Jeetendra

Interviewers: Jeetendra, Veronica, Zoey and Jack Interviewee: Mr. Yogesh Maini Date of the interview: 20th December, 2019 Start time of the interview: 9 AM End time of the interview: 9:15 AM Location of the interview: Macquarie Park, NSW Interview topic: Trends in Banking industry Jeetendra: Good evening sir. First of all, we would like to thank you for accepting the interview. Hope it would be okay for us to record the conversation for our group assignment. Mr. Yogesh: My pleasure. Yeah sure. Go ahead. Jeetendra: Our group wants to know about the trends in the banking industry as you have been working for quite long and need your expertise in completing our project. Can you please introduce yourself? Mr. Yogesh: Hi. My name is Yogesh. I have been working in the banking industry for 15 years and have been in the financial planning and wealth management business of the banking. Financial planning means where the high net worth individuals and corporates including small business enterprises would come to us and want to understand where to invest their money. We would do financial planning and need analysis to evaluate their objectives, goals and risks and then would advise them where to invest and manage their finances. Jeetendra: Oh Okay. So, that’s basically wealth management. Jeetendra: Would you name your key responsibilities in the department…? Mr. Yogesh: I was managing a team of relationship managers. On a typical day, a relationship manager’s job would be where the high net worth individuals would come over and they would need our guidance. They have lots of money but they don’t know where to invest. So, my team would help them understand their financial needs, risk profiles, where they are coming from, what is their background, how much risk they are willing to take on their investments, what is their financial understanding, whether they understand complex financial instruments or are they traditional financial instruments based customers. Once the team does all their analysis, then we would recommend our customers and obviously it’s not a sales job completely. Once you have sold something, you need to service them regularly, update them regarding their investments as to where they are going and meet them on a regular basis to do the annual health check or the financial checkup. Zoey: Would you please comment on the company specific organizational strategy and structure? Mr. Yogesh: Organizational structure is different in various banks and I have worked in 7-8 banks till now and every bank will have a different structure and every bank will have a different strategy towards wealth management because some banks are loan or asset oriented banks and few others are more towards providing financial advisory to its clients. When it comes to financial advisory in the previous bank I was working in, we had a head of wealth, under him we had a team of financial advisors, under them we had a team of relationship managers. So we were managing a portfolio of a $1 billion together as a team of 31 members. Jeetendra: Nice. We want to the most important trends in your industry which would transform future generations. Mr. Yogesh: Currently, this is all human interaction when it comes to relationship management because as the name goes, we are talking about managing relationship of high net worth value customers who are very important for the banks perspective because these are the individuals who keep huge value and huge money in the banks which the bank uses it for various purposes. Coming soon, the trend has already started emerging where in as all the relationship managers are humans, robot advisor is a new concept which is coming up. Robot advisory is something which will possibly be taking lots of jobs from relationship managers in future. Jeetendra: So far, what do you think about the current IT system in your particular segment and would it affect your working with the rapid advancement in technology? Mr. Yogesh: Yes, it would. As I mentioned earlier, the robot advisory technology is a sophisticated financial planning wherein the customer on his own whether on a laptop or on his mobile phone or I pad etc, they can log in online, state their preferences, needs and objectives into a system which is algorithm based and the algorithms will come up with the typical solutions as to what instrument or product he should be investing into and all that stuff. Jeetendra: How can we make humans still be existent in the industry before totally switching to automated structure? Mr. Yogesh: As I mentioned about robot advisors, what a robot advisory does is that it doesn’t have human interface. When we are talking about relationship managers, I am talking about human interface wherein emotions are attached. A customer needs human touch, he needs some understanding, the integrity of the individual has to be shown and the trust only develops when you are talking to an individual. On a machine, you can put in your relevant information but if you are not a person who is savvy with investments or even with IT, he will still suffer. Machines can do only a few things for you wherein human intervention will obviously give better solutions to the needs that you have. I don’t see that taking over human interaction completely in the next five years but may be later on if Artificial intelligence coupled with Robot advisories, then it would be different. Zoey: Can you tell us what would be the potential impact of the trend in the organization and in the external environment? Mr. Yogesh: Okay. There are two impacts, one is towards the customer and one is towards the bank. From the banking point of view, the employees would feel redundant when the robots will take their space and from customer’s point of view, it will be easier to adopt to robot advisory provided he understands the financial industry and if he is tech savvy without the help of relationship manager but not otherwise. Veronica: Do you think Virtual reality can be used in the banking industry? Mr. Yogesh: Virtual reality technology has already started coming into banking. VR coupled with artificial intelligence has coming in. Mashrek bank has tried with a robot in the branch where it was a sort of experiment rather than an actual robot in the action. This robot would replace a greeter who stands in front of the main entrance to greet and welcome it’s clients and guide them as to which seat they have to go to. This robot, as a test has done successfully and I am sure in the future, although it will take time but replace jobs in the banking industry. Jeetendra: Thank you very much for your kind cooperation and help throughout the process. This would help us in making our report into an effective one. Mr. Yogesh: Okay. All the best to you guys and thank you.