YES BANK is new age bank, and analytics adoption by users within all business groups has been phenomenal. The Bank has a culture of making informed decision basis available data & information. Analytics works as catalyst providing them the right information using statistical tools which helps the central teams to take appropri­ate decisions. There is a significant demand in all business groups to get maximum information be­fore making strategic decisions.

Analytics India Magazine caught up with Anand K Sundaram, Head – Credit Intelligence & Analytics, YES BANK, one of the leading private banks in the coun­try, to understand the state of analytics adoption in the bank, and the ways that it has affected the overall functioning of the bank. This article originally appeared in our annual study titled “State of analytics in domestic firms in India 2017”, carried out in association with Cartesian Consulting.

“Our Analytics Team still is at nascent stage of existence since last 2 years; however it has infused its presence significantly in the Retail banking space which is now mainly driven by an­alytics. The journey of analytics from MI visualis­ation to Machine learning is growing in significant pace here at YES BANK”, says Sundaram.

Starting with a 5 member analytics team to a 20-member team, Sundaram says that it is still a small unit compared to 21,000 employees of the bank, but largely the users of analytics would be the central teams within different groups, which would be ~100 staff. “Hence, a 20-member team is mainly catering to about 100 central team users”, he marks.

On analytics adoption and maturity:

While basic analytics existed in the Bank, a dedicated central analytics team was built two years ago. The team has added to the bottom line through various projects, which were implemented successfully. It used a mix of traditional & latest technologies along with statistical tools. Some of statistical tools used include logistic regression, RFM, Clustering, Segmentation, Random forest, scoring algorithm and some of the technology tools includes SQL, R, Tableau, etc.

Analytics has slowly started transforming manual process and decisioning to digital algorithm based execution. Several digital changes have streamlined multiple areas within the Bank. “We have adopted analytics in all our marketing campaigns, strategic policy decisioning, simple excel MI to visualisation applications, credit underwriting to scorecard and so on”, he adds.

Talking about analytics maturity at Yes Bank, Sundaram says “Analytics has still a long way to go within the organisation where almost every action is driven basis data & information. Analytics would also help the Bank in driving Digital Transformation with the use of algorithms and converting several manual processes to rule based processes.

“The team has made a great start and has made its presence felt, but it has a significant task ahead to support our CEO’s vision of becoming finest quality large Bank in India by 2020”, he says in the concluding.