Ally Tech Labs: the place to build tomorrow’s bank
An exclusive interview with Harish Naik, Head of the Ally Tech Lab, to learn all about where and how Ally, winner of the North American Innovation of the Year at the Qorus-Accenture Banking Innovation Awards 2022, designs its innovative projects.
Ally Tech Labs is testing different technologies, helping Ally Financial solve business problems and fueling them with innovative products and services to meet the expectations of the bank’s customers. Harish Naik who heads the labs tell Qorus more about it.
Tell us briefly about Ally Tech Labs. What year was the lab created? In which city is it located? How many people work there?
Ally Tech Labs, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, was founded in 2020 with a mission to accelerate adoption of new technologies and solve complex problems for Ally. We tackle the hard problems which are often not well defined, but when solved, they can accelerate and elevate the entire organization. We promote a culture of engineering excellence and partner heavily with business and strategy teams to define success. The initial Tech Labs initiatives allow us to experiment with contemporary technologies, bring industry learnings and define art of the possible within the world of technology.
We have six associates dedicated to Tech Labs. Everyone has extensive experience working on various technology platforms. They are ready to challenge the status quo, they do not hesitate to take risks while also taking a pragmatic approach to initiatives, and they enjoy the challenge of working on abstract concepts. We also add relevant experts as needed to augment the team.
What is the goal of Ally Tech Labs?
A focus on innovation is paramount in order remain competitive and to differentiate from competition.
The goal of Tech Labs is to keep a tab on the ever-changing technological landscape pertaining to Ally and determine how we can harness the capabilities to either improve efficiency or provide delightful digital experiences that would not have been possible before.
Our approach can be divided into two broad categories. Firstly, disruptive innovation to accelerate the adoption of new technologies. In this regard, we primarily focus on new and emerging tech such as quantum, AI, AR, VR, blockchain etc., and carry out proof of concept and tech to identify new opportunities these emerging technologies might bring. And secondly, sustaining/incremental innovation to develop platform-centric products and capabilities – this involves developing platforms and enhancing existing applications to continuously improve products, services and business operations to reduce stagnation and grow market share.
What are the main challenges to reach this goal?
The goal for Tech Labs is always going to be a moving target where constant innovation is necessary to best meet customers’ everchanging needs.
There are three main factors (challenges that are mitigated) that help us in meeting the goal:
• Leadership support – Having leadership faith and backing is essential for success. They help set the right environment for innovation within the organization. We are fortunate to have excellent support from our senior leadership. There is constant encouragement from leaders to pursue innovation. It is this culture of innovation that makes Ally stand apart from the competition.
• The ‘right’ team – Without a strong team it is impossible to build labs. Deep technical expertise, creativity, critical thinking and complex problem-solving skills are essential constituents for each team member. We spent considerable amounts of time in interviews and discussions before hiring our associates. We not only evaluated their tech capabilities but also ensured they believed in our mission. Our team is suited to take on any technical challenges. The success of the Labs is rightly attributed to this amazing team.
• Clear roadmap/plan – When the team is dealing with ambiguity, it is essential to have a rational plan to stay focused, motivated and succeed. We circumvent this challenge by ensuring we have clear success and failure metrics for each initiative. We regularly evaluate these metrics to ensure we are succeeding. If we do fail we learn quickly and move forward.
How do you measure results? What are your KPIs?
It has always been a challenge to identify key metrics to measure results of innovation. We have taken a different approach at Ally.
Every project we take on aligns with a strategic priority for one of our lines of business. We also align with our senior leadership team and gain concurrence on outcomes before embarking on the journey. Outcomes vary for each project.
We evaluate the tech capability and document the effort and cost it might take for broader rollout or gauge the feasibility of the tech capability or a new concept by testing with our employees.
At times, when we fail, we fail fast and document the learnings. These learnings are then shared across the organization.
What is the project that came out of the labs that you are most proud of? Can you tell me about it?
Along with developing disruptive marketing campaigns, in the past three years we have explored numerous tech capabilities and rolled them out in production.
• Ally Badges: Ally customers can see various badges upon login that signify various aspects of their relationship with Ally. The badges act as a token of appreciation.
• NFT based rewards platform: This is a unique way to leverage private blockchain platform and NFT to enable gamification and reward employees in a fun and engaging way.
• Enhancing AML platform: This is a great example of sustaining/incremental innovation. We are partnering with an AML tech team to enhance a module that is going to assist our analysts significantly.
We are also proud of setting up a github repository (https://github.com/ally-financial) and managing the open-source program for Ally.
Our partnerships with Michigan State University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been flourishing. The students join our team and help with developing early-stage innovations.
Our explorations in AR, metaverse and building a hologram have been thought provokers for the leadership team.
We will continue to explore, see around the corners and embrace disruptions as technology evolution continues.
Lastly, tell us about your ‘Using Platform Thinking to Disrupt Marketing’ project that was awarded by Qorus and Accenture. What were the main challenges to make it happen?
When we started supporting Ally’s marketing team, we identified key problem areas to tackle:
• We had to cater to a variety of campaigns with stringent timelines throughout the year.
• We needed emerging technology implementation with an emphasis on security while delivering new experiences.
• We had to focus on cost effective solutions.
• Effectiveness measurement of campaigns was a critical requirement.
To address these challenges, the Tech Labs team focused on five key pillars:
• High Velocity Team: Focus on developing a lean, multifaceted team with expertise across various tech domains that could quickly adapt to unique tech requirements.
• Rapid Agile Development: Daily design, problem solving sessions with tech and creative teams; pair programming, test driven development.
• Engineering Mindset: Develop a culture where teams can focus on initiating design based on abstract concepts while requirements get formed, adeptness at designing under constraints and understanding the trade-offs with various approaches.
• Leverage Ally Assets: Set up reusable platform for development, testing and deployment, automated testing and deployment, leverage proven in-house security tools for testing.
• Platform Approach: Accelerate agility, flexibility and efficiency by focusing on designing and developing modular architecture. Develop base framework with tooling and CI/CD pipeline for instant development. Develop reusable UI components to cater to future needs.
To help ease campaign development even further, project development microservices were created for common campaign functions such as email-id capture, page access or data inserts into databases. Security modules were also embedded in the deployable framework to ensure that each campaign followed our security processes. Microservice is wrapped around every unique campaign development, and it is inner-sourced. This allows us to reuse the capability in future campaigns.
By taking a platform approach and implementing this strategy that focuses on five key pillars, we are now able to onboard new campaigns instantly and focus on core new technology implementation while reusing the peripheral capabilities. This has allowed us to ease previous pain points and ensure each campaign is designed, developed and implemented on time, data is captured uniformly, and costs stay within budget. The time to market also continues to improve as the reusable components increase with each development.
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