Fintech on Friday: Why intelligent automation can lead to a better client experience
While working for Goldman Sachs and studying for an MBA at New York University soon after the turn of the millennium, Zeynep Hizir decided there was something missing from her work life: the thrill of starting up her own business.
She researched leisure services in her native Turkish market and decided Istanbul needed an upmarket spa. News quickly spread about her fledgling venture and the Four Seasons Hotel – a newly-restored 19th century Ottoman Palace sitting on the shores of the Bosphorus – approached her to move her facility there.
“This was an important moment for me, as it was my first encounter with the client experience and allowed me to use my creative instincts,” recalls Ms Hizir, now working for SS&C Technologies, where she aims to digitalise insurance companies’ investment functions, often perceived as behind the innovation curve.
She brought her new, client-centric approach back to Goldman in 2010, this time in London. “The key thing I learned about asset management was that when you speak to a client, it must feel like they are the only ones in the room at that moment,” she says in an interview over a Zoom link from her south London home. This belief that robotics can never displace the human touch is crucial to her fintech work.
“People say robotics is about taking the robot out of the human,” she says. “When I started at Goldman, it was like being in a Charlie Chaplin movie, going through the motions, copying, pasting and sending out emails,” explaining her motivation to digitalise repetitive processes, freeing up employee time for client relations.
This meant automating tasks like reporting and document scanning at the onboarding stage, including deploying software which can “read handwriting to 98 per cent accuracy”.
Put to the test
Deep research on automation helped Ms Hizir, who wrote her doctoral thesis on robotics in investment management while working at Met Life, put her academic theories into practice.
“When I started studying robotic process automation (RPA) in 2016, it looked like the best thing ever, like macros on steroids,” she remembers fondly. But many firms were not convinced by the efficacy of RPA, claiming it had no visible impact on ‘return on investment’ numbers.
The answer to digitalisation, discovered Ms Hizir in her ‘Eureka moment’, lay in combining new technologies. “I thought, wait a minute, if we can mix RPA with artificial intelligence then we can end up with intelligent automation, which is the best solution of all.”
These changes can transform even those firms not deemed to have an innovative culture, she found. “When I started at Metlife, my boss said ‘I don’t know what RPA is,’ but within a year, we had applied it to the business. Technology is advancing so fast that one day, somebody might not be aware of it, and the next day they are knee-deep in implementing it.”
While smaller or less progressive firms often outsource their technology, bigger banks and insurers can afford to invest in technology in-house. JP Morgan, for instance, has “embedded technology into their DNA”, growing innovative units within the bank, while China’s Ping An behaves like “a technology company offering insurance, rather than an insurance company offering technology”.
Digital transformation, says Ms Hizir, is a journey, which most firms are just beginning, using early-stage technologies unlikely to bear fruit until 2025. “If companies have not yet started their digital transformation journey, this is the moment to do it,” she states emphatically. “As mundane, boring tasks become automated, client servicing will increasingly enter the spotlight. The clients will finally get the attention they deserve.”
