Aditya Birla Capital: The digital shift

Staying ahead of the technology curve has stood Aditya Birla Capital in good stead. The holding company for the financial services businesses of the Aditya Birla Group has always been an early adopter of new and cutting-edge technology solutions that enhance the customer experience, while bringing in significant improvements in the efficiency and productivity of its operational processes.

Over the past few years, Aditya Birla Capital has been adopting an increasingly digital operational model, which has helped elevate service and efficiency levels. This journey began much before the Covid pandemic struck, and not surprisingly, the company has been reaping the fruits of this early start, and has seen improved customer satisfaction across its businesses.

Aditya Birla Capital's remarkable digital transformation has been written about a lot, and has inspired other companies to adopt similar models. This augurs well for the financial services industry's digital makeover and its overall growth prospects even in a global economic crisis.

Here are some of the highlights of Aditya Birla Capital's digital transformation trajectory, and how it has catapulted the company from its legacy approach into a new league of digitally-empowered growth: 

Re-engineering customer and distributor journeys in FY 21

• Renewed and re-engineered over 100 customer and distributor journeys
• On-boarded 90% of the customers digitally across all the businesses
• Implemented digital service journeys on multiple digital platforms, including the Web, WhatsApp, chatbots and voice bots
• Increased the availability of services on digital channels — from 74% in FY 20 to 90% in FY 21
• Registered over 8 million customer service interactions across all businesses
• The health insurance business saw 92% renewals, while the life insurance business saw 84% renewals on multiple digital platforms, including WhatsApp, the web, the app and on the audio-visual bot
• In FY 21, 95% of Aditya Birla Capital's distributors across businesses were on-boarded digitally
• Developed a portal for select advisors across Aditya Birla Capital's businesses as a one-stop destination for all their needs

Building scale by automating processes and platforms

• Over 350 robots perform live activities across Aditya Birla Capital's businesses in multiple functions, including operations, customer service, finance and human resources
• Email bots have been handling over 200,000 emails every quarter, driving high operational efficiencies across businesses
• Turnaround time cut down by 80% due to the implementation of an OCR (online character recognition) mechanism for auto-extraction of data from various sources
• Over 87% customer applications are on public and private cloud, enabling a better up-time     

Leveraging Fintech

•  A network of over 1,400 fintechs worldwide created to identify innovative solutions and to collaborate in the implementation of new technology solutions 
• Currently working with over 50 fintechs in various fields, including AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) solutions, voice technologies, conversational UI (user interface), digital KYC, biometrics, hyper-personalisation and sales engagement

Data analytics for customer experience

• Advanced deep-learning algorithms are being deployed to analyse customer calls and discern the customer experience
• Analytics is being used to understand customer behaviour, acquire new customers, and upsell relevant products to existing customers through pre-approved offers
• Analytics is helping predict premium-paying behaviour of customers
• Prediction of early claims being done through analytics as part of Aditya Birla Capital's fraud-risk mitigation efforts, and to predict and mitigate risks
• Advanced analytics being deployed to create the right conversations with the right customer at the right time, for higher upsell and better retention rates

Building digital ecosystems

• A robust digital ecosystem across the protecting, investing and financing businesses 
• Includes leading payment platforms, travel and leisure platforms, e-commerce platforms and financial services aggregators

Focus on people and culture

• 100% of the learning interventions at Aditya Birla Capital have been delivered virtually over the past few years
• Over 90% of the workforce is undergoing learning through digital mediums
• A consistent focus on enabling the workforce to become future-ready through exposure to AI, ML, cloud computing and robotic process automation learning
• Emerging leaders receive planned exposure to operational frameworks of tech start-ups, fintech companies and leading digital businesses

Staying relevant in today's challenging business environment takes much more than just incremental improvements in products and processes. Aditya Birla Capital's successful impressive performance in these difficult times is the result of the above measures and more, all enabled by the latest and proven technology tools available today.

By harnessing the power of digitisation, Aditya Birla Capital is on the path to future-proof its strategy and stay the financial services provider of choice for consumers in a dynamic and highly competitive industry.