taught people how to do it, and people want to do more of it.

Excited. And if I may, I'll just A or other mention, your web app has completely democratized training so you know go to our website. You'll find all the training pertaining to the platform. It's, it's free. You can take exams and asked her, if I didn't mention, I think curiosity will take you on that trajectory.

Yeah, low code and no code is here to stay, and, and we're going to see more and more of it.

I think that the with the automation, you know, we have this mantra within, within a line say, that is, You know, that the automation is our friend.

It is not, you know, our automation or our Associate, It is ... and associate, right. How do we make their life easier and better and going into future as we are looking at it. The biggest risks that we have as a, as a, as a country, as a, as an industry, is.

Resources with the right skills. So, being able to continually learn and do those things in an effective way where you are able to solve business problems are going to be the fundamental differences. So having training. available. Making, making sure that there are different venues where associate can really learn and practice those things, are are key for these organizations to succeed and excel to the next level.

Thank you so much for that. Unfortunately, as Amit has said, we can talk about this all day long, but we're out of time. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here with us. Amit. Fantastic. job moderating This discussion. Should Follies Shah. Ahmed Hussein thank you for sharing your expertise, your insights, your real practitioner, you know, view and applications. On behalf of World 2000 Global Register participants, we very much welcome your, you taking the time to share your expertise With us.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, what a great way of kicking off They, too, have a tremendous panel of leaders and practitioners of automation. So, thank you very much for all of your questions. As well. We couldn't get to all of them. Remember, go onto LinkedIn. You can post your questions in there, you can make comments several of our speakers go back to the posting and then we'll answer questions and your comments. As as you post them later on. We are going to wrap up this session now, and at the top of the hour, we're going to bring the head of operations and enablement for Asia services as Sun Life, financial shantanu. Khadija is going to be here with us. He's going to talk about re-engineering as a methodology to streamline the claims process and identify opportunities for robotics process automation. So, we're gonna see you ... on the at the top of the hour. And so, we'll see you back soon.