After staying on the hype cycle for a long time, “Digital Transformation” is increasingly becoming mainstream and more real. Big Data Analytics is a leading enabler to drive Digital transformation and to capture the industry trends and challenges around how companies are using Big Data to drive business PayPal hosted Fintech Xchange at the SunTec Convention Center in Singapore on September 2^nd, 2015. People from all walks of the “technology society” including platform companies, service providers, consulting organizations and even students (from NUS, NTU) participated at the event to learn more about applied Big Data for Transformation.

PayPal was very kind to have invited me on the speaker panel along with senior stakeholders from the industry. At the pre-event networking opportunity as well as during the panel, I spent some time with Anupam Pahuja (GM, APAC Technology), Abhi Bisarya (Head of Consumer Solutions, APAC, PayPal), Dr. Bernard Leong (Head of Digital Services at Singapore Post), Axel Winter (Global Head of Process & Data Architecture, Standard Chartered Bank) and John Berns (Head of Data Science at Lazada) discussing about Digital Transformation in their organizations.

After a warm welcome from Anupam, who gave a glimpse into the rapidly growing PayPal business, Abhi Bisarya made a very insightful presentation to kick-start the event. It was intriguing to note that 25% of all transactions processed by PayPal were already through mobile. This resulted into $46 Bn worth of transactions on mobile in 2014 alone. With 169 Mn+ customers, PayPal processes about $8000 per second and collects 100s of customer data attributes, which in turn are analyzed and used to personalize the consumer experience and minimize the risks involved in moving money. It was interesting to see customizable desktop & mobile dashboards being offered by PayPal basis deep analytics on customer data. That kind of set the tone for the rest to evening as everyone looked to understand the business impact of Big Data

As I am running the management consulting practice for global digital transformation at Zinnov, I had a couple of questions that I was looking to hear from these experts and share my views via the panel podium:

• What are the drivers and foundation of digital transformation at these organizations?
• What is the organizational readiness a company needs to have to transform digitally?
• How are companies thinking about vendor sourcing in the digital age?
• How real is the threat from digital startups disrupting traditional businesses?
• How are companies bridging the talent gap for digital transformation?

Dr. Bernard Leong from Singapore Post was very articulate on the key drivers and building blocks of digital transformation strategy. Giving reference to Harvard Business Review (HBR) articles multiple times, he suggested that digital is an absolute must for 3 key reasons – to protect the existing turf, to be relevant for millennial customers and to reduce the overall costs of doing business. He cautioned that not all digital transformation activities will be successful and companies should look at a 4-pronged approach of “Think Big”, “Act Small”, “Fail Fast” and “Learn Quickly”. Axel Winter from Standard Chartered made a comment representing the focus on digital in the banking industry – “if you don’t have a mobile app, you might as well start selling your shares”

In terms of organization readiness, Axel emphasized that having the DNA for digital is extremely vital for innovation. Standard Chartered, as such is undergoing a lot of organizational changes at the top level but the digital mandate is very clearly laid out. They have built a very strong internal IT team, which is supporting the innovation culture in the organization. Standard Chartered is probably one of the few large banks that have built their own Core Banking Solution (CBS) to cater to the specific needs of the bank.

Dr. Bernard is the Head of Digital Services at Singapore Post and this position was created about 3 years back realizing the need for digital transformation. Dr. Bernard reports directly to the CEO, is also the BU owner for digital business at Singapore and enjoys top leadership support in executing a digital strategy at the company. His primary focus is to expand the company in the region and build a strong foundation for the digital future. With a solid background in Theoretical Physics (PhD) & Computational Biology and a deep bent for data analytics, Dr. Bernard is hands-on with solving the customer paint points. He often goes to the post office to gain customer insights, digs deeper into social media platforms to find ‘genuine’ patterns and defines ‘call to action’. The company has gone through major transformations since the time he joined and has already digitized over 50% of their 58 post offices. Singapore Post has also launched newer offerings (such as POPStations, SAM Kiosks etc.) and shed away a few biz lines that were no longer strategic in the long arch of things (like selling mobile phones). The intent clearly is to sharpen the focus on what is most relevant from a futuristic standpoint.

On digital transformation ideas and prioritizing use cases, Dr. Bernard’s emphasis was on keeping the organization agile & lean and enabled for rapid prototyping. As an example, he likes collaborating with the CIO, BU owners and prioritise what is absolutely core to the business and has long term impact. Axel was of the opinion that while a number of banks are setting up Digital lab, the metrics to capture ROI or real success of such set ups are still evolving.

Data quality issues came up in the conversation several times and the panelist jokingly said that companies today don’t have “Big data” but have “Bad data”. The panel agreed that removing application silos and IT modernization focus is a must have to succeed in digital transformation journey and a well-planned modernization could avoid hefty investments in generating & managing data.  Standard Chartered, for e.g. is using Data Lake technologies and also focuses on core departmental use case data and horizontal use case data to speed up the data query process.

I believe that many companies are currently focused heavily on generating data and then trying to mine all kinds of data to derive use cases. However, going forward, companies will lay more emphasis on what use cases they want to solve for and accordingly identify what data that they need to aggregate and generate. This flip model will in turn reduce data management related overheads significantly thereby simplifying the data mirage to a large extent.

At Zinnov, we work with a number of IT service providers and I was curious to understand how large companies are (re)thinking their outsourcing relationships in the digital world. John Berns at Lazada said that they are a digital native company and like to keep things in-house and open source based. Axel, on the other hand, cautioned that the existing business model of IT commoditization will no longer be sustainable in the digital world and even though large System Integrators are setting up digital teams, that is only 20% of the organization headcount. The remaining 80% headcount continues to work on commodity business and that might need to fundamentally change in the future. Singapore Post has been working with a number of niche vendors such as Hootsuite, Engagor etc. and looks for the right capabilities to address digital needs of the companies. They are extremely selective about vendors, like to experiment on a small project with such vendors and cost also plays an important role in the equation.

On the disruptions caused by FinTech companies and startups in general, Axel opined that it is an important cog in the digital value chain but many of these startups may not be built on the right platforms that can scale. Such companies could maximize the impact by partnering with large Banks and build the platform to sustain. Standard Chartered for example has an office cum innovation lab in San Francisco, which works with startups to develop latest software for the bank and is overseen by the CIO directly.

Talent sourcing for Big Data and Digital Transformation was an important topic of discussion. John at Lazada emphasized that having both technical and domain skills are vital for Big Data strategy to succeed in an organization. However, he also agreed that it is difficult to find such capabilities together in an individual and suggested to hire a “mathematician who can communicate” and a “domain expert who understands the industry” and let them work together for growth. He felt that Singapore is a great source of data scientists, but has a severe shortage of data engineers with experience in scalable Big Data systems. At Singapore Post, employees are given six sigma trainings and are enabled to find meaning in data and they also look at Digital native companies such as Amazon & Google for inspirations.

The discussion concluded with some bright students from NTU and NUS inquiring about the future of analytics and looking for suggestions around building domain knowledge or deep technical knowledge for successful careers in big data. While these were tough questions, dinner had some vegetarian options for me to survive