CxO of the Week: Michael Yesudas, CTO, SunTec Biz Solutions

Information and technology have been integral companions of modern human civilization. Today, AI is dominating various sectors in India along with machine learning. Consumer-oriented services are playing a major role in the technology ecosystem. At CIOL, Michael Yesudas has shared his career journey from Silicon Valley to SunTec Business Solutions.

First, I would like to know more about you. Talk to me about your childhood, your dreams and your passions growing up.

As a youngster, my dream was to be an engineer, especially keen to join one of the IITs. As a young engineer, Robotics and Aerospace were my interest fields. In terms of passion beyond regular learning, I was keenly interested in learning new languages and still continue it today. Growing up, I enjoyed playing most sports - cricket and soccer among them.

If you were not doing what you do right now, what would you rather do for a living?

Personally, teaching and learning have always been my interests. So, if I were not an engineer, I would definitely have taken up teaching as a profession and would have been a professor. In fact, post-retirement, I hope to be a lecturer or even a professor someday.

Who motivated or influenced you the most in your life?

My failures and mistakes have most definitely been an immense source of motivation for me in my career. These mistakes have helped me understand what went wrong and how I can correct them for the future. However, my family and close friends have played a vital role in my personal life as well as my career. My wife Mareena has been a key source of inspiration and influence for me. She was instrumental in helping identify my strengths and enabled me to make the decision to become a software engineer.

What made you choose this industry?

I started off my career as a mechanical engineer in the automotive and oil industries. The technology industry was not my initial passion. However, my wife played a significant role in helping me identify that my strength lies in software and consider becoming a software engineer. She spent a significant amount of time explaining the critical concepts, especially with the performance tuning of applications.

Can you talk about your journey in this industry?

I started my career in the oil industry initially and later moved on to become a software support engineer at a British software company. Subsequently, in 1999, I became a software architect and worked with airports in helping them build real-time systems in airports around the world, their flight path and noise monitoring systems. After a brief stint with HP (then Compaq), I moved to Silicon Valley in 2001 and then to General Electric at Atlanta, where I worked predominantly in the ERP and Performance Engineering space, followed by IBM working in Supply Chain and AI Applications. Earlier this year, I joined SunTec.

Why do you think that there is a need for your company to exist in today’s market?

With the rapid shift towards a digital-first or customer-first world, banking has been one of the industries that have undergone a big transformation during the pandemic. Customer expectations for the digitalization of banking services have been continually evolving, and it is important for the industry to anticipate such needs in advance to enhance customer experience and trust. SunTec has been working with banks across the world to help them in their digital transformation journeys by deploying our cloud-native solutions as an intelligent middle layer, without disrupting the core system infrastructure. We are working towards helping banks understand the need for modernizing their infrastructure and becoming customer-driven banks. We also focus on helping them enhance their value-based engagement with customers and deliver value with every transaction. SunTec is the world’s no.1 pricing and billing company and is enabling banks to set up a system of engagement with enhanced product management capabilities, enterprise pricing, revenue management, and partner ecosystem management.

Can you describe your products?

● Our cloud-native, micro-services platform Xelerate helps organizations own the customer experience by setting up a system-of-engagement with enhanced product management capabilities, relationship-based pricing, benefits and loyalty management, enterprise billing & statements management, deal management, indirect taxation and partner ecosystem management and monetization.

● Our solutions such as personalization help organizations meet every customer’s unique needs while our solutions for e-invoicing, VAT, and NIR to name a few, help banks and organizations stay compliant.

Can you describe your business model?

We follow a SaaS and on-premise model. We deploy our solutions with banks in a SaaS model and on-private cloud, designed in a way to fulfill every customer need.

What type of tech and algorithms do you use?

At SunTec, our technology footprint apart from Java consists of traditional RDBMS like Oracle and Postgres, NoSQL Databases like Cassandra and MongoDB, Enterprise Messaging with Kafka, Cloud technology with Containerization and Orchestration tools, etc.

What are your views on the industry during the pandemic and can you give me your insights on the future?

While the banking industry has been working towards adopting digital as a concept, the pandemic has acted as an accelerator for the digitization of the industry. Changing customer expectations of banking services during the pandemic has forced the industry to leverage the right technologies and solutions to anticipate their needs and deepen relationships, trust, and loyalty.

The pandemic is here to stay with us for a little while longer. With this situation, the banking industry will witness a rise in neo-banks or digital-only banks, which is expected to transform the industry. We also expect to see increased usage of cloud and other emerging technologies over the next few years in the industry. Additionally, with the rise in fintech adoption across the country, the banking industry will have to revisit their business models and increasingly leverage technologies to transform their offerings and target wider markets.

What would you like to change about this industry?

Being a successful business is no more about the products, but more about the relationships that it has with its customers. The banking industry needs to understand the importance of becoming a digital-first and customer-first organization. It is imperative that they understand the customer journey and anticipate their needs and expectations in real-time to enhance their experience with the banks and build trust and loyalty. With the onset of the pandemic, the customer expectations to digitized banking services have shifted immensely. Therefore, banks must focus on a value-based engagement with the customers and deliver value with every transaction.

In today’s world, there is a huge need to safeguard data. What steps have you taken to secure your company?

• At SunTec, we are committed to ensuring data security and place the highest importance to safeguarding any data. We focus on security for all levels of data.

• We are working towards establishing a seamless ‘push button’ way of security, where people have the option of deciding if they want to comply with certain kinds of regulations, rather than having a whole implementation project for the data.

What are the recent developments at your company?

At SunTec, our focus over the last few months has been on the recruitment of freshers. We are looking at hiring employees, pan-India, over the next six months for our offices. We are also aiming to make our work environment more learning-centric and are committed to enriching the knowledge base of our employees through Individual Development Programs, keeping in mind an individual’s aspirations. Additionally, with the shift to a digital-first world, customer expectations from banking services are constantly evolving. For this, we have been working towards a SaaS model deployment of our solutions, with a specific focus on banks, to help them on their digital transformation journeys and enable them to anticipate customers’ needs and elevate the customer experience.