Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Global Head of Technology & Operations, VOYA FINANCIAL INC
Voya Financial CIO Santhosh Keshavan on Growth Through Simplification | Technovation 638
In this interview, Santhosh Keshavan, EVP and Chief Information Officer of Voya Financial, focuses on growth through innovation ...
About Santhosh Keshavan
Santhosh Keshavan, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Global Head of Technology & Operations at Voya Financial, has described the company's digital transformation as an ongoing journey focused on simplification, data management, and cloud adoption. He stated that Voya has consolidated its core systems, including reducing 46 instances of its record-keeping platform in wealth solutions, and has migrated from data centers to a hybrid cloud environment, with plans to move further toward public cloud over the next three to four years. Keshavan emphasized that blindly moving applications to the cloud can lead to higher expenses and unintended consequences, and that understanding the purpose of cloud migration is critical)Skip. He also highlighted the launch of the "my Voyage" digital platform, which he described as a first-of-its-kind personalized financial guidance tool that integrates workplace benefits and external accounts, and noted that the consolidation efforts enabled its development within a year rather than the three to five years it would have otherwise taken. Keshavan has stressed the importance of data as a foundation for digital transformation, stating that without a good understanding of data and the ability to create intelligence from it, digital transformation cannot succeed. He said Voya has built a scalable platform to ingest, transform, and feed data based on a "build it once and use it many times" principle to reduce data quality issues. He also discussed the company's focus on hyper-personalization and solving the "last mile problem" to help customers execute on guidance, as well as its efforts to innovate by integrating financial planning around health and wealth. Keshavan noted that talent is a critical aspect of progress, and that Voya's focus on employee well-being, diversity, equity and inclusion, and ESG priorities helps attract and retain employees. He added that information security is becoming increasingly important as the business connects with more partners.
Transcript (22 segments)
P
Peter High0:00
Welcome to Technovation, I'm your host Peter High. My guest today is Santhosh Keshavan. Santhosh is the Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Voya Financial, a company that helps Americans plan, invest, and protect their savings to get ready to retire better. The company earns nearly eight billion dollars in annual revenue. Santhosh has been CIO for nearly four and a half years and is responsible for Voya's technology systems, data and digital organization, information security, and infrastructure. He also serves on Voya's executive committee. Prior to joining Voya, Santhosh held the position of EVP and CIO for Regions Bank from 2010 to 2017. I look forward to hearing from him how he drives IT strategies that help to accelerate business growth through innovation while also focusing on simplification and creating efficiencies to deliver a better experience for Voya's customers. Santhosh, welcome to Technovation. It's great to speak with you today.
S
Santhosh Keshavan0:55
Yeah, Peter, thanks very much for having me. It's a pleasure.
P
Peter High0:59
Wonderful. I just read a brief introduction as to your background and your role within Voya Financial. I wonder maybe just here at the outset for greater context setting, if you could take a moment for those who may be a little less familiar, describe Voya's business in a bit more detail and any additional color you'd like to provide with regard to your responsibilities as CIO.
S
Santhosh Keshavan1:21
Yeah, sure, Peter. It's always good to start with a bit of a business background. As you said, Voya focuses on retirement for all Americans, to have a better retirement, better quality after retirement. We focus from hiring through retirement for all the employees. Voya came out of ING during the 2007 financial crisis and we went public in 2013. When we started, we had five business lines, and through some strategic business transformation, we ended up divesting two of the five business lines: the annuities business and the life insurance business, which was done over the past three or four years. Now we are poised for growth. We are laser focused on growth, and we are focused on our asset management, our employee benefits, what we call our health business, and our retirement. We also now call that our wealth business. So wealth, health, and asset management are our primary focus areas. Technology plays a very key role. In my role within the organization, we have a singular IT organization, and as you said, the data, digital, info security, infrastructure, and also our data science organization is under my umbrella.
P
Peter High2:51
That's wonderful. And as you and I have discussed in a previous conversation, Voya is an interesting business model, B2B to C in many ways. Talk a bit about the role that you see digital playing in the interactions with customers and ultimately your customers' customers, if you will, and the extent to which that's evolved over the course of the four-plus years that you've been with the organization.
S
Santhosh Keshavan3:16
It's a great question. For us, digital becomes even more important because we don't necessarily have retail branches. So digital is the way our customers—when we say customers, the employees and employers—can get in touch with us, the way we can serve them. So digital has always been in the forefront. Voya has done quite a bit of investments even in the last three or four years in revamping our digital assets and rewriting all of our digital assets. The pandemic and the new ways of working have even made this more relevant. So we are becoming a mobile-first, cloud-first company. We are really thinking through the lens of the customer and really trying to see how we can take the right tools to our customers through their preference, whether it's through them calling us, wanting to chat with us, using their mobile or other types of technologies to get to the right information and the right service. We are focusing on all these areas. And when we talk about digital, I also want to make sure we emphasize the need for a strong data foundation, because without a strong data foundation, digital becomes less impactful. So we look at both data and digital together.
P
Peter High4:50
An important qualification. I really appreciate that, and I'm looking forward to digging into that a little bit further with you. Before we do, I mentioned at the outset also that an area of focus—and you articulated some of the ways in which that's been manifested in your own description—is that simplification is part of what you and the team have been working on. I know for many organizations, especially large ones, as they think about the next sources of growth, adding to the business where possible, simplification sometimes seems to run contrary, almost paradoxical to that. But it is an important aspect to set an appropriate foundation so that you're not adding simply complexity and therefore, frankly, risk to the organization as you grow. So I'd be interested if you wouldn't mind diagnosing the ways in which, or the topics that have been particularly fruitful, as you've thought about simplification of the tech and digital within an environment like Voya's.
S
Santhosh Keshavan5:46
Yeah, it has been a very strategic focus for us. While innovation is always one of the drivers of our strategy, we are paying a lot of attention to simplification for two reasons. One, this feeds into innovation. As we look through the lens of our customer and our business partners, simplification will allow us to bring solutions to market faster. If we are complex, if you have multiple core systems or too many peripheral systems, trying to innovate in those environments will make it very expensive. Every project will take multi-years, to which point that idea may not be innovative anymore. So if we are disciplined, if we bring the right judgment in how we build our future architecture and how we can simplify what we have—because technology is evolving and new tools and opportunities are there on a daily basis—really trying to simplify will help with our overall expense, it will help with time to market, and like you said, it creates a better hygiene for us to support going forward. Companies do it anyway. Automation is one example where they try to make things simpler for our customers. But I also believe in reducing our footprint as much as possible. It just makes us that much more nimble.
P
Peter High7:22
Yeah, I love that concept of nimble, certainly as an orienting principle. I wonder to what extent did it require any sort of cultural changes? It's human nature to want to go off and do the next thing. You've completed something in the past, let's go on to the new. And oftentimes, from many interactions with peers of yours, there's difficulty in saying, 'Okay, we've introduced this new thing. What's rendered redundant as a result of that? What have we expanded our offering to include now that requires or enables us to turn a great number of other things off?' Were there sets of practices? Did this come naturally to the organization, or was there some musculature that was necessary to build in order to bring this to life?
S
Santhosh Keshavan8:11
I think it's definitely a muscle. It is a muscle for all of us, and I still think it is something that we still keep working on. It is never an end state. But to get to the right spot for an organization, multiple things will play. One is really having an understanding or a catalog of capabilities. Many times we end up making decisions in silos, not really knowing what already exists in an organization. So cataloging the capabilities is very important. The second thing that we have done is to really focus on defining what are table stakes and what are differentiators, and the things that we want to build and internally own the intellectual property or the code, and the things that applications or capabilities or tools we could rent, lease, or partner. Having clarity on that helps. And the third thing you pointed out is really the culture of when do we go best of breed and when do we leverage existing solutions. Sometimes learn to live with 80% and let the product evolve to give us the remaining 20%, versus trying to buy many solutions to make that happen. So that's the culture and discipline part.
P
Peter High9:38
That's a great overview. I want to return to the point that you made before, that data and digital are in many ways thought up together within the organization, data being a critical element in terms of making better decisions, engaging the health of relationships with customers, interacting with employees and customers alike, et cetera. Talk a little bit further, if you wouldn't mind. I'd love to go a bit deeper than your important introduction there as to how you see the role of data playing and even how you formulated a broader data strategy for the organization, please.
S
Santhosh Keshavan10:17
Yeah, data is extremely important for success. What do I mean by that? It's a very generic statement, but we look at data through some core transactional information that we can bring to bear. There is a lot of technology built behind the scenes in gathering all this data. So the more efficiently we can do this, the better off we are. Again, it goes to the simplicity, the nimbleness that we talked about. The other aspect of data is also focusing on personalization or hyper-personalization, which is becoming a differentiator for many organizations. As people—our customers or employees—want to get served, they will most likely use our tools and systems if the system knows their preference, if they know that individual. And that hyper-personalization is possible through having a good understanding of our data and having the ability to store it and use it.
P
Peter High11:29
Yeah, very interesting. I wonder, talk a little bit about other areas that you and the team are innovating around. I know that, as you point out, yours is a business where digital and technology are the lifeblood in many ways, the way in which you do business, the way in which you interact with customers. Any other sorts of areas you would highlight or underscore in terms of topics or areas of innovation that you're helping to drive?
S
Santhosh Keshavan11:54
Yeah, innovation is happening all the time. But one area, one example I want to highlight is really around the ways we are bringing the financial planning around health and wealth. In the past, we have seen companies either focus solely on the health side or on the wealth side, the 401k retirement. But what we are seeing is you really need both pieces together to make the right choices along the way and also to be able to successfully retire. Whether it's helping the customers or employees in this case make the right choices during their enrollment season as an example, how do we give them the right information at the right time that's really actionable? This is possible through bringing the health and wealth data together during their enrollment season with the right mobile-first technology that makes it extremely easy for them to go through and make those choices and selections. That's really one example, but it's very powerful. And as we look at the future on how we can really help Americans retire better, there are so many ways we can bring in solutions through innovation. How do we help them pay off the student debt loan, for example? If they can do that, they can probably save more for retirement. How much should they save in their HSA or 401k, or which should be done more or less? All of these are personalized to every individual, every household's needs. This is where technology can really play a role in giving the right information at the right time, and this is really exciting for us.
P
Peter High13:49
Yeah, important topics for everyone to be contemplating in terms of making sure that they're building a nest egg that will mean that they can have a safe and secure retirement ahead. I want to talk to you a bit about the element of culture. Obviously, the heart of culture is people. This has been a difficult time for many organizations as attrition is on the rise across the economy. The war for talent is certainly very much flaring up at the moment, and organizations are at times finding challenges in bringing in great people. I know that a talent strategy is naturally a topic that you and the team have been focused on a great deal as well. I wonder if you can cover a bit about how you're thinking about it and creative ways in which you've identified sources of talent during a period of time when it's acutely necessary.
S
Santhosh Keshavan14:44
Yeah, talent is such an important aspect. We feel, I feel, without the right talent, we will not be able to progress, period, full stop. And I'm also very fortunate to be working for a company like Voya, which focuses so much on the well-being of our own employees as well. We do everything to make sure that the employees are taken care of. The recent pandemic is a good example. We put the safety of employees first. We were able to switch to 100% remote overnight, not only just for our employees but for our partners, contractors, the 10,000-plus people that serve our customers. So in every way, we try to promote that inside the company. We live that on a day-to-day basis. We focus on things about DE&I and ESG. Those are really important for us. Voya is a leader in many ways. This helps us, along with our brand name, appeal to a lot of the workforce and helps us attract some of the best talent. Also, the other thing we have been doing is reaching out to universities and building some partnerships. Our internship program, the summer internship or the co-op programs that we have, has been growing. We did not stop that even during the peak of the pandemic last year. We somehow figured out a way to switch to virtual. The in-person experience was probably better for the students, but as opposed to not having anything, we decided to switch, and I'm so glad we did it. That becomes a source of talent for us as well as we look at future years.
P
Peter High16:43
Great points you raise across the board. I want to underscore and dive a little deeper in a couple of the points you made. You talked about how so many today, as they're seeking employment, bear in mind D&I efforts, ESG efforts as well, and that progress made within your organization makes it more magnetic. Can you talk about the most effective means of conveying these as priorities to would-be employees of your organization?
S
Santhosh Keshavan17:11
We talk about these things in our investor calls. We talk about this as we go to various recruiting campaigns to the universities. It's very much there on our website as well. But beyond just being listed there, we really live this. This is not a metric. This is not just something that's out there for people to read. When somebody becomes a Voya employee, they will truly see how passionate we are as an organization, and this really keeps us going and motivated.
P
Peter High17:48
Santhosh, I'd like to also cover, if I could, trends that are particularly exciting to you. We've covered a number of them through this conversation. I wonder if there are others that we haven't covered, or if there are any that we have that you'd like to underscore further and delve into more deeply. But as you look to the future, say two or three years, what are some of the trends that are starting to make their way onto your strategic roadmap, please?
S
Santhosh Keshavan18:12
There are a couple of things that jump out. One is our strategy around being cloud-first. I briefly mentioned that at the beginning. We are a hybrid cloud company today. We have gotten out of the data center business. We no longer run or operate our own data centers. But we are a private cloud, public cloud. I see us going more towards public cloud over the next three to four years. The innovation is happening in the public cloud. We can easily scale there, and there are numerous other benefits that companies are looking at. So that's definitely top of mind. The second one that I should also mention is information security. It is becoming even more important than before, given that businesses are becoming more complex. We are connecting and exchanging information with many partners. Having a solid information security discipline and infrastructure is as important as well. That's one of the things that we'll continue to be very focused on.
P
Peter High19:33
Well, Santhosh, thank you so much for joining me on Technovation today, talking a bit about the areas that you and your team have been focused on across your four-plus years with Voya Financial. It's exciting to hear about the many areas in which you're innovating, but also the care that you take in making sure that the foundation remains very healthy so that you're building a more sustainable future for the organization through the tech and digital efforts that you're shepherding. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much.
S
Santhosh Keshavan20:04
Yeah, Peter, thank you again. Thanks for having me.