| |December 20189CIOReviewpeople into the market. Automation in turn will bring the efficiency by reducing the manual intervention.Cognitive agents engaging front officeToday, most of the product dis-tribution is done through bro-kerage houses and retail banks. Re-lationship managers of these firms play key role in distribution. The products are bit complex for the av-erage investors due to numerous as-set classes. With traditional technol-ogy, it was a herculean task to build a simplified investor support system that can help customer to decide on the right product. But today, cogni-tive computing has made it possible to simplify this. In the advent of AI powered platform such as Watson, intelligent bots are being devel-oped who can perform majority of relationship managers job. These bots will help investors in address-ing their queries, explaining them about their investment performance and providing a frictionless expe-rience to the investors. In future, these bots will be capable of inter-acting with investors on their pre-ferred social platforms. These bots will have wider and more memora-ble contextual awareness of inves-tors than human relationship man-agers, hence can provide a better engagement experience. Smart workflows and RPA will transform middle office and back office operationReal-time data integration and cog-nitive technologies will help in cre-ating smart workflows for middle office processes. The complex pro-cesses such as customer onboarding will be faster and will help in creat-ing hassle-free processing of client requests. As the systems will start adopting new deep-learning tech-nologies, it will make the entire middle office operation automated. RPA technology is driving the auto-mation of back office. RPA-powered Bots are replacing humans in back-office gradually. Most of the firms have just started replacing standard manual activities with Bots. This has helped bringing down the running cost and improving the processing power of the operation. In com-ing years, RPA technologies will in-crease the cognitive power of these bots to increase their intelligence.The orchestration will drive the ef-fectiveness of the transformationToday, most of the processes are built around the products that are traded in the market. As newer products enter the market the pro-cesses continue to be more complex and hence making the transforma-tion journey cumbersome. This re-quires a shift from product-centric processes to customer-centric pro-cesses. The only way to achieve this is by orchestrating the end to end activities in front-middle-back office and make them customer-centric. For example, cognitive agents at the front office should be able to drive intelligent work flows that are directly integrated with back-office bots. The challenges in driving the transformationDigitalization has multiple chal-lenges. The current transformation approach through digitalization and automation are still build on top of legacy structure. The technologies sometimes are not scalable due to design limitation and lack of skill availability. In next five to ten years, emerging scalable technologies like blockchain and quantum computing will bring a complete paradigm shift that may not follow the traditional siloed structures. Hence, the mar-ket should start relooking at its core structure. Traditional front-middle-back office model should be demol-ished. By leveraging on emerging technology, a new customer-centric model should be developed which will help adopting the future tech-nologies faster. This will help in in-creased participation and reducing the risks. In next five to ten years, emerging scalable technologies like blockchain and quantum computing will bring a complete paradigm shift that may not follow the traditional siloed structures. Hence, the market should start relooking at its core structureSuvrata Acharya
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