Key Insights
Reusable Digital Capabilities Enhance Efficiency
Building reusable digital capabilities significantly enhances operational efficiency in banking. These capabilities, which are product and line of business agnostic, allow for a consistent client experience and predictable processes across various services. Examples include automating document uploads, ensuring correct document selection, and extracting relevant information reliably. This approach not only improves productivity and reduces costs but also allows for scalability in operations. By creating components that can be reused across different banking functions, organizations can handle varying workloads more dynamically, ensuring smooth client interactions and quicker service delivery. This method also supports better resource allocation, enabling professionals to focus on more complex tasks that require higher-level thinking.
Data Extraction and Automation are Crucial
Data extraction and automation play crucial roles in streamlining banking operations. Handling large volumes of documents, these technologies ensure that information such as dates of birth, names, social insurance numbers, and income details are accurately extracted and processed. This reduces manual workload and increases accuracy in operations like mortgage origination and loan servicing. Automation helps in routing tasks that require additional scrutiny and ensures that processes are completed efficiently. By integrating data extraction and automation into daily operations, banks can improve reliability, reduce errors, and enhance overall productivity. These technologies also support regulatory compliance by ensuring that data is handled consistently and accurately.
AI is Key to Solving Business Problems
Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for addressing business challenges in the banking sector. Rather than using AI indiscriminately, it is applied to specific problems to enhance operational efficiency and client services. AI’s applications include machine learning for data analysis, improving decision-making processes, and automating routine tasks. This strategic use of AI helps in reducing costs, speeding up workflows, and providing better insights for business strategies. AI-driven tools enable banks to process large datasets quickly, identify patterns, and make informed decisions that enhance client satisfaction. By focusing on practical use cases, AI becomes an integral part of solving real-world business problems, driving innovation, and maintaining competitive advantage in the industry.
Episode Highlights
Career Journey and Transition to Banking
Zeeshan Syed started his career as a software engineer in oil and gas before transitioning to banking. His initial exposure to banking came through consulting for the Royal Bank of Canada, which later led to a permanent role in the bank’s business financial services. This transition was driven by a continuous desire to learn and adapt to new industries. Despite initially planning to return to consulting after gaining some experience, Zeeshan found the values and culture at RBC compatible with his own, leading to a 15-year tenure.
“I’d work at the bank for two years, get some experience under my belt, and then go consult again […] It just ended up being two years turned into going on 15 years now with the bank.”
Overcoming Career Challenges
Facing challenges head-on, Zeeshan emphasizes the importance of resilience and adding value in new environments. Moving from oil and gas to banking, he found himself surrounded by experts in commercial banking and risk. This background difference helped him approach problems from unique perspectives, enabling him to contribute meaningfully. His approach involves asking different questions and viewing challenges as opportunities to learn and grow.
“You’re not necessarily smarter than anyone else in the room, but you can approach problems from a different perspective and you can just ask it differently.”
Building Reusable Digital Capabilities
Zeeshan discusses the importance of creating reusable digital capabilities to streamline operations and improve client experiences. These capabilities, designed to be product and line of business agnostic, help ensure consistency and predictability across various banking services. By focusing on scalable operations, these reusable components allow RBC to handle peaks and troughs in workload efficiently, enhancing productivity and cost-effectiveness.
“We want to build capabilities that are product and line of business agnostic. We want to build them for reuse because it allows for more consistent experience, a more predictable pattern that we can establish and deploy in different areas.”
Future of Automation and AI in Banking
Zeeshan highlights the potential of AI and machine learning in transforming banking operations. Rather than using AI as a one-size-fits-all solution, it is applied strategically to solve specific business problems. AI helps in improving decision-making processes, automating routine tasks, and providing better insights. The focus is on expanding the toolkit to address client and business problems effectively, making AI a crucial element in future banking innovations.
“We center our conversations around what is the client problem we’re trying to solve for, what is the business problem we’re trying to solve for, and then looking at our toolkit and expanding that toolkit to say what other capabilities can be pulled in.”
