Ahead in the Cloud: Customer Service at Digital Speed with Suresh Renganathan

Chad Watt: Welcome to Ahead in the Cloud, where business leaders share what they've learned on their cloud journey. I'm Chad Watt, Infosys Knowledge Institute researcher and writer. Here today with Suresh Renganathan, Chief Technology Officer of Teachers Federal Credit Union. Teachers FCU has its roots in Long Island and 420,000 members across the country. It is one of the three largest open charter credit unions in the country. That basically means that any person can join and deposit money or take out a loan. Suresh and Teachers are very busy right now. Suresh is leading a broad technology transformation effort, and Teachers is expanding into Florida and supporting members across the nation. Welcome, Suresh in Ahead in the Cloud.

Suresh: Thank you, Chad. I'm really glad to be here.

Chad Watt: Tell me about the first time you heard about cloud computing.

Suresh: If I can think back around somewhere in 2006, when Amazon Web Services introduced something called S3 or Simple Story Solution and EC Elastic Computing, that's the first time at least I heard about cloud computing services, even though it's been in existence longer than that.

Chad Watt: Give me your kind of take, and this is a little bit off script, but give me your take on cloud computing and financial services businesses. How does that work well again?

Suresh: The financial services today is undergoing a solid transformation across the industry, financial institutions, banks, credit union, everybody, the foundation for any transformation even digital is going to be cloud because cloud provides your business agility, cloud provides you elasticity, provides you resilience, and certainly even higher security than certain small data centers if you want.

Chad Watt: So let's just do some cloud calibration for here. Talking about Teachers on kind of a scale of 0 to 100, how essential are the cloud systems you have to your day-to-day work?

Suresh: So basically right. I said the cloud services is very much essential for digital transformation and financial institutions, including Teachers are undergoing the digital transformation. So the cloud offers very significant opportunity, improve business agility, service delivery, time to market, even enable new capabilities and deliver better member experience. So I would say cloud is still almost number one priority. I'll say, what are the number one later but it's just cybersecurity. So security and cloud is a high priority for any transformation.

Chad Watt: So where are you guys in terms of your migration early stage in the middle process, mostly done?

Suresh: Like many companies, we are currently in a hybrid form. What does it mean? All the new developments are initiating in the cloud, whether it's lake, whether it's online banking or whether it's account opening, whether it's a collaboration tools. Even we developed deployed member 360 using Salesforce technologies, which is in the cloud. So there are a lot of systems in the cloud. There are certain core systems we have in our data centers. We are early stage of planning the migration.

Chad Watt: Are there some things you'll never move to the cloud, either for regulation or historical reasons, and how do you decide?

Suresh: Today, I do not see a reason for not moving to cloud. Cloud are more compliant. ISO 9001, 27001. They have more certifications than any medium range company can acquire, but for investment reasons, because people like us, we invested in certain data centers we have in enough infrastructure. Probably we may, as our cloud strategy evolves, we may decide to have some tier three or certain applications, POCs, innovation lab, whatever it is, some backups to be retained in our data center. But I do not see any compliance reasons or other reasons why we cannot migrate go in the cloud.

Chad Watt: Isn't that something. It's amazing how far regulations have maybe caught up with the cloud. We've talked about some technical things. So cloud transformation is a major goal for you guys. We've talked about the technical aspects of it, but let's also talk about the change aspects of it because change is always hard. And cloud transformation requires that human change as well. How do you go about persuading people who are resistant to change a recent guest of mine called them box huggers to really embrace a kind of cloud first strategy?

Suresh: It's a great question, Chad, you said it yourself. The biggest change we have to focus on is people, right? So in my observation, people do not care about transformation until you tell them how it'll positively impact their role, right? It's people we have to focus on first. So in my opinion, everything lives and dies by strategy. First, create a cloud strategy and gain buying from key stakeholders across the company. Second, form a cloud advisory council, like a steering committee, a member, a leader from across organizations. Third, from a cloud governance team where they will first craft out roles, responsibilities, accountability. Then they will help us with a change management explaining to the team what's in it for them, how they will value. Based on that, slowly, this team, the cloud governance team will help anybody to create a value realization and then delivery management plan. And that is a foundation first.

And let's not forget as we develop these things, in my opinion, where many small companies failed in many areas, you have to design how a future operating model in the cloud looks like. Whether we need to invest in cloud architect, cloud admin, cloud engineers. So develop that's fasting roles, right? Who's going to be a part of operating team. Second thing is we have to have beyond the cloud strategy, we have to have a proper cloud migration plan. How are you going to migrate? Which systems are going to get migrated first? What's the agile and iterative plan, is the key thing I could quickly think of, Chad.

Chad Watt: Got it. I want to come back to the cloud council has that something you've done in previous work? Have you had a cloud council in place?

Suresh: In every transformation I've done right now doing are done at Farmers Insurance. We first form two things. One is steering committee. Second is enterprise governance and a change management team.

Chad Watt: Who do you bring into that? You have some technical people, you have some other people?

Suresh: The key influences and who could gain the buy-ins of the entire company because there's no longer a silo, right? Everything is connected in enterprise, whether it's members or customers, they look at a company as a whole, not at digital or not at different channel wise. So what do we deliver? It's still integrated. So I try to bring in teachers, for example, in digital transformation, we have a steering committee and a governing committee. We have many more other areas of governance. It works well to bring collective intelligence early on. It may look like chaotic, but once the engine moves, it produces value in agile form iteratively with constant feedback and improvements.

Chad Watt: Great. I want to come back to your discussion on operating model, migration, and transformation. Migration obviously has endpoints. Does transformation ever end when you're talking about cloud?

Suresh: Transformation is a journey, right? If you look back, transformation has always been with us in human history, from hunters and gatherers, to agriculturists, from agriculture to manufacturing, for manufacturing to knowledge workers.

So transformation is a journey. In my opinion, this time digital tools are accelerating the transformation, which means from a regular banking service or product company, we are accelerating to generate something of value and enable better experience, achieve operational efficiencies, back and forth. That's a transformation happening today. So I see it as a journey. It will never end.

Chad Watt: Let's talk a little bit more about data, cloud and AI. You've got a lot of data cloud makes it easy to move data around and AI promises to help you make sense of it quicker and more efficient. Looking at kind of the areas of business to break it out. The customer facing experience, core business operations, and support services. Where are you working the most with data and AI?

Suresh: That's a great question. Teachers, as much as we are one of the largest credit union. We are still small compared to large banks. We are forward thinking leaders with pragmatism. So we began our work on AI and data in core operations and support services. So today we began our journey in this area, intelligent automation using machine learning for OCR or Optical Character Recognition. We have developed many robotic process automation across all the business units to achieve efficiency and scale.

Chad Watt: You mentioned getting this data and AI scaled up. It's one thing to change a manual process into an automated process. How do you take that to across the whole business and have impact on the business?

Suresh: That's a great question. For example, we went around every organization within Teachers, and we asked, what are the mundane activities you do not like to do. Many members order debit cards. It takes 23 different steps from three different systems. Sometimes I'm just saying that I don't accurately know the number. So what happens is now the bot tirelessly works almost 24-hours on operating on debit card reorder. There is something called UDM monitoring, which is basically monitoring for undisclosed credits. When you apply for mortgages. The bot constantly monitors on your credit history. So there are many ways we do it. And then we scale it when the volume peaks up using technology. When you strengthen this kind of foundation, that allows us to be ready for the national growth as well.

Chad Watt: Give me your magic wand usage for data, AI, and cloud. What do you dream of doing someday if you have unlimited power?

Suresh: If I had unlimited power, I really want to enable first a descriptive insight, which allows the company to look at health and well-being, I would love to produce predictive insights so that it allows us to make the right investment choices, to deliver growth and profitability. I would love to even deliver prescriptive insight solutions based on trends, patterns, and other things, so that leaders are realizing the value of data. That's one thing, right? This is not just in the area of business growth or personalization, or even in the area of fraud management, even in the area of other support services. That's how I would like to see it, Chad.

Chad Watt: I'm curious, let's talk a little bit more about data. When you talk about your fellow executives within the organization, what do they expect to get from data?

Suresh: All leaders, whether my teammates are I've seen even in Farmers or other places, all leaders expect value. All leaders would like to see a data driven business model, either for marketing, for cross and lapse services, fraud management. The reason is the IT guys we've been saying right from the early on data is the new currency, data are fuel to propel the business grow, right?

Chad Watt: So the data is the new oil. Yeah.

Suresh: Oil. Exactly. Even if our data is new plutonium, right? Because if it's in the right hand, it produces value. If it's the wrong hand. So, so...

Chad Watt: I like that better. I like that better.

Suresh: So ultimately, we want to accomplish targeted growth opportunities. We want to accomplish personalized experience. We want to enable fact-based investment decisions. We want to predict and reduce, excuse me, delinquencies. We need to figure it out. A new revenue generating opportunities, even establish a risk tolerance model. Today, we support our chief finance office on the current elevated credit loss ECL. If you will compliance effort, track branch performances against objectives. So a lot of plethora of use cases and that's what the leaders want. Ultimately, they want to realize value.

Chad Watt: Got it. Let's talk a little bit about data storage. What is your ideal approach to data storage? Warehouse, lake, lake house, data mesh, cloud, on-premises, hybrid. What is your ideal approach on, in the context of a financial services business?

Suresh: I always at least tell my team think big first, right? Begin with the end in mind but think really big. Now, that IT is teaching think composable as well so that it evolves to that north star. So the north star is far think big, but act small, right? The MVP, we talked about a Minimum Viable Product. Then once you deploy realize the value, is it valuable collect the feedback through that data. In this case, data governance council, if you were data governance and then iteratively keep deploying by using collective intelligence, that's number one. That's my approach. But when it comes to the data lake, sorry, data warehouse, data lake and lake house. If you think about it, the first-generation data platform, we can call it data warehouse, right? We derive descriptive insights. And then of course we are realizing value.

Now the leads are coming along. We can call it a second-generation data platform, right? A semi-structure, non-structure data is pumping in. So data science is using that lake to generate value. Now, comes the third thing lake house. It's a combination of data warehouse plus the lake because through the industry would love to see a centralized data storage, centralized data area, a single platform serving whether we serve the BI team, analytics team for reports or we serve data scientists, or even we can serve certain applications with real time analytics for personalization and next best offer. So the consumption towards the lake and lake house is really expanding.

Chad Watt: Can you briefly kind of give me some of the traits of an organization that has its data processes?

Suresh: Learning from American Express, Farmers, and now at Teachers do not allow multiple data sources. A single source of truth is key. So centralize and organize the data in one repository that's key thing. Second, establish a strong data governance. Where domain owners are a business owning their own set of data, then invest in right policy, procedures and processes where the domain owners are responsible for quality, privacy and compliance as well. So when it comes to data accessibility, we talk about it. The democratization of data is key. We have to open up the right access to the right members, beyond analytics and BI teams. The last one I've seen to drive data oriented culture. You should have an integrated set of tools, whether it's Tableau, whether it's machine learning for data scientists, anybody connected with lake, so that it's easier for people to consume the data the way they like. So those are the key traits I've seen for a successful data driven organization, Chad.

Chad Watt: Related to security and cloud. We also have the world we live in today, which is pretty much a work from wherever. And you have to lay security and workforce implications over that. It was a quick shift for a lot of companies, just I'll say broadly done in crisis mode. We moved from working from the office to working from home. Did that have an impact on cybersecurity standards?

Suresh: It did right here in the US I'm seeing, we tend to ship quickly the pendulum in a way to the left way to the right. So when the pandemic hit and we went fully lights off or fully remote, we just start putting a laptop or putting a device and connecting them to the data center is good enough, which is not everybody. So there are enough compliance, legal and educational requirements beyond protecting, using a VPN or antivirus software, right? So bring your own device needs to have a policy. You need to have a stronger mobile device management solutions constantly upgrade antivirus, anti-spyware, Automator updates regularly, and certainly bring constant awareness and compliance trainings to our people. So that was originally missed, but quickly I've seen people are pulling it through and absolutely that's what I like about the US and the trend in industry. Pretty much. We are stabilizing. Well, Chad, first of all, thank you very much. For asking some great questions. Thank you for the opportunity and thank you for the coverage of Teachers Federal Credit Union.

Chad Watt: You're welcome. Thank you very much, Suresh. The Ahead in the Cloud podcast is produced for MIT tech review and partnership with Infosys Cobalt, visit our content hub on technologyreview.com to learn more about how businesses across the globe are moving from cloud chaos to cloud clarity. You can follow Ahead in the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts. You can find more details in our show notes and transcripts at the Knowledge Institute's home on the web that's at infosys.com/iki. Thanks to our guest, Suresh Renganathan and our producers, Catherine Burdette, Christine Calhoun, and Yulia De Bari. Dode Bigley is our audio technician. I'm Chad Watt with the Infosys Knowledge Institute signing off. Until next time, keep learning and keep sharing.