Our company’s digital quotient is rising: CRISIL K Murad

What progress has CRISIL made with its digital transformation initiative?

The digital quotient of the entire company continues to rise. There is digitization of all the components – people, process and technology. Agile transformation is a big part of what we’re doing. Besides, the things that you used to do manually are getting fully automated. The type of products we manufacture is also changing; We are moving everything to the cloud. We have been on this for two years now and there are still two more years to go. Our cloud migration will be done by next year. We are also launching a lot of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) products and working on a platform approach to building things. Also, the way you are exchanging data, security is a big deal as every threat actor (hacker/cyber criminal) wants to access and exploit. So, we’re spending an incredible amount of time making sure things are completely safe.

You are both the CTO and the CIO. How do you combine these roles from a strategy perspective?

CRISIL is a multidisciplinary organization. We do a lot of things like rating, benchmarking and risk resolution, and also provide a range of services and push a lot of products. So, in a way, we are a very tech heavy company. I am skilled enough as a CTO; I go through the code with the team where necessary, and then allow the team to structure and build. As a CIO, I look at the product; see how the information is flowing; how to secure it on a large scale; how to align (products and services) with business objectives; And how to leverage technology to drive the kind of growth you’re seeing within CRISIL. I also spend time with customers to understand how we should be building better products to maximize our customer value. These two strategies (as CTO and CIO) inevitably align to make better use of resources such as time and money.

Talking about technologies, how are Crisil’s investments in Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing) paying dividends?

We have a GAC ​​(Global Analytical Center) division that works on providing data to S&P Global, which includes a lot of extraction work. We have a data science team, and use ML to help us extract data from the unstructured documents we receive, such as filings, etc. The other side involves data science. Since we have a huge amount of data from a ratings perspective, as well as our other businesses, we are looking at how to get more intelligence out of that data using and building ML models. We are a data company in many ways, and ML has a lot of use cases for us within data processing. We also do a lot of risk analysis, and we build models to understand risk, early warning systems and things like that. ML can be leveraged in these areas as well.

How do you see the maturity of your customers when it comes to adopting these new and emerging technologies?

It is diverse. For example, when I look at cloud adoption, I don’t see a huge amount of maturity yet in India. Now the speed of cloud has started intensifying in India. India may be a year or two behind, but it will catch on very quickly and we are very much focused on taking things to the cloud and bringing new offerings in the form of SaaS. When it comes to ML, there are some companies that are doing some work, especially in data science. Many companies have built data lakes (data repositories of raw data), but many are struggling with them, resulting in data swamps.

How should companies view the return on investment (ROI) from these emerging technologies?

Companies are not monoliths. For example, if you take a large bank, it has many departments and not every department and every product or service they provide is not subject to strong regulatory controls or security controls from a regulatory standpoint. When they ask: ‘Is there any point in going to the cloud?’ (they should know if they are) moving to the cloud because they want to save cost, or use services, or because they want agility.

We are moving to the cloud to drive agility as we believe we can deliver enormous value to our customers by leveraging the capabilities the cloud has to offer. So, it’s targeted toward revenue and growth, more than anything else and the way to do that is product innovation is happening very quickly, when you’ll be able to live inside your own data center.

That said, you can totally use the cloud service inside your own data center and have it work, depending on what kind of application you have. If you’re really smart and have the right kinds of applications, you may be able to spend as much on an external cloud as you were spending inside your data center.

What improvement have you seen in CRISIL?

Within S&P, I moved about 175 applications to AWS (Amazon Web Services) in about 8 months. We have been there for over two years and quite successfully. So, you have to figure out your cost and basically understand what you’re trying to achieve, and then work backwards from there and say, “Okay, this strategy will help me get back to my business goals.” allows.”

If you want to build a product and you have a platform like our ‘Fulcrum’, you can use it as an accelerator to build new products.

Previously, if you had to build a product with low complexity or medium complexity, you could build it from start to finish—getting the servers, etc., in traditional mode. But it may take 5-6 months to fully configure; And the whole cycle can take a year to get a product out. With the new platform, I am able to do this in less than 3 months. So, you reduce your product cycle from 1 year to 3 months, and then offer it as a SaaS service. It can also help us to bring closer with other products. Let’s say you have one product, and the customer finds value in another product as well, this can allow for seamless integration across all of them for a good user experience. These are the things that create better value for the client. Many companies have multiple products, but they do not integrate with each other. A platform approach helps to accomplish these things.

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