In this live case study presentation sponsored by OneSpan, we will be joined by Ruchi Gupta, Head of Enterprise Digitization at People’s United Bank to share first-hand perspectives on uncovering opportunity for digitization across business units, the expanded use of e-signatures across the bank and how to work towards a Center of Excellence (CoE) to unlock value across the business.
The discussion will provide real world insights into:
- Gaining trust and buy-in from leadership to fast track your e-signature program
- Creating end-to-end digital workflows transforming the banking platform from lending,
- new account opening to any new transactions
- Best practices for moving beyond your initial deployment and fostering a solution that
- can grow with you, even in times of greater uncertainty
- Identity verification and authentication considerations to protect every remote transaction and agreement
Aaron: (
All right. Well, thanks for joining us this morning. We're gonna talk about digital transformation in particular at people's United. I'm joined by Ruchi here. Ruchi. It's great to see you. When you talk about digital transformation, transformation, particularly at People's United, it was a journey and there's been a lot of impact, a lot of transformation, a lot of disruption over the past few years. Can you talk a little bit about, how that happened and a little bit more about some of the longer term impacts that you're seeing, from that transformation?
Ruchi Gupta: (
Yeah. Hello everyone. Thank you again, this is Ruchi from People's United bank, and it's a pleasure to be here along with you. Digital transformation, it's a buzz word, right? And we have been on journey for a long time and with COVID 19, it absolutely accelerated and disrupted banking and our efforts going on. So some of the things that we saw, some efforts, right, that would've taken a couple of years to even gain some visibility that became overnight urgency, need for the bank to make it happen. And digitization was one of the space. When I speak about digitization, I'm mostly talking about E signature and digital agreements, that allows you to kind of like handle the manual processes and sending the documents out to your customers for signing. That is a huge need in banking where every process touches every second process touches digital agreements today. So, the journey was accelerated over, a couple of days, we were building our platform internally, but it changed overnight and we needed to maintain help our bank to maintain operational efficiencies and operational maintenance for our bank, as well as the business groups. Right. In terms of longer term, we ended up establishing a business transformation office, it helped us to rethink and reinforce to think, how do we change our bank holistically, right. How do we transform, our businesses, Right? So it was through the lens of process technology and talent, right? It's not just about bringing digital capabilities. So we had to think through end to end holistic journey, whether it was in retail, commercial or wealth. So in terms of, I believe Aaron, will continue to see the acceleration in our digital transformation journey in waiting faster, experimenting faster, bringing that speed of digital capabilities to our customers to serve them better.
Aaron: (
Right. You've talked a lot about, digitization going from being a nice to have, to a must have
Ruchi Gupta: (
Yeah.
Aaron: (
capability in your organization. Can you elaborate on the impact of that and maybe around some of the areas of the business that have been were rapidly affected by that digitization?
Ruchi Gupta: (
Absolutely. Raise your hand if you guys can connect to the signage, sorry, we are closed once the COVID hit. Right. I'm sure the audience here can connect with outside the branches, reduce stars, so we really saw, where our employees and bankers were forced to support our customer remotely, right. With the manual processes that exist today, digital agreements, e-signature right. Which was nice to have every business wanted this need for this platform, but it was never a urgency. So in terms of having those priorities, X, Y, Z, we are working on upgrading our platforms, but everything is working as normal before COVID. Now it became an overnight urgency, need to send the documents across to the customer, whether it was lending, whether it was online account opening or any kind of transaction. We saw, intense need for the digital agreements in e-signature platform. So I would, it was nice to have before, but now as a exact need, immediate need for them. So you can think about SBAPPP stuff, right? A lot, many people have worked on that initiative and we had modern platforms, but they were not ready to send out the documents to our customer. We did not have automated processes in the backend and having those analytics and reports available to our business stakeholders, loan officers, so that they could take the appropriate action. So I still distinctively remember, our conversation happening with senior management. We are talking about C executives here, should we leverage our platform, which was still in a build phase where we are trying to build and trying to fly at the same time. It was Monday to Thursday, decision was going back and forth, back and forth. And then Thursday, midnight, our team was up for the challenge. And between Thursday and Sunday, we had implemented the solution. We had trained about 60 loan offices to send the documentations to the customer. And within two weeks we processed about 14,000 transaction accounting for 2 to 3 billion in loans. So that was a huge success. Not only with SBAPPP following up to that, we had need for supporting our capital markets, with the library changes we needed to send out, again, work on commercial institutional loans that were accounting for 8 billion. So that was huge one. And followed with that. I'm sure many of us have home mortgages, residential and lot of consumers coming in and asking for the need, can you guys reduce the interest rates? We worked on it and that was some of the large strategic initiatives that we were focused on and we continue to prioritize, as the pipeline like make sure, okay, what is the next important initiative for our bank to support our customers?
Aaron: (
Did you always have a holistic vision of transformation? Cause we always hear about transformation and digitization, starting in a line of business or a particular function, within an organization. Was that more holistic in terms of the way you approached it?
Ruchi Gupta: (
Very good question. In terms of vision, I remember our journey started about four years back. All we knew was how do we enable our bank to digitize, e-signature and digital agreements. It was very, very little small piece, just focused on digital agreements. And we were running an MVP. All we could think at that point was how do we support our business stakeholders? The businesses where there is a critical need, which touches the sales process or customers, how do we accelerate those, go to market, you know processes. How do we enable six to seven weeks of journey in two to three days for our customers. Reduce that friction increase the customer experience, how we operationalize the backend processes. So that was a vision we started with. It evolved with the period of time, as we continue to learn with the research, our conversation with our banks and business stakeholders and we realized that after speaking to business stakeholders, every process is touching digital agreements, but everybody has a different processes. Some have similar, some has different. So we had to evolve our strategy. How do we kind of scale our practice? So we have the practice, but there's no single business who has the similar need as other, you may see retail consumers has a different need than in commercial or than in wealth. Some of the systems, onboarding starts with CRM. There are different products across. So how do we evolve that strategy, and solution it out. So we bucketed four different solutions for different businesses need. And, went forward with that. So it wasn't overnight, something I woke up and say, Hey, we got to digitize the whole bank. We want you drive the growth and customer experience and operational efficiency. So it was a definitely evolving process. And now we sit in business transformation office where we holistically look through the businesses, right through the lens of process, technology and talent. So first you need to understand what the challenges are in the retail, commercial and wealth, and then kind of understand, okay, what is working? What is not working? Where should we lay digital capabilities, what processes we need to refine and how do we automate the back end processes? So now we are in bigger picture at a strategic level because this is the committee that or office that sits across the enterprise. And we are focusing on bridging the gap between corporate strategy and execution at the business level.
Aaron: (
Right. That's fantastic. When it comes to the journey and building the vision, tech is one piece, but there's also, developing the narrative.
Ruchi Gupta: (
Yeah.
Aaron: (
Getting buy-in, there's a huge cultural element to that. Can you talk about how you moved and drove that vision forward at People's United?
Ruchi Gupta: (
Well, yeah, absolutely. I think before we started our journey, there was a lot of research done. Speaking to other banks, what has their journey been? Speaking to large banks like JP Morgan, RBC, other, similar banks like us. Understanding what the businesses are facing, the challenges where we can drive the value. So we had laid a vision, how could we drive the value. And how is going to happen as I mentioned to you earlier. It's been evolving process Aaron and it'll continue to evolve how we do the things. More integrations, more connectors available. So this is what I'm going to leave, how our vision involves, strategy involves and how do we prioritize different use cases.
Aaron: (
Right. And on that note, there's so many different use cases that you could concentrate on. How do you prioritize? How do you say, okay, there might be an area where we have to pivot away from another business, an area with a higher impact to the business. So maybe just talk a little bit about, your approach to prioritization when it comes to digitization and digital agreements.
Ruchi Gupta: (
Yeah. Prioritization is not easy. It's tough, when it comes to bank, bank has own priorities. And then within your area, you have your own priorities. So how do we align with business stakeholders and work on OKRs for them? Because we are trying to gain the sponsorship here, in terms of, in our digitization practice, we look at scoring methodologies. Which is based on whether it's ROI, whether it's implementation, what is the voice of customer there? What are business stakeholder challenges? What is the urgency there? So earlier this was the process, when the regulatory needs happened, that I spoke about a few minutes back on SBAPPP or capital markets or interest rate reduction program. These are banks, critical initiatives that has to take the precedence about existing, things that we are working on the pipeline. So we have to navigate and pivot to those initiatives. It was critical. How do we support our small business customers. So definitely you'll see our regular reprioritization based on urgency there, what the bank's needs are, how can we be more agile and resilient in these times to support our customers.
Aaron: (
Right. And throughout your journey, it's a learning process. Significantly for a bank. Were there any, I guess this is two parts. Were there any aha moments that came up during this process with SBA or any of those projects? And I guess the second thing would be, what were the key takeaways and lessons learned from that?
Ruchi Gupta: (
Oh, absolutely. I still remember from 2018 to 2020, end of December, we, we were working towards it, but it was not that aggressive space. We had MVP that really worked out well. We realized that we needed to build a platform internally with vendor diagnostic, whether it's a DocuSign, one spend sign or Salesforce and front end and the back end, to operationalize, automating the processes. We were making a study space and we had a pipeline of almost like 30 to 45 opportunities across the bank, but we had the challenge that it was not immediate need. There were no urgency. Everybody had continued to do whatever they were doing and businesses who were even prioritized felt the need. Okay, we can move forward because we are doing X, Y, Z or we are focused on mergers activities because we've merged with another bank. Now we need to support those customers. So, I came to a point, okay, if it's not a strategic priority for the bank, then we shouldn't be even doing it. We are in a limbo. And I went to my manager and I mentioned, I know I have other initiatives that I'm leading and I'm ready to launch and take them to the market at this point, if this is not a critical urgency for the bank, let's drop this. We need to make it very clear to executive teams that whether we move forward or put it on the hold, if it's not important enough, it was important. But I had to put my step down to mention that. And, meantime I launched another digital identity tokens in March, we heard the SBAPPP stuff happening. And all of a sudden we had additional funding. We had additional resources, we had support from five different teams to move forward. We set up a forum every day. Our businesses were coming in, sharing these are the challenges when you can get us in. We optimized as fast as we could within every business launch happening in 10 weeks in parallel supporting four or five businesses. So it was a long process, but we are here. I think not everyone expected COVID 19 and the things that we went through, but in terms of digitization, digital agreements, I think it came as a blessing in disguise.
Aaron: (
One more question, now that you've established this culture and you've got the buy-in what's next? What are you most excited about in terms of digitizing within the bank?
Ruchi Gupta: (
Yeah, so we have laid the foundation. We have standardized, onboarding and how we support the business users and, very strong governance and, center of excellence. In terms of next, now we are sitting in business transformation office, holistically looking at commercial wealth and retail. So our next agenda is instead of working in silos, delivering the one of needs as a projects, we are looking at how do we leverage from starting point from CRM. Enabling these bankers, sales officers to prepare the documentation, extract the data, send it to the customers, get it back, put them into the ECM, for compliance and audit purposes. So we are looking holistically. Okay. Let's do the holistic journey end to end, rather than, interim solutions that we rolled out. We have big strategic initiative focused on commercials as well as wealth, where we will be utilizing connectors with Salesforce, starting the journey and delivering the holistic experience for our business stakeholders.
Aaron: (
Right. That's fantastic. I think we have a few more minutes left. I think we're gonna open up for any questions that anyone has from the audience. So feel free to ask anything.
Audience 1: (
In terms of the partners that you worked with in terms of that holistic transformation, any lessons learned that you feel like, this really made the difference.
Ruchi Gupta: (
First of all, you have to understand, your own ecosystem. What are you trying to do? Where are you going? What are you trying to change? What challenges do you have and then understand what are the partners existing in the market. So you have DocuSign, you have one spin sign who has been amazing partner to us. And we have relationship with other vendors. So, our goal was okay, what are our needs? What kind of value we can drive? And what are the partners who are going to help us in every step of the journey? So in terms of one spin sign, they have been very proactive, helping us understand how other banks are doing, where is the success rates in terms of wealth or commercial and sharing the case studies with us. So that helped us. No two organizations are same, our challenges are different than what a US bank may have or JP Morgan may have. You have to understand what will work for you. And it comes with the process of every day working in and out of this platform that we are trying to build.
Audience 2: (
Where do you sit organizationally, are you part of IT or is it a separate digital office?
Ruchi Gupta: (
Yes. So I sit in business transformation office, as I mentioned, this office was created two years back. And it operates across the enterprise, and goal is to build a gap between corporate strategy and the business execution. So I'm a proud person, but my journey has been diverse. I've been a founder, entrepreneur, product to now strategic leader.
Aaron: (
All right. We're being told to wrap, so thanks very much Ruchi and thanks for joining our session today.