BCT Digital: Driving Digital Transformation for Banks and Financial Institutions through Risk Management Product Suite

BCT Digital is a global FinTech firm specializing in risk management products with its vision to 'Make it Local, Go Global' through reverse innovation. The company drives digital transformation through its product suite rt360 that includes:

• rt360 – Early Warning System (EWS)

• rt360 – Model Risk Management (MRM)

• rt360 – Asset-Liability Risk Management (ALM)

• rt360 – RAROC (Risk-Adjusted Return on Capital) Calculator

• rt360 – Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)

BCT Digital recently launched new products to combat the impact of COVID-19. These include:

• rt360 – Real-time Early Warning System

• rt360 – Expected Credit Loss (ECL)

The product suites are built on a platform of Predictive Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.

Leading on a Strong Foundational Background

Jaya Vaidhyanathan is the CEO of BCT Digital, managing the end-to-end business operations and expansions, P&L, product innovation and ensuring market success. Jaya began as an investment banker with Wall Street firms, working at the intersection of the technology and financial services responsible for business transformations of several Fortune 100 clients. After Wall Street, she felt the need to bring value-based IT jobs to India. Hence, Jaya joined HCL and facilitated outsourcing multi-million-dollar deals, creating engineering opportunities in India. She moved to Accenture as a Managing Partner, contributing to the growth and making India one of the largest geographies for the company. This focus continued in Jaya's later roles as an EVP of Standard Chartered Bank (Scope) heading Strategic Transformation and Technology.

Jaya has a computer science and engineering degree from Madras University, a management degree from Cornell University, and also earned a CFA charter. She serves on global boards such as UTI AMC and Mastermind Foundation (NGO).

Jaya has been recognized as,

• Three-time winner of Stevie Award

• India's Most Trusted CEO 2020 by WCRC

• Women AI Leaders in India 2020 at Rising 2020 Analytics & AI Conference

• Female Executive of the Year Award 2019 by Data Bird Journal

Learning through Experience

Jaya opines that a successful leader needs to ease others' pathway and inspire them to be better versions of themselves.

Primarily, Jaya's transformative experiences have been around breaking old barriers and opening the floodgates for opportunities that would make a difference in people's lives and corporates. For Example, Jaya was a part of the HCL anchor team that won the first and largest single vendor – US$780 million outsourced deal. This paved the way and led India to look at larger value deals and created a massive social impact by creating millions of jobs.

At Accenture, Jaya was instrumental for its exponential scale up in India by growing to 60,000 associates. The vision was to develop India as a global hub for the worldwide consulting business.

Lately, Jaya has focused on mentoring product companies that could potentially be the next unicorns from India and stand the test of time globally. In her current role, Jaya built products to respond to a national issue of NPA that struck India in 2015. In parallel, time and effort were invested in assessing the NPA situation, which resulted in launching a paper on 'Practitioners insights on Credit Monitoring.' The timing was perfect, and she quickly built a product from the ground up, which has a significant impact on putting back millions of dollars per bank every year through the company's award-winning product – rt360 – EWS. For a bank size of US$50 Billion with even a 1% impact on NPA, the banks could witness US$500 Million of returns through proactive recovery. This also enabled Jaya to build unique products for India's unique needs and culture.

Serving on several global boards has also enhanced Jaya's journey. Jaya spearheaded one of the largest M&A deals in Europe, while she served as an Independent Director on the Board of Altran. Jaya also serves on the board of UTI AMC and says that we need more women on boards worldwide to have much-needed diversity of perspectives in the board room.

Challenge of Acceptance

Jaya presumes that every innovative idea has challenges of acceptance. BCT Digital faced considerable resistance in the Indian eco-system when the company introduced its suite of products. She adds that the qualifying parameters of a public sector RFP were strict.

Jaya faced the next challenge in recruiting people and convincing them about her vision. She mentions that, indeed, it is definitely glorious when anyone succeeds. However, challenges are a valuable learning experience. If people don't ever fail, it means they have not set the bar very high.

Developing Core Competencies to be a Good Transformational Leader

Jaya suggests that transformative leaders should develop core competencies and be adaptive. She asks them to learn continuously and network obsessively. Jaya encourages leaders to promote their ventures with a 'Never give up' attitude and be ready to take rejections in their stride.

She implies them to learn to prioritize and be confident with the thought that they are doing enough, which will make them want to do more.

Innovating through 'Business First, Technology Next' Approach

BCT Digital adopts a clear blue ocean strategy. The company has a 'Business First, Technology Next' approach to innovation. Further, BCT Digital explores niches in the risk management spectrum compared to global risk management products. Current products offer a platform that banks need to customize to address their risk management needs. Coupled with that, each country has its regulatory requirements that a global outlook cannot resolve. BCT Digital's entire product philosophy is to build an out-of-the-box framework to include adjacencies in the GRC space.

Suggesting Disruptive Technology for Banking System 

Jaya believes that disruptive technology enables banks to adopt a scientific approach and replace the gut feeling. A huge problem, such as the NPA, requires sophisticated and disruptive technologies to dissect diversified data from various sources. For instance, the products work on the platform of predictive analytics, AI, ML, and others. They can quickly ingest the data and provide insights and alerts, which can be accessed on digital mediums in formats that are easy for human consumption. Technology is the backbone of everything today, she adds.

Jaya remarks that today's leaders have to continuously foster an innovation mindset and invest in exploring technologies, increasing the spending in R&D. She believes that leaders also have to inspire people to discover new dimensions of the world and their place in it.

Going Global in the Future

Jaya envisions BCT Digital to be at the acme of 'Make it Local, Go Global.' Banks are the custodians of trust. It's the pillar behind the fiscal economy, and Jaya's goal is to bring in more transparency and restore people's trust in the Indian banking system.

BCT Digital's goal is to grow 20X in the next couple of years with products for all the risk needs of the BFS vertical in the RegTech space. Jaya comments that she shall continue to be futuristic about the industry growth with increased collaboration between FinTechs and the banking sector.

A Piece of Advice for Budding Women Leaders

Jaya advises emerging women leaders to dream big, prioritize, and commit to the journey to make their dreams a reality. She concludes by asking leaders to let go of small fights in the pursuit of their dreams.