Reflection
The journey into self-love and self-acceptance must begin with self-examination. Until you take the journey of self-reflection, it is almost impossible to grow or learn in life. – Iyanla Vanzant
I had a meeting with Nikunj Dalmia, Managing Editor of ET Now today where we discussed the current question facing the banking industry.
As a designer of banking technology for the last 37 years, I believe that the complexity of the global banking industry can be represented through the Banking Complexity Pyramid. This complexity includes the interconnected world, regulatory compliances, extreme economic fluctuations, and five generations of existing technologies.
Investor communities often react based on visible symptoms like Brexit, Trump, or Russia/Ukraine, without conducting a detailed analysis. However, the controllable element in this complexity is technology, and a holistic design is required to build resilience against regulatory changes, an interconnected/interdependent world, and economic fluctuations.
I believe that technology investments are crucial for banks to navigate the complex banking industry and build resilience.
At Intellect 3.0, we have invested over 600 crores in building the Open Finance platform eMACH.ai based on BankTech wave 5 by converging 5 technologies of events, microservices, API, cloud, and AI.
Our platform helps banks’ in-house business, operations, and technology teams to ‘Connect’ broken windows created by ‘Residual Legacy’ and compose agile solutions by using 285 independent microservices (Core Banking, Lending, Credit Card, Wealth and Corporate Banking) and tightly wire the entire ecosystem using 1214 API’s. This platform helps banks to co-design technology transformation in a very systematic way and helps reduce operations costs by 20%.
hashtag#bankingtechnology hashtag#etnow hashtag#eMACH.ai hashtag#openfinance

I heard the phrase during my school days – Time Flies.
Here I am experiencing 10 years of time flown since innauguration of FT8012 on 23rd March 2013 by Michael Harte, who flown from Australia to innaugurate this ‘Monument of Design Thinking’, the first of its kind in the world dedicated for making a difference in financial technology world.
Over the 10 years period of smartest brains entered in this space and having deep design conversations makes this place sacred. Each time I participated in taking a group of leaders around Design Center, I got some new learning, some new connections, some blind spots surfaced or some difficult problems got solved. Each visit is Magical and energising for me.
The whole concept and design of Mission Samriddhi germinated from FT 8012. It took us 3 years and over 150 Development Accelerators with deep commitment to Social development participated in over 20 different workshops. The entire CATALYST WHEEL and Cluster Development Program (CDP) got designed from this SACRED place.
It’s a Temple of Thinking and Inspiration for me.
Happy Design Day.
hashtag#design hashtag#inspiration hashtag#missionsamriddhi hashtag#socialdevelopment

Today we spent the ‘Agri Day out’ at HOCO farming by Mission Samriddhi and Intellect ESG at Shiratoki village.
A wonderful picnic and deep learning on agriculture from Professor Hemant Singh Chouhan.
Mystery on Companion crops, science of bacteria’s using multiple organic fertilisers and pesticides.
Zero chemical fertilisers and zero chemical pesticides. All organic material produced by tribals.
Typically it costs 10,000 rupees per acre of chemical fertilisers like urea and various pesticides. For 109 acres, the HOCO saved over 11 lacs of input costs.
We learnt that few companion plants acts as pest control to other plant because they attract specific birds which eats pests.
We were fortunate to get deep knowledge in natural farmin

Today is the 6th foundation day of Mission Samriddhi. There were more than 70 participants in the workshop who decided on the name for the ‘Purpose’ they are committing to. Finally, it has to go for voting and the name Mission Samriddhi was born.
During that time, Arup Kavan helped me design the ‘Open Architecture’ for Social Development after researching various models of sustainable and scalable social development, including the United Nations. Since we knew social development is Multidimensional and Multifactorial problem, we will need Design Thinking as a methodology for arriving at small successes. MS executive Council also took a ‘Conscious Pause’ in accelerating the projects for the first 3 years. We called this phase of Mission Samriddhi a student phase doing extensive research through experiential learning by spawning multiple projects. This pause has provided us with‘ silent spaces’ to listen to the extreme noises in very large systems of social development.
Early on, the purpose of the organisation got crystallised into just 3 words instead of long sentences – Celebrate, Connect and Catalyse. This simplification helped in such a wonderful alignment among hundreds of like-minded, highly expertise-based professionals.

Last 0.1% is what makes to last 32 teams in World Cup football.
I am curious to know what are the elements which makes the team to get to World Cup level.
The 140 crore India does not even get entry into this world event. Yes I know we can take shelters under various umbrellas like
A. India Football is overshadowed by Cricket or
B. No one supports India Football or
C. India does not have enough good players etc etc.
We have observed that most of the supports have pivoted around very niche place says Chennai for Chess or Tennis, Hyderabad for Badminton or Haryana for Wrestling and Boxing etc.
What are the Patterns of making India in World Cup in next 10 years
worldcup2022 #team #algorithms
On 14th Oct, I had the opportunity to present India’s first Assistive Technology Start-Up Awards by AssisTech Foundation (ATF) in partnership with NASSCOM Foundation at IIT Madras Research Park (IITMRP) !
As a part of its 10X programme, IIT-Madras Research Park is betting big in the Assistive Technology (AT) space and intends to help create several start-ups in the coming years.
This initiative focuses on supporting & scaling indigenously built, affordable assistive technology products/solutions for India and the world to empower all Persons with Disability.
As a small step towards this direction, IITMRP organised a conference (13 th to 15 th October) a one-of-a-kind event bringing together the academia, industry and end users of Assistive Technologies,that is persons with disabilities. This conference was having 20+ presenters, 8 workshops and 80+ exhibits.
Many congratulations AssisTech Foundation IITMRP, AssisTech Foundation, Nasscom and all the winners of the first AssisTech Awards.

I observed there are 4 Design Competencies
The Design Curiousity is related to ‘observe Status Quo’ and asking question – is there any better way to do it?
Design Experience is about imagining ‘what can go wrong’ besides being SIMPLE.
Design Solution is about Holistic understanding of the ecosystem and available Technologies and apply them to ‘CONNECT THE NON OBVIOUS DOTS’.
Design Robust Product is all about MICRO DETAILING of the delivery processes and wiring them.

Manish Maakan, Uppili Srinivasan (Upps), Atanu Ganguli, Andrew England, Debal Dutt and team Intellect Global Transaction Banking | iGTB great show at Sibos 2022.
Upps, I love the succinct 7-minute articulation of COCB – Consumerisation of Commercial Banking (our core theme at Sibos), wired with domain and technology.
The sharpness of 6 tenets of COCB – 1. Hyper Personalisation, 2. Real-time, Connected journeys, 3. Action-triggering insights, 4. Immediacy, 5. Desire & trust-based decision making, 6. Friction-free experience – even at scale, which the banks need to understand and have a gameplan to embrace
3 dimensions of Technology architecture – Composability, Contextuality and Hyperscale along with Data has woven very well.
The need for a Platform and Intellect ability to compose products based on end consumer needs leading to a HOLISTIC experience vs ‘experience at the door’ is captured very well in your video.
I also like 5 imperative for Banks (Revenue Growth, Revenue Protection, Cost avoidance, risk protection and risk elimination) as a driver for choosing Intellect. Congratulations.
iGTB #sibos2022 #COCB #designthinking #intellect

I am reading a book ‘The Code Breaker’ written by Walter Isaacson. It’s about CRISPER the gene editing tool, which is changing the way Biology worked till now.
I read only 150 pages till now which describes the journey of Doudna and charpentier, over 25 years which resulted into final Technology of Gene Editing using CRISPER- CAS9. I love the story telling of Walter and could feel the moments of discovery, connecting the dots to paint big picture and building the technology itself.
I can relate this book to the way at Intellect we built two technologies – Fabric Data Services as a platform and Turmeric technology. We experienced similar ‘moments of Aha’ when we connected little dots to paint the big picture.

It was 24th July, 1993, Polaris Software Lab Ltd got its registration to commence software business.
We got our first international projects from Data General Inc, Raleigh to support their File system. Data General was then a mid range Computer company. We setup first ODC for them at 3rd Floor Carex Center.
Second business was from Saudi Arabia from Saudi American Bank. We supported their client server banking application.
Third contract was from Switzerland with JWS partnership.
The 4th large project was from Software Sidoun, Germany.
The 5th very, very large project was from NEC Japan for writing component based Core banking system. It was led from their Silicon Valley office and it was 100 million dollar contract over 4 years during 1998.
We setup our UK office at Reading, Singapore office, Frankfurt office, Fremont Office, Atlanta office, NJ office, Tokyo office in first 5 years of our operations
All initiatives were bootstraped without any investor support.
It was sheer power of Talent, who believed in sheer entrepreneurial spirit and made the company grew at CAGR of 105 percent over first 7 years which led it to being classified amongst Top 200 Fastest growing companies of the world.
Today Intellect is continuing ‘Path breaking journey in financial technology’ by letting go services business and reinventing its brand to ‘Intellect’ from Polaris.
We let go 2 things at the same time demonstrating Courage of Leadership team at Intellect
1. Cash generating business of Services
2. Globally very well known brand.
I am dedicating this day to BELIEF, Courage, Innovation, intense Customer focus and Power of one intellect team. I draw my daily dose of energy from all of you. Thank you.
#Intellect #designthing #belief #foundationday
