Data-Driven Work Cultures: Santhosh Keshavan of Voya Financial On How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level
An Interview With Pierre Brunelle
ACQUIRE new business — There are hundreds of thousands of companies in the United States looking to provide retirement and benefits programs to their employees where Voya can help. With so many potential prospects it can be overwhelming to approach without the support of data and analytics. We’ve closely partnered our data science team with sales and marketing groups to help them succeed. We’ve built a network of internal and external data sources, analyzed massive amounts of information to be able to provide strategic support in terms of where regional or industry-level opportunities are, but also very practical tactical insights on what services a specific company might be interested in. We’ve unveiled a clearer picture of our likely customers, empowering our teams to connect with the right employers, reach the right decision makers, and engage in the right way to best showcase Voya’s strengths.
As part of our series about “How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Santhosh Keshavan.
Santhosh Keshavan is executive vice president and chief information officer for Voya Financial, Inc., where he is responsible for leading the firm’s enterprise technology strategy. In this role, Keshavan is responsible for the firm’s technology systems, data and digital organization, information security and infrastructure. He also serves on Voya’s Executive Committee. Keshavan has more than 25 years of experience as a transformational leader, with expertise in financial services, technology, operations and complex program management, including acquisitions and divestitures. Prior to joining Voya, Keshavan was EVP and CIO for Regions Bank and formerly held leadership positions at Fidelity Investments and SunGard Data Systems (now FIS).
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I started my career as a programmer analyst at an IT consulting startup in Bangalore, India, called Span Systems. I got to develop many systems for the wealth and asset management industry for a company called SunGard (now part of FIS), which included Omni recordkeeping platform. I transitioned from the consultant role to working at SunGard a few years later.
While at SunGard, I had the opportunity to develop strong product management skills, and the ability to lead and influence change through effective communications for a global client base.
I wanted to learn as much as I could about all aspects of technology, so I raised my hand whenever a new opportunity came along, resulting in challenging assignments and career advancement. When an opportunity to lead an acquisition and integration organization in Australia opened, I jumped at it. That career move opened doors to new leadership opportunities and accelerated my career growth.
My initiation into the technology field taught me the fundamentals of IT and gave me a view into all the possibilities technology has to offer. Many don’t realize that technology is a creative discipline. It takes motivation, desire and human creativity to see a need and inspire a solution — that’s true innovation. Technology capabilities are the tools that bring innovation to life. I not only wanted to be a part of that I wanted to lead the way.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
When I first started working in Bangalore, India, I had to drive about two hours (mostly due to traffic and bad roads) to check emails. Part of the process was to download all the emails (and any attachments) to a floppy disk (I am dating myself now) and even though they were quite expensive, we would have couple of backups. There were times when even the backups failed, and we had to make a trip back to the center where we could re-access email. As a result of the additional time and expense of these failed backups, we added quality check to the process where we would log in to another desktop and ensure the attachments were not corrupt before we drove back. While it was painful and added time, it was worth it! Quality checking is an important part of any process and still applies to everything we do today.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. Jeff is a serial entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, and inventor. He also founded two mobile computing companies, Palm Pilot and Handspring. This book eloquently expresses the ultimate goal of thousands of scientists: to understand the mechanics of the human mind which is very relevant for anyone interested in artificial intelligence (AI) on how the next breakthroughs in AI will emerge.
Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
At Voya we don’t think in terms of projects, with a set start and an end date. We work on building capabilities that make a difference in people’s lives. Building capabilities is a journey with a clear vision of where you want to go, understanding the many ways to get there. While we are on many capability journeys now, one journey is particularly exciting to me because it has the greatest potential to help people achieve better financial futures.
Customer expectation for greater integration and personalization is growing and will continue to grow. In the retirement and employee benefits space, people want digital tools that help them make more informed — and comprehensive — benefits decisions. Voya has conducted extensive research with both employers and employees to better understand sentiments around the convergence of health and wealth. Recent Voya research revealed that 7 in 10 employees (73%) are interested in guidance and support tools that would help them understand how much money to put aside for retirement, emergency savings and health care expenses1.
With this in mind, Voya set out on a journey to build those integration and personalization capabilities to fill this customer need. In March, we introduced a new integrated and holistic benefits selection experience — myHealth&Wealth2 — to offer personalized guidance to help employees optimize their household spending across health insurance benefits, emergency savings and saving for retirement. myHealth&Wealth is a technology-enabled, interactive experience that helps employees think about their benefits contributions and savings as a total “benefits budget,” while providing individuals with a personalized action plan. This tool is only the beginning of our personalization journey. We’re on our way to providing a boldly different participant experience consisting of science-based tools, guidance and resources designed to help individuals become more engaged and more on-track for retirement.
At Voya, we will continue to advance our capabilities to reach this goal. From a technology perspective, this requires leading-edge data, digital, analytics and cloud capabilities. Investing in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, API and advanced data science and analytics will continue to be a key focus.
The ability to use data to integrate and personalize digital experiences will continue to develop and improve. With more companies moving to a public cloud environment, there will be greater opportunity to partner with FinTechs and other data sources. This opens endless possibilities to integrate all sorts of data, such as spousal/partner benefits, elder care expenses, student loans, medical claims and more. The ability to bring data together to paint a holistic picture of household finances will lead to more personalized digital experiences. The ease of data integration to deliver digital personalization is one of the greatest opportunities in the financial services industry.
- Based on the results of a Voya Financial survey conducted through Ipsos on the Ipsos eNation omnibus online platform among 1,005 adults aged 18+ in the U.S. (featuring 294 people who are currently working and benefits-eligible). Research was conducted Dec. 17–18, 2020.
- Voya Financial and its affiliated companies (collectively, “Voya”) is making available to you the myHealth&Wealth tool offered by SAVVI Financial LLC. (“SAVVI”). Voya has a financial ownership interest in and business relationships with SAVVI that create an incentive for Voya to promote SAVVI’s products and services and for SAVVI to promote Voya’s products and services. Please access and read SAVVI’s Firm Brochure which is available at this link: https://www.savvifi.com/legal/form-adv. It contains general information about SAVVI’s business, including conflicts of interest.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about empowering organizations to be more “data-driven.” My work centers on the value of data visualization and data collaboration at all levels of an organization, so I’m particularly passionate about this topic. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly it means to be data-driven? On a practical level, what does it look like to use data to make decisions?
Data-driven decision making (DDDM) is defined as using facts, metrics, and data to guide business decisions that align with your goals.
Business decisions — both big and small — are made every day and they are often subject to human assumptions, perspectives, experiences, etc. DDDM, on the other hand, is the practice of letting numbers tell the true story of the business and using those facts to direct future decision making for the business. The first step, though, is being able to ask the right questions of the data. Data is meaningless without the human interpretation and analysis to translate data into action. In my experience, being data driven means being more informed and basing your decisions on the stories and trends your data reveals.
In practical terms, DDDM can take many forms depending on company culture. Generally, it should first be about determining the availability and integrity of the data. After collecting and validating the data, data analysis occurs, trends are identified, and the story is revealed. Only then can the findings be presented to key decision makers or before any strategy setting and decision making takes place. We must allow the data to tell us the story before determining recommendations that lead to be best path forward.
Being data-driven requires us to continually listen to the evidence and ask additional questions. Sometimes, the answers to those questions will confirm our hypotheses, but at other times, they can surprise us. If we’re only looking for data to validate our views, then we’re not leveraging data effectively. Taking data to the next level requires us to be open minded and willing to accept where we might have been wrong and adapt to new information. But decision making is a human activity, most effective when the data story is complemented with experience, perspective and even intuition.
Which companies can most benefit from tools that empower data collaboration?
All companies can benefit from tools that empower data collaboration. I’d say the ones that will benefit the most are those companies that recognize data plays a dual role in both development and enablement of corporate strategy. Traditionally companies have looked at data as an enabler of strategy, but the trend has quickly shifted towards companies now relying on data for the development of strategy.
Data and data science capabilities are emerging as defining elements in business strategy development and key drivers of strategic decisions. A holistic data management strategy, discipline and execution has quickly become the central driver of business growth and market differentiation. Companies are no longer looking at data as just an outcome of business transactions from which they can gain insight, they are now looking at data to identify consumer behavior, needs and expectations — and using that understanding to define future direction.
Companies that recognize data as a driving force in both cases are more likely to secure a more prolific path forward.
We’d love to hear about your experiences using data to drive decisions. In your experience, how has data analytics and data collaboration helped improve operations, processes, and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.
The exciting thing about data is that there are endless opportunities for its use. It can help drive strategy, increase sales, reduce risk, better serve customers, and so much more. Through data and analytics, sales teams can best determine and anticipate client needs, as well as identify ways to proactively address them. This enables companies to be truly customer centric. Data and analytics can also help companies enter into new target markets, and customer experience data can define the look, feel and functionality of a business’s website. As I shared earlier, at Voya we are integrating health and wealth data to offer an integrated and personalized view of household spending across health insurance benefits, emergency savings and saving for retirement. We’re also integrating data across employee benefit products to identify possible claims opportunities that a participant may be unaware of when filing an alternate claim. This specific example enables us to demonstrate that we are truly putting customer needs first and looking for ways to both differentiate Voya and bring clients greater value. Bringing data together in this way helps our customers make more informed decisions about their benefits selections upfront and enables them to optimize their benefits in their time of need. With data, the possibilities are endless, not only to guide strategy, but to improve business outcomes and employee experiences.
Has the shift towards becoming more data-driven been challenging for some teams or organizations from your vantage point? What are the challenges? How can organizations solve these challenges?
I believe everyone has come to appreciate the tremendous value data has to offer, the challenge now lies in instilling a culture and creating operating model that optimizes data management and data science.
When considering an operating model, data is often considered an IT function, yet data strategy should be viewed as a business strategy. The data belongs to the business and the business should decide what they want the data to do for the business. Cultivating a sense of understanding, ownership and empowerment about data in the businesses is essential to advancing and really accelerating business growth. Yet, while every business unit should own their data strategy, data management is an enterprise discipline. Creating a centralized data office will help elevate data strategies to the benefit of the company as a whole, while also creating frameworks and processes for the best management of the business data.
The culture piece is a bit more challenging. Culture change takes time, commitment and real discipline. It takes everyone from the CEO to the individual employee to consistently demonstrate the value of data and data science through actions. This can look like leaders requiring data-driven decision making of their teams, to employees questioning their processes through a lens of data-driven improvement opportunities.
Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Effectively Leverage Data to Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.
As I alluded to earlier, the companies that optimize data in both the development and enablement of corporate strategy, are the ones that will be able “take it to the next level” — and will get there faster. We’re doing this at Voya, while also looking at ways to effectively leverage data to drive better outcomes for our company and our customers.
- ACQUIRE new business
There are hundreds of thousands of companies in the United States looking to provide retirement and benefits programs to their employees where Voya can help. With so many potential prospects it can be overwhelming to approach without the support of data and analytics. We’ve closely partnered our data science team with sales and marketing groups to help them succeed. We’ve built a network of internal and external data sources, analyzed massive amounts of information to be able to provide strategic support in terms of where regional or industry-level opportunities are, but also very practical tactical insights on what services a specific company might be interested in. We’ve unveiled a clearer picture of our likely customers, empowering our teams to connect with the right employers, reach the right decision makers, and engage in the right way to best showcase Voya’s strengths.
2. INCREASE sales
The distribution partners with whom Voya works engage with us across a wide range of mediums — meetings with our sales and relationship teams, webinars to keep up on trends and best practices, education emails, industry events, and online resources to name a few. Bringing all these points of engagement together with some of the segmentation work we’ve done to understand what different types of advisors and firms want from Voya — both in terms of solutions and how they like to engage — gives us a great set of data to understand where they might be in the buying process. We’ve used data science to then recommend the right time for follow-up by our sales teams, while also highlighting some of the messaging that might be most relevant for them to have an effective conversation on how Voya can help them meet their goals.
3. RETAIN customers
One of the biggest pitfalls that people run into in successfully saving for retirement is taking their money out too early. Sometimes people find themselves in situations where they need money urgently for very valid reasons and start to look towards closing out their retirement plan, but haven’t thought through tax implications, or other options their plan might offer like loans and hardship withdrawals. Similarly, employees changing jobs or retiring often think they need to close out their retirement plan and make decisions they later regret. We’re able to use a wide range of data and analytics to detect when these moments are about to happen — for example, a sudden interest in some of our online tools, a change in savings patterns leading up to key age-milestones or looking at a withdrawal form. By identifying these activities before the actual money leaves, we’re able to guide them to educational resources and conversations to make sure they make the best decision for them. Often times, this leads to them continuing their relationship with Voya, and if not, we can still make sure they felt informed in taking the steps they did.
4. REDUCE risk
Account-takeover fraud is an industry-wide risk and with identity theft on the rise, it is imperative that we protect what is typically one of our customers’ largest assets — their retirement accounts. Leveraging internal and external data, voice biometrics, geolocation, and activity sequencing allows us to create a robust picture of who our customers really are. Machine learning allowed us to develop behavioral profiles and identify pattern shifts and abnormalities. We have developed comprehensive monitoring across contact points — phone calls, website or app engagement, and any account change requests — to rapidly identify and flag potentially fraudulent activity for review and ensure their accounts stay safe.
5. IMPROVE process effectiveness
A key focus for us is continually improving the effectiveness and efficiency of our internal processes to drive both business growth and efficiencies of scale. Our benefits underwriting teams have used data science to build a prioritization process that lets us optimally deploy our team, ensuring we get in front of the best opportunities and spend less time where we won’t be the right fit. Within Investment Management, we’re building new data sets by gathering unstructured data and applying natural language processing to gain new visibility into companies. We’re using this in machine learning to predict important events like dividend cuts. Our quantitative analysts are combining these outputs into their stock selection process to achieve improved returns and stronger risk management.
Most of the data-driven business strategies revolve around using data to improve the existing business outcomes like those detailed above. This has been done quite successfully in many companies. The more challenging — and, in my opinion, more exciting — type of data-driven culture is to use data to innovate new business models.
The name of this series is “Data-Driven Work Cultures”. Changing a culture is hard. What would you suggest is needed to change a work culture to become more Data Driven?
I noted some examples of ways to create a data-driven culture earlier, but for an organization to be truly driven by data it must foster a data-first culture. A data-first culture doesn’t see data as a byproduct of business operations, but rather as an integral initiator of business processes. At Voya, we are no longer just aggregating data, but we are rather intentional with the data we collect. We have an environment to effectively store and manage the data in a usable format. A key aspect of being a data-first organization is collecting all possible data that comes out of daily operations, not just enough to perform a specific business purpose. When you have all the data you can run different analysis to make discoveries and even let the data guide you in asking more questions. This is what being a data-first company means for Voya.
The future of work has recently become very fluid. Based on your experience, how do you think the needs for data will evolve and change over the next five years?
The needs for data will continue to grow and evolve as it has over the past decades. As it becomes more engrained in business processes and decision making, we will most certainly discover more opportunities for its practical use. One such emerging opportunity will be about enhancing the way we work in a hybrid/remote work environment. This can take shape in many forms, including helping to improve employee productivity measures, streamlining existing processes, even collecting and analyzing employee engagement and wellbeing data. All of these opportunities can both enhance employee experiences and lead to improved business outcomes in our new way of working.
I can also see data and data science adding tremendous value to current HR and talent acquisition practices. Now that we are all more open to a global talent pool, data can help formulate global workforce strategies, determining geographies, scheduling, and compensation and benefits packages, that optimize engagement and productivity. With the amount of workplace data now available, we are in a position to begin to formulate new ideas on how to best leverage that data to improve existing work practices.
Does your organization have any exciting goals for the near future? What challenges will you need to tackle to reach them? How do you think data analytics can best help you to achieve these goals?
Voya has many exciting goals for the future, but today I’ll focus in on one particularly close to my heart. I’m incredibly proud to work for a company like Voya, which is steeped in culture and a deep commitment to important social causes. Through our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) efforts, Voya is purposefully bringing stakeholders together to address some of society’s greatest challenges; focusing on issues that are most material for its business and important to its colleagues, customers and communities. We are especially proud of the accomplishments we have made in terms of advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. These efforts can be seen in the diverse composition of our board of directors and our leadership team, as well as in the many awards we have won for our strong culture. While Voya has a strong commitment to ESG initiatives, we know there is always more we can do. The scope of ESG work is vast and the world’s priorities are constantly changing. It’s challenging to understand where one can make the greatest impact and how to prioritize and focus. I know our data strategy and data science capabilities will guide us in the right, data-driven direction.
How can our readers further follow your work?
Readers can follow my personal LinkedIn account, as well as Voya’s corporate LinkedIn account and the Voya newsroom for the latest news and announcements.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
