CxO of the Week: Praveen Paulose, MD and CEO, Celusion Technologies.

Celusion Technologies, a software company develops Enterprise Applications with cutting-edge technology. With its passion for technology, the company loves to tackle a challenge. It used its new-age technology to create a seamless and secure experience for its clientele in the BFSI sector. The software company equips banks, financial co-operations, stockbroking companies, insurance companies to transform their customer acquisition processes into a fully digital channel augmented by real-time regulatory checks and artificial intelligence for fraud detection.

Praveen Paulose, MD and CEO, Celusion Technologies is a pioneer in the BFSI industry. He outlines the industry landscape and how Celusion fits the bill. Excerpts of the QnA.

What, as per you, are the five important things that fintech should be looking at today?

Digital Channels for Customers: Analyse all customer acquisition & servicing touchpoints and ensure that these touchpoints can be served through pure digital channels.

Workforce Productivity: Digital platforms to enable Work from Anywhere; to streamline operations and vendor interactions resulting in greater productivity. It will also help focus more on revenue-generating activities.

Security: With the new shift to systems accessible from anywhere, the BFSI need to be more resilient to the proliferation of cyber threats and data security.

Artificial Intelligence: Leverage artificial intelligence within your processes. This will help improve customer experience, due diligence. It will also help discover insights that help your decisioning process.

Data-Driven Insights: With digital transformation, you generate terabytes of data and are better positioned to make data-driven insights to make faster decisions and improvements on the current processes.

What changes did the pandemic bring to the Fintech Industry?

Even before COVID-19, consumer expectations were constantly evolving, convincing banks to use computerized channels, peer-to-peer payments and online wallets. The pandemic has incredibly highlighted the significance of digitization. The utilization of ATMs and money has substantially fallen. Further, bank offices are shut or working on decreased hours. Thus, banks look to speed up digital innovation efforts. They are partnering with FinTechs, which can prove economical as well as mutually beneficial.

• Shift towards open banking

• Need for contactless and video-based verification

• Digital customer onboarding

• Shift to telesales based infrastructure and systems from on-field sales

• Front-end and back-end processes digitized to support remote work

Where does Celusion Technologies stand on cybersecurity aspects? What are you doing to make the end-user feel safe?

Our experience with large financial institutions has set very high expectations of secure solutions. Security is one of our high priority objectives for the year. Thus, we are building a team of security personnel, who will be responsible for:

• Internal security at Celusion

• Infrastructure security and architecture for our products

• Information and privacy protection for our products

• Implementing securing coding guidelines

How can small financial players overcome the challenges faced while adopting technology into their business?

In today’s world, technology is affordable and available in open models, making it feasible for small financial players to adopt. It is the mindset more than any other obstacles that make a financial player leverage technology. You have cloud-based systems for practically all functions of a financial company, that allow you to pay as you go.

Some players go overboard with building technology in-house. In reality, there is no real advantage of doing so and the time and effort required to build and maintain these systems are very high. Instead, if you have a few processes that are unique to your business, you can attempt to build them and find the right solutions for all other processes.

What are your plans for Celusion Technologies in the New Normal?

• Creating holistic ecosystems to bring the entire lifecycle and all stakeholders onto a single platform with seamless integrations with various other systems in the company.

• Smooth, contact-less and AI/ML-based automation in onboarding customers for Enterprise companies. This will help onboard thousands and lacs of customers per month majorly for Demat and Trading accounts, Loan applications, Bank accounts, Merchant onboarding as well as Insurance applications.

• Simplify and automate the digital lending processes. This includes underwriting workflows and rules, in any NBFC, Bank as well as Housing Finance company.

• Creating a partner agnostic environment for Fintech based API’s to be used in Customer onboarding and Digital lending; thus bringing more value and cost-effectiveness for the Enterprise Customer.

• Leverage our current position in providing digital solutions to the BFSI to be a market leader in India and ASEAN countries.

How will work-from-home lead to a paradigm shift in the ITeS industry?

• Shift to more cloud infrastructure to manage internal development. This could be hardware for your development environments, thin clients for developers and software like project management, source control.

• Controlled costs of high maintenance physical offices in metro cities and employee time saved due to travel in these cities

• The talent pool will now extend to Tier 3 and 4 cities because the current environment encourages work from anywhere.

• More digital interactions and processes to ensure smooth onboarding and engagement with employees