Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Global Head of Technology & Operations, VOYA FINANCIAL INC
How to Ingest, Transform, and Feed Data in Insurance Industry with Santhosh Keshavan, from Voya
Santhosh Keshavan, EVP and CIO at Voya, disclosed how they are taking advantage of data and turning it into something ...
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 (43 segments)
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Narrator0:00
This episode of Life Accelerated is brought to you by Equisoft, a leading global provider of end-to-end cloud-based solutions with deep domain expertise in the life insurance industry. To learn more, visit equisoft.com.
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Anthony O'Donnell0:19
I think all companies have a lot of data. The challenge is how do you create intelligent, actionable guidance from the data we have? I'm Anthony O'Donnell and this is Life Accelerated, a podcast for life insurers striving to achieve digital transformation. Digital transformation can be said to be managed from two ends of a continuum. Companies must create a compelling and efficient customer experience, but in order to do that, they need a modern foundation. Voya, an insurance, wealth management, and retirement products company, is building the foundation for digital transformation through core system consolidation, migration to the cloud, and modernized data management. CIO Santhosh Keshavan shares how these initiatives are speeding the creation of capabilities to give customers more power, for example with the MyVoyage mobile app and the Voyapal chatbot. Santhosh is Executive Vice President and CIO at Voya Financial. He is responsible for the firm's technology systems, data and digital organization, information security, and infrastructure. He also serves on Voya's Executive Committee. Throughout our conversation, Santhosh shares Voya's digital transformation efforts: simplifying legacy systems, creating intelligence from data, and accelerating cloud adoption. And he stresses that it's not a destination but rather a journey. Here's my conversation with Santhosh.
Hi Santhosh, tell us a little bit about Voya Financial's history, its product set, and its current place in the market. Most of our readers probably know that Voya rebranded from ING US back in 2013.
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Santhosh Keshavan1:50
First off, it's great to be here and having this conversation. Let me speak a little bit about where Voya is today and I'll connect that to the transformation that we have gone through in the last decade or so. Voya is a leading provider of retirement products and services in the US. We have three business lines: Investment Management, Health Solutions, and Wealth Solutions. In January of this year, we also acquired Benefitfocus, which is an industry-leading benefits administration tech company that serves employers, health plans, and brokers. We are really focused on guiding Americans to greater retirement readiness and financial wellness through employer-sponsored savings plans and holistic retirement and income guidance. From a customer perspective, we serve 52,000 institutional clients and over 6 million individual retirement plan participants. As a leading provider of group supplemental health insurance in the US, we also provide a comprehensive and highly flexible portfolio of stop-loss, life, disability, and voluntary insurance products. I want to quickly touch on our acquisition: Benefitfocus extends our workplace benefits and savings reach and capabilities by providing benefits administration capabilities to over 16 million individual subscription employees across employer and health plan clients. And the last thing on our investment management: we manage public and private fixed income, equities, multi-asset solutions, and alternative strategies for institutions, intermediaries, and individual investors. This is where we are today. If you go back to how we started, as you mentioned at the beginning, we were born out of ING US and we had a different business mix. We started off in 2013 with five business lines, and in the last few years we have divested two of the five. We have divested our annuities business first and then the life insurance business. But we are very laser focused on the three businesses plus the acquisition we recently made. We feel we are poised for growth and we feel like we have the right mix going forward.
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Anthony O'Donnell4:04
So let's discuss your role at Voya. What's your title, what's your brief, and how did your previous career lead you to your current appointment?
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Santhosh Keshavan4:12
My title is Chief Information Officer. I joined Voya in 2017, so it's almost going to be six years this summer. Time flies when you're having fun, and I'm having a lot of fun at Voya. I've been in the financial services industry my entire career, almost 30 years now. I started off and I'm trained as a software developer. I have a computer science engineering degree, graduated in India, and I started working straight out for a wealth management company back in the days known as SunGard. I got a chance to develop many software products while I was working at SunGard, and I also got to play multiple roles within the company. It was great. I managed the software side, I got a chance to build data centers in the US and many other countries that the company was operating in. I also had a stint managing P&L for Asia Pacific. I spent about 14 years at SunGard, and then I made a switch to Fidelity Investments where I got to work on the asset management side. After Fidelity, I spent about six years or so at a regional bank as a CIO, and then joined Voya in 2017. I felt like I had exposure to all facets of the financial services industry, and even though they're all financial services, they're different in their own ways and how they interact with customers and leverage technologies differently. So it gives me a good perspective in managing Voya's current state and the growth as well.
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Anthony O'Donnell5:41
That's true. Within a given enterprise, you could have very diverse experience. You could come from very different places in the enterprise, and like you said, you've got both business experience and technology experience, technology management, and also programming experience.
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Santhosh Keshavan5:54
I've been very fortunate to be at the right place at the right time and also having the opportunity to work with some great colleagues in each and every company. It's been a phenomenal journey, it's been fun. I wanted to be in technology, I wanted to be in software, and financial services happened to be my first job and I've loved it ever since.
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Anthony O'Donnell6:13
Let's talk a little bit more about the fun that you've been having as we get to a more detailed consideration of your digital transformation efforts. I thought a good start would be to talk about the foundational work of simplifying legacy systems. So maybe you could give us an account of how things were and what work you've done to consolidate.
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Santhosh Keshavan6:29
Transformation is used often, and I feel like we will always be transforming because technology is changing so fast. I talked about initially how the business transformed. We had five businesses, we transformed. Technology also has gone through a pretty significant transformation at Voya since I joined in multiple areas. We have migrated from having data centers into public cloud or private cloud. We have taken a position to really consolidate our core systems in all the businesses. For example, in our Wealth Solutions, we had 46 instances of our record-keeping platform, and that was very complex and expensive to manage. It was not allowing us to innovate faster because any innovation had to be integrated 40 times over, and that would take years. Then it's not new anymore. So we put in a very concerted effort to really simplify, having one core system in each of our areas. Along the way, we have also done some investments in other foundational areas. We have also done quite a bit in our digital footprint. We have had to rewrite all our digital assets. They were probably 20 years old when I joined, and that's a long time in the tech industry. And then the last thing is around our investments around data as well, which is part of our original transformation where we are focusing on those foundational capabilities.
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Anthony O'Donnell7:50
Having talked about the foundational technology, this might be a good time to talk about how Voya defines digital transformation and what digital interaction means to Voya.
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Santhosh Keshavan8:01
Digital transformation for Voya, and at least in my opinion, is a very broad umbrella. It comprises many aspects. The first and the most important component is data. Without having a good understanding of data, having the ability to create intelligence from the data... I think all companies have a lot of data. The challenge is how do you create intelligent, actionable guidance from the data we have? That is core to our digital transformation. The second part is having an open architecture. It is very much necessary that for customers to adopt and maximize the use of their digital tools, we need to span multiple ecosystems. Not only do we have to talk to applications that are within our ecosystem, but we've got to traverse other surrounding ecosystems from that customer's perspective. So API management becomes very critical in enabling that great customer experience. And the last thing I would say, which is very critical for digital transformation, is also faster adoption of public cloud technologies. There is more innovation that's happening there that will allow us to bring solutions at a much faster pace to the market and give greater control to our customers. So those three areas, I would say, form the core of digital transformation.
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Anthony O'Donnell9:18
I thought we might dig in a little deeper into data and discuss the challenges of data migration and data quality. As you've already suggested, control of data is so crucial. It's what circulates through all the systems, and it's so much easier said than done. So could you tell us about some of the challenges you faced and some of the challenges that you think still remain?
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Santhosh Keshavan9:36
Absolutely. We sometimes joke about it or talk about it within the company where it's a battle well fought, never won, because the data production is pretty massive. It is not just the data that the core systems provide, the systems of record provide. It is also the data that we try to capture from a customer perspective that's very important: what choices they like, how do they like this data to be served, and the customer 360. Do we know enough about the customer to be able to give them what they're looking for? When you look at the universe of data, it's very complex. So what we have attempted to do is build a platform that's scalable where we are able to ingest data, we are able to transform data, and we are able to feed data for downstream customers. And we are also focusing on one guiding principle there: build it once and use it many times. That will allow us to have fewer copies, which will hopefully take away some of the quality issues where we may not all be looking at the same source. New technologies have come in the last even two or three years where managing data is becoming easier or more manageable, and we are leveraging those technologies as well. Definitely having our data platform on the cloud has helped us. Automation has helped us quite a bit in this space. Together, we feel again it is a constant battle. I would not say we have conquered it, but I think we are headed in the right direction.
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Anthony O'Donnell11:04
I think also the public cloud adoption discussion is similar to the data discussion because it's not only a big job, but it's a paradigm change. I mean, you're changing the infrastructure that you operate on. I wonder what some of the major considerations are for CIOs like you, as you see it and as you would advise your peers, about what can go to the cloud, what can't go to the cloud, what are some of the trade-offs, and what are some of the big decisions?
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Santhosh Keshavan11:27
Every company, every application will have to be looked at within how they operate. Blindly taking all the applications and going to the cloud as is may have a lot of unpleasant or unintended consequences, including expenses going way up, not having the ability to take advantage of all functionality that native cloud may offer. So it requires thorough analysis. We've got to really understand and answer the question why: why are we going to the cloud, what problem are we trying to solve? Once we address that for each application or a group of applications, you really have two choices. You go as is, which is not very desirable because you go as is, you're not really taking advantage of a lot of the native capabilities that makes an application much better. But it's also being practical that we cannot rewrite every single application in our portfolio. So we have to balance that and really be very thoughtful in how we migrate, because we also have to consider all the security requirements and privacy requirements which are very important as well. It's not just the functionality, but making sure they are well protected. But once we make the choice, once companies are able to migrate the workload, they do enjoy certain scale, flexibility, and taking advantage of the innovation that's happening. We just got to go application by application and create a path of transformation for each of those in the journey to the cloud.
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Anthony O'Donnell12:55
To some extent, you've anticipated a question that just occurred to me about how does a CIO make the case for the cloud to the leadership of an insurance and financial services company?
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Santhosh Keshavan13:04
It's a lot easier these days than if you had asked me the question 10 years back. There was a lot of question around: is this secure, are we going to lose control, are we going to be able to have a disaster recovery as robust as we had in our own data centers? But the cloud industry and the ecosystem has evolved significantly in the last 10 years. So today, the discussion is more around: are the applications ready to be hosted in the cloud, what's the financial impact? And the most important thing is also the tendency for companies to go from how they operate the data centers to operating similarly in the cloud. There is a culture shift, there is a shift in thinking on how we balance out what we want, when we want, and how we pay for it. So there is a whole element of change that has to be managed. But when I look at our stakeholders, they are fairly comfortable with what cloud has to offer. It is getting the other pieces right. If we move an application as is, are we going to see some performance impact? That's not a good thing. So you don't want performance to be degraded by moving certain applications. And if they are not going to work well, then we have to rewrite the application or think of another strategy. And finance is always a big part. I've seen where going to the cloud to lower the expense rate generally is not a good idea because at times running applications or workloads in cloud could be more expensive. So really understanding the why is very critical.
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Anthony O'Donnell14:35
We're talking about the importance of applications functioning correctly. I thought we could now talk about the MyVoyage mobile app, what it does, where it is in its stage of evolution, and how important it is to how Voya interacts with its customers.
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Santhosh Keshavan14:49
This is one of my favorite topics. It's an exciting time again for Voya. We are looking to provide customers more power on their own situation to make the best choices. MyVoyage was the result of us spending almost a year analyzing how can we bring some better tools and technologies to our customers. MyVoyage is really a first-of-its-kind, I would say, personalized financial guidance and connected workplace benefits digital platform. It truly offers a one-stop solution which will provide individuals with a complete view of their financial picture. This includes workplace benefits, it includes their savings account, along with the integration of external accounts they may have such as personal banking or other credit accounts, to really help them better manage their health and financial well-being. Without such a tool and without a way for them to see it all in one place, successfully investing for retirement and getting there would continue to be a challenge. So this is an attempt to make that easy.
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Anthony O'Donnell15:53
What you're describing is a very different kind of engagement with the customer than insurers and financial services companies have historically had with their customers.
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Santhosh Keshavan16:01
We are learning. This has been a challenge for the insurance industry, the retirement services industry, for almost 20 years. When you look at the adoption of when our customers log in or call to check on their retirement balance or to check on other sorts of insurance or health benefits they may have, it's generally when there is a life event or during the annual enrollment process. There are so many choices that an employee has to pick during the annual enrollment, it's almost overwhelming. What we have seen from data that's published is on an average they spend six minutes picking their plan during enrollment and spend 60 minutes deciding which Netflix movies to browse. That's a result of too many choices. The tools and technologies are not really explaining in simple English what actions they could take. So the industry was hoping that when people log in more, they can build more solutions, and probably the customers are hoping for better solutions and give them a reason to log in more. So this solution, MyVoyage, where we are looking at the whole ecosystem of health and wealth coming together including their personal data and providing almost real-time guidance which are actionable, will make this very meaningful.
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Anthony O'Donnell17:16
I'm trying to put my finger on why this is so fun and exciting for you. It's always gratifying obviously when you've accomplished what you set out to do, but I might guess it's also more specifically about the combination of how it improves the quality of engagement, the frequency of engagement, and how it unifies the overall customer experience.
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Santhosh Keshavan17:35
100%. The reason we are excited is it's not like we are creating new sources of income for our customers. We are going to help... if that's not positive, then... Can we really help them make best choices? And again, it's very personalized. So it's not a generic guidance. For that customer, for that employee, for that family, can they make choices in a way that they are maximizing the returns on those choices? That creates a very exciting opportunity where they can track the progress, they are in control, and this is all done through digital channels. The pandemic has kind of accelerated this as well. Very few people go to a branch or an office. Voya does not have one. We only interact with our customers through web, mobile, or they can call our customer service number. But it's all through digital guidance.
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Anthony O'Donnell18:29
How important were your consolidation efforts to making MyVoyage possible?
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Santhosh Keshavan18:33
It was massive. If we had again 40-plus copies of the core system, something like this would have taken three to five years or more and a lot more expensive. When you do this over such a long period of time, but with consolidating our core systems, simplifying our overall footprint, and really sunsetting multiple duplicative applications that we had in our stack, we were able to launch the first version within a year. From inception of the idea to ramping up the teams to developing a minimum viable product and launching that into the market was within one year. That was extremely exciting, and it was the first time we could really prove how fast we could move in this space.
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Anthony O'Donnell19:18
One of our major themes in the Life Accelerated podcast is the importance of foundational technology or core systems to digital transformation, and I think this is a great illustration of that.
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Santhosh Keshavan19:26
Absolutely. And we have other examples too. We've talked about MyVoyage because it's really new. One other example that again is very tied to the core of our digital transformation I would like to share is around a product we call Voyapal. This was a chatbot that was built and which enhances our website experience, and this chatbot will also be integrated into MyVoyage in the next quarter or so. This gives our customers more flexibility and assists them on how they want to be assisted. In the first year itself, this is an intelligent chatbot where this had about 300,000 customer interactions and 70% of them were answered and the questions were resolved using Voyapal. It's becoming more popular. We would definitely love to speak to our customers too, but if they choose to get a quick transaction done by leveraging a technology which is becoming more intelligent, then there is a way to doing that as well.
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Anthony O'Donnell20:24
Let's talk a little bit about how your organization works, starting with how important partnerships are to digital transformation and Voya, and to the overall operation of technology and support of the business.
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Santhosh Keshavan20:37
Partnerships happen in multiple ways. One is how do we bring in more solutions to our ecosystem, whether those solutions are built by Voya or not. We do partner with multiple providers within the space. We also partner with fintechs; they bring in some unique solutions that may be important for us to deliver to our customers. There is also partnership on how we deliver things. We have strong support with several of our technology partners that come and help when we are trying to adopt and deliver on a new piece of technology. We have companies that we have used for some of the managed IT services. Some of them are very large, some of them are boutique, but we have had relationships with them for over 15 years at Voya, and we come together very quickly. Even in the case of MyVoyage, all of this had to come together. We had data partners, we had partnership within our company as well where business, technology, operations came together. We partnered with payroll providers, we had to partner with several technology companies to come and help us. So a lot of this came together very quickly, and this came together also because of the history of working well with each other.
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Anthony O'Donnell21:50
It's always good to hear how you're able to ramp up and down with partners for staffing. Let's talk a little bit about the internal organization. The way I'd like to ask this is with the kinds of technology you're implementing and the kinds of functionality you're building, how are the skill sets of the IT organization changing?
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Santhosh Keshavan22:06
There was a time when some technologies would be around for five, ten years. Now I think every two years skills are changing. We do focus on a couple of things. One is understanding the domain itself, understanding of our customers, understanding the business. That does not change, that evolves over time. We encourage all our associates to really understand from the lens of our customer, understand our business. The tools and technologies, it's quite dynamic, and we do several things. We have a pretty good training program internally. We retool, we have the ability to train our associates, and we also, like I said, partner with third-party consulting firms that come and help us. So if they have the exposure, and we also have a global delivery center. We have locations across the US, we have locations in India, London. That helps us bring together the best, gives us the opportunity to attract the best. But it's a constant battle. We have to stay on top, and really talent is what makes us all successful at the end of the day.
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Anthony O'Donnell23:11
So the skill sets are changing rapidly. How are the IT professionals themselves changing? And I guess the way of putting this is how does Voya work to attract and retain the kind of talent you need today?
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Santhosh Keshavan23:22
Voya's brand is phenomenal. We have won several awards every year, from being the most ethical company to one of the best companies to work for. All these things help us attract and retain the best. Even during the pandemic, we learned that it was not necessary to drag every employee to the office, and we have so many locations across the US that most of us were talking to each other on the phone. So we very quickly pivoted to allowing employees the flexibility of either being hybrid or fully remote. With that shift, we were actually able to attract a higher degree of talent because we were not confined to a geographic location anymore. We also have partnerships with universities and we do some great internship programs, summer internships and co-ops. Collectively, we feel like we have a very good pipeline of new talent, and we also do a good job of retaining the ones we have. But cross-training is really key because technology keeps changing so fast that we do encourage people to learn and adopt new technologies.
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Anthony O'Donnell24:26
We've ranged pretty widely in our conversation. I thought maybe you could close with a kind of summary of where digital transformation is taking Voya as a provider of products and services to consumers.
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Santhosh Keshavan24:37
Digital transformation, I think, is an ongoing term. I wish I could say it's a project and it ends on a certain day. This will continue to evolve, this will continue to expand. I think we are going to focus on hyper-personalization. This is where customers expect when they log into a system, the system should know them really well. It is a process, it is part of the transformation, but I think that will be a core focus for us. The other area is what we call the last mile problem. As we go through and provide guidance, if it's not easily actionable, then they will most likely not do it because that's going to be pushed for a future day and people get busy. So between hyper-personalization and solving the last mile problem where they can very easily execute on the guidance and make those transactions real will be very important. What the financial industry is seeing is how customers are experiencing this outside, whether it's e-commerce or Netflix or other places where these things are already a reality. So we will be pretty soon focusing more and coming on par with some of the other areas that they already see.
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Anthony O'Donnell25:49
And what kind of feedback are you getting from your customers at this point?
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Santhosh Keshavan25:53
The feedback is good. They are liking what they are seeing. It's very early days. I'm speaking from a MyVoyage example perspective, but so far it's been very good, I would say, not only from the employees but from the employers as well. Because employers feel like coming up with a more comprehensive, well thought out, personalized solution will help customers navigate their own choices much better. But we will obviously keep a very close eye on how we do the next 12 months and integrate the feedback that we receive into our future roadmap.
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Anthony O'Donnell26:26
And as you've emphasized more than once in our conversation, it is after all a journey.
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Santhosh Keshavan26:30
Absolutely, because everything around us is changing fast. Being nimble, having the right foundation helps us keep up with the change, keep up with the pace of change as we go.
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Anthony O'Donnell26:42
Delightful listening to your enthusiasm about your work at Voya. Thanks so much, Santhosh.
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Santhosh Keshavan26:46
Thank you for having me. Enjoy the conversation.
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Anthony O'Donnell26:50
It's great fun talking with Santhosh about Voya's transformation, not least because he seems to be having so much fun himself. Their satisfaction not only in a job well done but in the doing of it with an effective team of executive peers and highly competent technology professionals. Santhosh's account also shows that important lessons are to be learned and applied. For example, when it comes to cloud, it's easier to make the case to senior leadership today, but technology leaders must proceed with open eyes. Santhosh cautions that technology leaders must understand what problems they're trying to solve with cloud, because blindly taking applications to the cloud can have unforeseen consequences. Thank you for joining us for this Life Accelerated podcast. For more relevant content to help you achieve digital transformation, visit equisoft.com.