Symphonizing Technology for Customers with Swamy Seetharaman

The rise of technology, digital services, and social networks has led to increased customer expectations. Customers are demanding personalized services throughout all industries — particularly banking and finance. From shopping online to online banking, customers have been presented with the opportunity to get what they want and when they want conveniently. Simultaneously, e-commerce, personalization, and new ways of communicating with customers have led to tremendous benefits for customers.

To understand the effect of digital transformation on customers more thoroughly, in the 38th episode, we get into a conversation with Swamy Seetharaman, Head of Technology at CRED. With professional experience of around three decades in several multinational companies, Swamy holds his expertise in domains like technology transformations, product strategy, and building organizations. Let’s know more about his journey and experiences in the latest episode of “Avantika Designeering Series”, “Symphonizing Technology for Customers”.

Rohit Lalwani: There is so much excitement about what CRED does and so much in the public domain and it is so inspiring and exciting that everyone wants to be a part of it.

Moving now from CRED to things you do in the world of technology, and I have a few questions on that. My first one is, when you talk about the digital payment industry, customers are used to seamless payments for most daily transactions and with ever-increasing expectations for an integrated and secure-based payment for any product or service.

However, I see that there is a gap in understanding whether this technology has the potential for sustainable development that encompasses ecosystem growth beyond social and economic change. The question that I have for you is what are the possible scenarios for the future of the digital payment industry?

Swamy: I want to talk a little bit about the UPI disruption. India has shown the world how to build a stack of this proportion and its adoption as well which was incredible. I am very proud of UPI and the kind of disruption and simplification that it has created. Roadside vendors are collecting payment through QR codes. For example, people who sell tender coconut also collect payment through online mode. It is extremely empowering for them and everyone because the digital footprint is simplified, and solves so many things. I am super proud of that. And I think we are on the right trajectory if we foresee in the future, payment will become even simpler, things like ‘Tap and Pay’ a lot of contactless payment, which again is already with post-COVID, some of that is already out there in the market not having a second factor again some improvements already you would be seen out in the market or tokenization will become bigger. It will make it much safer. You would never have to reveal your card number for online or offline transactions.

There are from factors like ‘Pay later’ and it has caught up the imagination, it will become more prevalent and that just removes the friction. If you take a drop-off or checkout for many of these e-commerce companies, then the main reason would be friction.

From an authentication perspective, biometric face-voice, these are things that will evolve and it is already mulching.

These are some of the things I foresee, but largely I would say is the simplification of payments and the second is interoperability.

A lot of these things will be standards and not like something proprietary for people and not one or two companies, a lot of interoperability will play and simplification will happen. Our digital footprint will grow significantly through all form factors of payment, whether it is about credit, debit, whether about pay later, or any form factors.

Rohit Lalwani: I am sure that there is a huge amount of disruption, which was expected. In the last decade, we have seen a couple of exciting times for this. While we talk about disruption, my next question is based on those organizations which are facing pressure to deliver more value to customers and to lead change through evolving digital capability. Obviously to do this successfully certain capabilities must be required within an organization. The question that I have is, what are the ingredients of a successful digital transformation strategy?

Swamy: In terms of AI itself if you look at the value or two sets of value to that, one is for the consumers and the other one is for the companies and organizations themselves. Let me give three-four examples primarily on this transformation. Let us talk about personalization. Personalization is giving the right set of information.

There is a lot of information overload and there is so much to be done but how are you able to understand users’ interests based on explicit and implicit signals and now you can remove that cognitive overload and give the right things at the right time so that they can fulfil theirs needs.

This is why personalization becomes extremely important. To do personalization, it is really important to understand who your customers are and what their needs are, what are their wants, what their habits are? This is extremely important to understand customers and then personalize the experience for them. If I have to extend this, if a customer has a need, you need the right interventions. There are so many companies who go and give a loan to people, who have excess wealth and they have no interest in doing that. But some people have an interest, let us say a sudden medical need. They need loans. So, understanding and providing them at the right time would be very useful for them because you are solving a real problem for them. They need the money and have the right intent to pay back, but they need the money at that time.

So therefore the right interventions are extremely important. If you look at it there is a lot of unstructured data. How do you make sense out of it and build signals out of it that become extremely important? All of them are fundamentally going into understanding customers better and helping them and solving them. Everything has to be done with consent and the data and extreme privacy have to be taken. If consent is given for a value then doing that makes a lot of sense.

The last one, which I wish to touch upon is, why understanding customer signals are important. Let us take insurance as an example. All of us get the same premium amount and in terms of your repayment behaviour or your credit score, you would have always been disciplined but you get the same premium as anybody else.

So when you start solving for a small percentage of people who are bad actors, then a large part of good actors do not get the benefit. So, this digital transformation should solve that and it should solve the right intervention, it should solve not getting penalized for someone else’s mistake, it should solve for removing the cognitive overload, and it should solve for a personalized experience. That is my opinion, where we can fundamentally solve this incredible technology for adding value to customers.

Rohit Lalwani: This brings me to my last question. At Avantika university, we have coined the term ‘Designeering’, which is the base ideology and philosophy that we operate on, where the world of design and technology is seen to be blending. While you touched upon this in your previous answer, what is your take on this blended approach, and do you think ‘designeering’ is an exciting area or an important way to go out and coach the future talent?

Swamy: Absolutely. Users will churn without a good design experience while solving problems is extremely critical. Assuming that everyone in all the teams is together, they do not have any thinking box. They know that this can be solved by having conversations between design products and engineering together to ensure that there is no thinking bug, which means we can only create what we think. We create things twice, one mentally and one physically. The term ‘designeering’ is rightly coined because they go hand in hand and it is extremely important in this era to ensure and remove all the cognitive overload and we provide the best experience for users and we solve the problems and simplify this whole thing. I certainly believe this will take off. It is very tightly integrated and kudos to your university and team for coining this and putting this as a curriculum. I think this will do well.

Without a good design, you would not be able to solve a problem in this new age where the threshold of expectation is high.

There are more questions that have been answered by Swamy Seetharaman. To learn more about Design and Technology head to our latest Podcast episode. For more details, visit our profile.