Bajaj Finserv is a part of Bajaj Holdings & Investments Limited, focused on consumer finance businesses, life insurance, and general insurance.
Bajaj Finserv has invested heavily in analytics, most of the decisions are data-driven. We spoke to Parag Lokhande, who heads service and operations data Unit for Bajaj Finserv, about the current impact of analytics at the organization.
Parag Lokhande is a seasoned analytics professional having spent 14 years in analytics. He has worked with Companies like Metlife, AEGON and ICICI prudential in the past. He likes to read and share new trends on analytics, is an active blogger and loves to interact with students.
Analytics India Magazine: How does Bajaj Finserv utilize analytics?
Parag Lokhande: Organization has long back realized that Data has to be at the core of the Risk, product and customer-related process and a lot of effort is put to capture and store data at various touchpoints. Company has also invested heavily on reporting tools so the data reaches to the last mile in a secured and effective way.
The leaders drive the change based on data and even employees in the non-technical role are encouraged to learn about data analytics. This has created an environment where discussion happens on techniques and methods used in models- ( ML, DL and AI), Validation of models and how to drive test and learn across various campaigns.
AIM: Can you point to some specific analytics use cases that brought value to the organization?
PL: Every day some new innovation happens in the organization. To talk of a few, We are the first NBFC to automate our email process using ML models and BOT. Today for our top service related queries, ML understands the intent of the customers, captures entity (like Loan no, FD etc) and responds to customers using RPA’s. Using this we have been able to substantially reduce our response time, increase the accuracy of responses and most importantly are able to handle scale without manpower addition.
Lot of work is also happening on unstructured data to understand sentiments, identify opportunities to cross-sell up-sell as well as monitor Social media for any significant event which may lead to Reputational loss.
AIM: How is the analytics group structured, team size, under which department etc?
PL: We started analytics journey long time back, today we have been able to institutionalize analytics in the organization. We have COE’ for most of our business, the analytics team is a key part of this COE and drives a lot of changes using the power of data. Each analytics team would have a BI team, data Science team and data engineering team. The size of the team can vary from 20-35 members based on the size of the business. Which means we have significant no of employees who are working on data science.
AIM: What is the biggest challenge you face while implementing data-driven decision making for your organization?
PL: Every business has its own set of challenges. The biggest challenge we face is getting the business team and data science team to understand each other challenges. The data science team has to understand the business problem and the business team has to understand how to use the model. Thankfully in our case, there is strong data orientation at leadership level which helps us to overcome this problem.
AIM: How did you start your career in analytics?
PL: I started my journey with ICICI Prudential in 2006 after graduating from NITIE. I got an opportunity to work on EDW there and thus developed a love for analytics. I worked on life and health business and then moved on to set up the analytics unit in AEGON Life. It gave me different learning as it was a start-up. I took care of analytics, strategy and cross-sell over there. After spending 11 years in insurance, I wanted to explore other businesses hence joined Bajaj Finserv and enjoying every day over here.
AIM: What are some of the things that the head of analytics function should keep in mind?
PL: World of analytics is evolving every day, the new employees are much more aware and knowledgeable than the older generation. It is important for Analytics head to spend time with them, nurture them, allow them to make mistake, let them come with a new solution and help them to understand the nuances of the business. It is important to have some non-conformist in your team who will challenge the existing status quo and come with different solutions. We need to develop such people and grow them to contribute in a meaningful way to business.
AIM: What are the biggest trends that you are seeing in the analytics industry?
PL: Voice, text and image will change the world. 27% of online global population is using voice for search. Today Alexa and google home are part of every upper-middle-class household. People use video’s to learn new things. Coursera, udemy platforms are used by all of us. In the whole process, we generate millions of data points. Today organization who know and understands their customers in and out are the ones who will survive going forward.
Analytics has to play a big role in the big data environment. We need people who understand nuances of business as well have a strong technical background to solve business problems, With the new advancement happening in the tech world, ex 5G we will see a massive change in behaviour of the customer.
AIM: Anything else that you would like to add
PL: Today World is moving very fast, analytics is an exciting field. Everyday new technology, new methods, new data set are getting released. Focus on learning new skills, understanding nuances of business, read more and keep exploring. With more of more leaders understanding the importance of data, welcome to the exciting future.
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