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Private sector lender YES Bank is creating a separate division to consolidate technology and innovation-related activities to help the bank stay ahead of competition.
Banking on Techtonic
The Rana Kapoor-promoted bank has created a new team, Techtonic, which will have about 100 business and technology experts who will help drive the digital transformation at the bank.
Talking to BusinessLine , Aseem Gandhi, Chief Disruption Officer at YES Bank, said that the bank has been working on digitally transforming all traditional processes for the last three years, and that there is a need to have a separate team to look into future technologies, such as blockchain, data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, among others, to develop architecture and planning, right sourcing, development, and maintenance.
“Techtonic will have a team of about 100 data scientists, full-stack developers and engineers who will identify, evaluate and build strategy, evaluate future tech, plan and manage projects and bring about a data-driven approach to build innovative products in-house. We have already identified 50 such data scientists from within the organisation, and the rest will be hired from IITs and other premier institutes and a datathon,” Amit Shah, the bank’s Chief Fintech Officer added.
Shah said that the Datathon, for which the bank has called for applications to be filled from September 26 through October 21, will help identify about 100 data scientists who can work on freelance, contractual or full-time basis (depending on the requirement and project) to create innovative future-banking solutions.
The first round of the Datathon will be a 48 hour AI-ML challenge to identify top 100 data scientists in the country, who will be working on creating data models using YES Bank’s problem statements. The top 100 data scientists will work on creating data models on the bank’s tech stack for a six-week period starting from November 7.
Finally, the top 15 models or prototypes will be tested on YES Bank’s data platforms, and the winners will receive a prize money of ₹20 lakh. Amazon Web Services and data science leader Cloudera are partnering with YES Bank for the Datathon.
Anup Purohit, Chief Information Officer at YES Bank, and Ritesh Pai, the Chief Digital Officer, will also be a part of the Techtonic and drive the digital initiatives.
“Since inception, the bank has relied on outsourcing of majority of infrastructure services, including migration of systems development to vendor partners. But in the current phase of growth, the half-life of technology and innovation has shrunk considerably, necessitating be-spoke and innovative solutions with quicker turn-around times for product launches and updates,” said Shah, stressing on the need for creating tech solutions in-house. Mundane activities such as network support and server maintenance, however, will be outsourced, he added.
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