CxO of the Week: Mr Robin Bhowmik, CBO, Manipal Academy of BFSI

CxO of the Week: This week, CiOL gets to know more about Mr Robin Bhowmik. In his role as CBO, Robin is responsible for driving overall revenue and business growth across all verticals including Banking, Insurance, Fintech and NBFC’s leading all market-facing functions such as Sales, Marketing and strategic alliances.

An innovative, entrepreneurial, growth and results-driven executive with over 24 years of global experience; Robin is a recognized expert in using both consumer and enterprise technology with proven ability to drive disruption within Industries that include Education, Banking and Healthcare. Robin comes from a technology background having performed leadership roles within companies that include Hewlett Packard, CSC and more recently; Sify Technologies where he was leading the Data Centres and Cloud Platforms business.

Robin is an alumnus of the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business; Robin additionally holds a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Jadavpur University, an Advanced Diploma from NIIT in Systems management and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from Calcutta University. Read ahead to know more about him.

How are you personally dealing with the pandemic? Are there any new activities that you picked?

The pandemic has been a life-changing experience for a lot of people including me. Retaining mental, physical, and emotional health has been a top priority for me and my entire family during these last few months. At the same time, supporting our extended staff and crew during these uncertain times has been equally important to ensure they navigate this change safely and with ease. Staying fit, communicating more than ever, meeting friends and family over Zoom calls, eating healthy and trying to do active digital detox has helped.

I was able to get back to my old habit of reading extensively during this time and managed to consistently stay away from binge-watching shows on Netflix. I did pick up a few cooking and mopping skills during the lockdown and can personally vouch for my repertoire of exotic spices that I curated along the way.

What were some of the things you miss while working from home? How did you maximize your productivity while working from home?

For me, human interaction and the ability to interface with people during the day is extremely important. There are so many softer aspects of work and efficiency that can evolve in the face to face meetings that cannot be done on a digital medium. I also am a compulsive traveller so the inability to be on the road or in an aircraft has been a very sobering experience.

I have set aside physical space for my work area, and that has intuitively helped me establish a work routine. Now, I allocate a full hour to an early morning workout followed by getting ready like another day at work before joining my virtual meetings. It helps to have an ergonomic set up of your workspace with enough light and fresh air. To break the monotony, I started taking some of my team calls from my garden too!

How Covid-19 accelerated the transition to digital for all sectors. What will the new normal be?

Covid 19 has fast-tracked digital adoption across all channels and ecosystems, especially for the Banking sector that we focus on. Digital payments are at an all-time high at over $65B this year and growing. Working from home has become acceptable for a lot of roles that have resulted in organisations lowering their physical infrastructure requirements and in turn, reducing the burden on our choked cities and road infrastructure.

People are now accelerating their upskilling initiatives as teachers deliver online classes, bankers manage clients sitting at home, sales executives connect with clients and prospects online, and leaders engage with their teams working thousands of miles away.

The new normal will have elevated attention to health and personal wellbeing combined with a greater awareness to avoid crowded places in the future. While social distancing is relatively unknown in India, this pandemic has brought in a certain degree of social separation that might continue in parts. People should be far more careful about having cleaner surroundings and focus on greater personal health and fitness.

Digital disruption has meant that acceptability of working remotely will lead to new models of employment, including the gig economy. Workers across the spectrum are realising the need to reskill and upskill in areas dominated by technology as traditional roles get redefined overnight. Speed to market and business agility will also define those organisations that survive by changing their traditional offerings to the new normal.

Redundancies in process-centric industries that lack customer focus will allow for a new breed of start-ups to define the future with customer-centric and value-added services such as FinTech.

A lot of companies are struggling. How do they re-engineer themselves?

This is the time when companies need to be more agile than ever and the need to define core competencies will come to the forefront. Not everyone can do everything, and the need to define your core market and unique value proposition is imperative.

Technology play is critical across all sectors whether it be through automation or the use of Artificial Intelligence or cognitive apps. Letting go of assets such as real estate and moving quickly to work from anywhere model will help drive continuity and scale down the line.

Last but not the least, this is the time when companies need to invest in skilling their employees and not slash training budgets. Jobs and roles will transform quickly and the inability of people to catch up with the new requirements will be the single largest point of friction for most organisations.

Has Covid-19 opened career opportunities for everyone through technology, or do we continue to face the job crisis?

The job crisis has affected a lot of people that have been laid off as part of the initial response to the repeated lockdowns that happened in India. A significant impact of this initial response will be felt for at least another four quarters. However, this will lead to the emergence of a couple of key trends. There are a few roles that are focussed heavily around the new world of technology and data that will largely be recession-proof.

A lot of these roles will require heavy reskilling and upskilling but will dominate the job market going forward. Secondly, there are critical services that are essential including banking, education, farming, etc. which will continue to grow with a heavy infusion of technology. Related jobs will see a spurt of growth as well as services and products that support the new stay at home normal including e-commerce, delivery services, etc.

Does upskilling play an important role?

Upskilling is survival for most professionals, and never before has it been more felt. The underlying driver for any digital transformation is first the people transformation part, and that can only happen if workers realise that obsolescence of skills is very real and happening faster than usual.

To remain relevant and recession-proof, deep skilling as well as cross-skilling initiatives are critical whether it be carried out by the individual or the organisation. In the future, employees will need to be like an app that you download on your phone. It should come with its own upgrades and updates on a regular basis and these upgrades should be free to the employer

What are some of the parameters that one should look for when entering the BD industry?

Business development in the BFSI industry has fundamentally changed over the past few years with renewed acceleration happening in the past few months of the pandemic. The shift towards an understanding of national and global markets, and the impact of global trends on the India market, is core to the ability to position relevant products to customers.

The role of analytics and data is far more critical and central to success in a BD role as the ability to analyse effectively counter-intuitive trends and potentially fake news. Technology has also moved to centre stage as digital transformation across roles, processes, and industries redefine new-age skills that will be needed to understand, engage, and sell to existing and future customers.

What are the future career prospects in the BFSI sector for IT professionals for the upcoming workforce?

The BFSI industry is transforming itself at breakneck speed. It was the first to adopt technology in the form of enterprise core banking systems over a decade ago and now, they are adopting technology in every other aspect. Right from delivering better customer experiences, automating internal processes to reducing cost and time, integrating with other platforms to provide unified interfaces into every aspect of their customer’s life, convenience and reach for traditional banking and insurance models.

BFSI companies are also offering personalised products that reflect your specific need. Traditional roles such as wealth managers are now moving to technology-driven apps with robotic process automation, data analytics is allowing for better decision making to drive lower NPAs and bad loans, payments are getting reinvented through digital wallets, and lending is going micro with peer to peer platforms.

The future of technology professionals in the BFSI sector has never been more exciting with the entry of the largest number of new FinTech players and billions of dollars of investment into this ecosystem. Technology continues to define new products and services, and traditional models are getting challenged every day by new and more established players from non-BFSI sectors.

What are some of the challenges you face in driving digital transformation?

The biggest challenge in digital transformation is the people part of it. People are not willing to change easily and unlearning is hard. Secondly, digital transformation does not always have to do with expensive technology or a long implementation lifecycle. Simple tools can be implemented more often than not to meet business needs. Thirdly, going digital throws open cybersecurity challenges that most organisations are not equipped to handle today.

This can cause long term and critical damage to a service provider’s infrastructure and reputation in case not handled properly. Last but not the least, leadership teams need to lead the change that is often an outcome of any transformation including one driven digitally. Hence, leadership behaviours and the ability to set the pace for the rest of the organisation in the midst of rapid change is a key dependency for digital transformation to be impactful and permanent.