Sanjay Sharma is no stranger to transformation. Our COO (Chief Operating Officer) of over 5 years is the driving force behind our technical effort and spent his first 15 months with us building our organisational infrastructure and technical capabilities from the ground up in order to accommodate the co-brands business that we’d recently acquired.
Blown away by the project’s pace and the quality of delivery, it showed him the astonishing power of our people — empowered to make decisions and deliver the results.
Sanjay’s digital vision isn’t just about successfully launching new products — it’s bigger. It’s about building an unparalleled, self-sufficient digital engineering capability in-house, so that we are completely future-proofed to deliver platforms that enable new products, capabilities, innovations and apps — anticipating tomorrow’s needs at a pace that is more associated with Tech giants.
Combined with our six million-strong customer base and strong levels of profitability, Sanjay firmly believes our unique challenger position amongst less established/Agile/tech-enabled businesses gives us a distinct edge in a highly competitive market.
But if we’re to realise our ambition to become the leading digitally-enabled consumer finance provider in the UK, we need to make sure we’re one step ahead of everyone else. We want to be a technology company that enables frictionless integration with any device, any channel, any product or third party. This will allow us to move at pace to react to customer insight and demand as well as potentially disrupt traditional business models and institutions.
Fortunately, Sanjay knows exactly how we should do this, having established six imperatives as part of the next phase of digital transformation.
1. Moving to Agile platforms and engineering. We’ve evolved our organisational mindset from projects to products and platforms. All our systems of innovation are made fit for purpose: micro-services architected and API-enabled (Application Programme Interface), meaning all future changes are easier to deploy, are simpler and cost-effective to implement. We are also one of the only established financial services companies to be a fully public cloud-native.
2. Exploiting advanced data analytics. We’ve built a very well-architected data lake in the cloud, with customer data in AWS (Amazon Web Services) public cloud using very advanced technologies. With continued investment in Data Science capability and leveraging our data lake, we are now looking to improve our underwriting decisions, and offer predictive models to retailers.
3. Driving automation for operational excellence. We’re using robotics to fully digitalise all the back-office processes and are continuing to scale this. We also want to extend it to intelligent automation, starting with the Microsoft AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies for chatbots and moving on to Natural Language Processing and cognitive services.
4. Digitalising the entire customer journey. We’re studying customers’ typical journeys to help us understand where they currently ‘break’ (meaning human intervention is needed). Then, we’re reengineering the processes so that gradually, all journeys will become wholly digital.
5. Scaling up our Agile organisation and culture. Having studied various Agile models in the marketplace, we’ve come up with our very own. We’ve launched a full squad pilot. It’s proved highly successful, so we are now considering extending Agile across the organisation with the ambition of becoming a scale Agile organisation.
6. Innovating at scale. The ultimate goal once we’re satisfied we’ve achieved the first five imperatives, will involve a cultural transformation towards experimentation and learning from failure as well as success. Soon we’ll be able to ramp up our already ambitious release schedule with an unmatched capability for deployment and integration.
We’ve made rapid progress since embarking on this journey at the start of 2018.
We now have a permanent team of 100+ engineers and have brought e-servicing fully in-house. We’ve launched 34 new mobile apps, moved our aqua and marbles brands onto the new cloud platform and launched two new products, opus and Fluid.
Our customers are happier than ever. Since re-launching e-servicing, our Net Easy Score, which measures how easy it is to navigate through an app or website, has gone up 16 points from around 55 to 71.
We’ve just launched a new digital product, NewPay, with our retail partner, Unshackled.com, that offers customers different ways to pay (instalment, revolving or credit offers) all on a single account.
Yet we’re only just scratching the surface of our ambitious plans. Fully realising our vision of building a world-class engineering capability will take brilliant engineers.
So if you’re looking for a fast-paced environment, brilliant colleagues and the chance to make a difference, working in offices specifically designed for collaboration, speed, entrepreneurship and fun — we’d love for you to join us.
We’ll also soon be running a series of hackathons and no doubt celebrating some fantastic prototypes — the best of which we’ll implement — so watch this space.
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