When an audit identified exposures in a financial organization’s processes, it became apparent that the Company’s approach to risk management reporting was limited and costly. Reporting involved extensive manual effort, and was supported by spreadsheets and workbooks that were difficult and time-consuming to use, introducing errors and delays into the process. Prolifics introduced a data governance and automation solution that elevates risk assessment and makes reporting user-friendly. It collates data, ensures its quality, and creates a reliable view of key finance and compliance functions across the enterprise. This solution saves the Company up to $100,000 a year in labor costs.
Prolifics’ technology specialists can implement solutions across all mortgage banking platforms that enable your organization to meet your objectives while reducing cost and improving efficiency.
Prolifics’ Innovation Center is the next step in groundbreaking solutions when it comes to data, AI, the cloud, blockchain, and all the other technologies that are making the headlines.
Chairman and Managing Director Satya Bolli discusses how the Innovation Center drives innovation across Prolifics and beyond.
Transcript
I’m an entrepreneur, but I’m very much a techie at heart. I’m curious. I love to explore, solve problems, and find solutions. As a leader, I empower my team to make innovation a part of our DNA. I have rebooted our business model so that it has innovation at its core.
We have a proud track record of innovating with purpose. We have reimagined how we engage with customers on innovation: designing processes to allow cocreation with our customers, improving how we communicate innovation, and delivering with agility and speed.
The Innovation Center is how we’re achieving this. It is not limited to a physical location. It’s global, it’s flexible, it’s agile. It operates on a continued cadence, providing a sandbox environment where our business and technology experts come together with our clients to create innovative solutions.
Our Innovation Center is becoming the primary source for building future competencies, product engineering on products, integrating our sales, consulting, and engineering teams, and giving our customers a delivery experience they can’t expect anywhere else.
Since the launch of our Innovation Center in January 2019, we have run 10 sprints across a total of 22 innovation solutions. These have covered technologies across applications, platforms, data, and cloud. This allows us to disseminate the innovation quickly across the company, allowing us to open up participation to everyone.
After selling my first venture in 1997, I had this unfulfilled mission to improve the efficiency of software development. Today, our team understands the changing landscape. Our deep expertise in technology lets us deliver solutions quickly to meet the immediate needs of our customers and create for the future.
The insurance industry is subject to high rates of churn. Customers are constantly hunting for the companies and policies that offer the best prices and value. This puts pressure on companies to find ways to save cost and maintain or increase revenue.
Companies have turned to automation to work out more efficient, cost-effective processes. However, there’s traditionally been a certain amount of human intervention into these automated processes; a human’s knowledge and understanding are required to accomplish what automation can’t. Plus, there’s still a need to understand the customer’s journey and the pain points along that path in order to help reduce churn.
Enter AI. By putting AI and machine learning to work, insurers can better understand how customers feel about their interactions, then take the right steps to ensure their satisfaction and keep their business.
Putting Innovation in the Conversation
At the Prolifics Innovation Center, we have developed an AI-assisted workflow solution. It leverages sentiment analysis to determine how satisfied a customer is with their insurance experience and, in turn, how likely they may be to seek out other options. Insurers can combine this intelligence with other information, such as where the customer lives, their income level, and their policy terms, to create a 360-degree customer view.
The solution ingests a customer’s phone conversation or text conversation with a chatbot. The AI processes this data and performs sentiment analysis. Using these data points, the workflow rates the emotional content of the interaction in real time. Is it positive, neutral, or negative? While some words may seem positive or negative in a vacuum, it takes real, nuanced understanding of how humans communicate to understand the true emotional content. (Ever heard of sarcasm?) That’s what AI and machine learning can do.
This deep insight into the customer helps guide a workflow that dictates what measures a live agent can take to retain their business.
But the solution doesn’t stop there. The AI can assist humans in decision-making just as much as humans assist automation. When a customer interaction with a chatbot is rated poorly in terms of emotional sentiment, the AI can bring a live agent into the conversation, rather than requiring human observation to identify when to step in. This helps make better use of live agents’ time and effort. Insurers can apply their people power in more value-adding ways.
In short, the solution brings humans and automation together to do what they do best. As a result, the customer benefits from the best possible experience, and the company retains their business.
Power AI with the Right Data and the Right Expertise
The success rate of any artificial intelligence technology depends on the quality of the data that fuels it. The Prolifics Innovation Center’s expertise across the data spectrum means that we can help ensure that data quality and governance drive accurate, meaningful interactions in AI and machine learning solutions. We also understand all the other pillars that support an automation solution, like robotic process automation, APIs, and the cloud. This knowledge helps us create powerful and successful AI solutions that take all the right factors into account.
Where much of the focus in AI-assisted technologies is on building products, the industry needs to look at its business processes as a whole to see how and where technology can help it improve value. Success comes when comprehensive solutions solve problems from end to end.
While insurance is one of the first use cases we’re tackling with the AI-assisted workflow solution, our goal is to expand the solution to other industries, with a special eye on financial services and healthcare.
About the Prolifics Innovation Center
The Prolifics Innovation Center leverages our decades of experience to build next-generation solutions like our AI-assisted workflow.
We strive to provide the leadership and vision that keep organizations competitive. Our experts work closely with our customers to incorporate feedback and tailor our solutions to real-world business needs.
If you would like to learn more about our AI-assisted workflow solution or become part of our Innovation Center, please email us at solutions@prolificsdev.wpengine.com.
Privacy compliance matters more than ever in today’s connected world. We’ve all had that feeling, at one time or another, that “Big Brother” is watching us. We search for something online, then ads for it appear on our social media feeds. We purchase something off a website, and we start getting emails for all sorts of related products.
Organizations collect our information – our data – for various reasons. But who really “owns” an individual’s data once it’s out there? What can individuals do when it comes to questions about personal data collection, and how can the Prolifics Innovation Center assist companies respond in the correct way?
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Several states, and even local governments, are considering or have already enacted privacy rights legislation compliance requirements allowing individuals to control a company’s use of their collected data. A major law went into effect January 1, 2020 — the California Consumer Privacy Act guidance (CCPA).
We’re not attorneys, so instead of explaining the law, we’ll let the California Attorney General’s CCPA fact sheet describe the basics:
The CCPA grants new rights to California consumers:
The right to know what personal information is collected, used, shared, or sold, both as to the categories and specific pieces of personal information.
The right to delete personal information held by businesses and by extension, a business’s service provider.
The right to opt out of sale of personal information. Consumers are able to direct a business that sells personal information to stop selling that information. Children under the age of 16 must provide opt-in consent, with a parent or guardian consenting for children under 13.
The right to non-discrimination in terms of price or service when a consumer exercises a privacy right under CCPA.
CCPA provides fines for both a company’s intentional and unintentional violations of the law, as well as providing consumers with the right to sue companies in certain cases.
The Prolifics Solutions to Your Business Challenges
Let’s use a simple example: Under CCPA, Jane Smith wants TheBiggCo to delete all her personal information. What are the company’s challenges and how can we assist?
UI: At the front end, so Jane can make her request in the first place, there must be a user interface (UI) that gives individuals access to TheBiggCo and the ability to communicate their options as legislated. Using our expertise with low-code development platforms, we can work with you to create a customized UI solution. As another option, we’ve partnered with OneTrust privacy compliance partner to generate the front-end experience.
Identification: A crucial issue is that TheBiggCo needs to know where all of Jane’s information is. It could be parsed and scattered across databases and shared with third-party partners. The Prolifics solution — unique to the industry — is Data Hawk sensitive data scanning. Data Hawk quickly scans all your data, not just file names or column headers, to find sensitive information and identify where business data privacy solutions are needed. Data Hawk can do this in days, versus weeks for competing products.
Execution: Jane’s data must be assembled and formatted into a catalog, where the requested action (like deletion) is carried out, logged for audit purposes, and confirmed back to Jane. We work with providers like IBM and Talend to customize software for big data integration for privacy rights legislation compliance and data privacy compliance services.
Whatever you need for your compliance process — whether UI, identification, or execution — the CCPA compliance solutions from the Prolifics Innovation Center will help you generate rapidly implemented privacy compliance solutions for businesses.
About the Prolifics Innovation Center
The Prolifics Innovation Center leverages decades of experience to build next-generation solutions like those for personal data protection services and CCPA compliance for businesses. We provide the leadership and vision that keep organizations competitive.
Our experts work closely with customers to incorporate feedback and tailor our services to real-world needs, whether you require data identification and deletion tools, data privacy management tools, or guidance on consumer data rights under CCPA.
If you would like to learn more about our CCPA compliance software or data privacy solutions provider capabilities, or become part of our Innovation Center, please email us at solutions@prolifics.com.
The demand for data science resources is growing far beyond supply. The gap between what companies need and the data science skills that are available in the market is a wide one, and it’s only continuing to grow. This makes developing data science work activities expensive and difficult because of the limited availability of specialized resources. This puts a serious strain on organizations, particularly because data science is so important to business: it produces predictive models that help drive new revenue, improve customer service, and reduce operating costs. But the inability to gain access to effective data science resources and produce analytics outcomes in a timely fashion can cause significant frustration.
For organizations struggling with this talent crunch, a core challenge is often determining the best path forward. Do you invest heavily in a lengthy hiring process, or do you find ways to empower existing staff? This is where strategic solutions can make a significant impact on closing the data science skills gap. The goal is not to replace human expertise but to augment it, making advanced analytics accessible to a wider range of technical and business teams.
A Strategic Solution for Unlocking Data Science Resources
The talent shortage is a complex issue driven by several factors. Many educational institutions have yet to formalize comprehensive data science degrees, leading to a fragmented learning experience for aspiring professionals. The rapid evolution of the field also means that staying current requires continuous learning, which can be a barrier for many. As a result, businesses are often left with an acute need for professionals who are proficient in various fields, from programming and statistics to machine learning and business strategy.
In this environment, companies face a difficult choice: compete for top talent in a hyper-competitive market or scale back their data initiatives. The consequences of inaction are significant. Without the ability to leverage data effectively, companies risk falling behind competitors who have successfully implemented data-driven strategies for everything from fraud detection to targeted marketing. The challenge highlights a clear need for alternative solutions that democratize access to data science capabilities.
A Turn-Key Data Science Solution: The Prolifics Innovation Center
To address this issue, the Prolifics Innovation Center has developed a turn-key machine learning solution designed to meet a wide range of data science needs. This platform is built to simplify and accelerate the process of building, training, and deploying predictive models. For organizations lacking sufficient data science personnel, it brings advanced capabilities to the table, making them easy for existing organizational services to consume.
But this technology isn’t a replacement for data scientists; it’s a force multiplier. For organizations that already employ data scientists, the solution automates much of the manual work involved in model development. It can automatically evaluate thousands of algorithms in the time it would take a human to manually evaluate just a few. This frees up your in-house experts to focus on more strategic, high-value tasks, rather than being bogged down in repetitive, time-consuming processes. With this approach, organizations don’t have to sacrifice quality or accuracy for the sake of cost—or vice versa.
Data Science: An Analytics Workhorse for Business Growth
So where can data science help? The answer is just about anywhere. The Prolifics solution can benefit companies of any size, especially when dealing with large consumer populations that produce large volumes of data. We are initially focusing on certain use cases where our data science solution can excel:
Retail enterprises: Companies can leverage predictive analytics models to better understand their customers. These models can help identify and attract potential customers, cross-sell products more effectively, and increase the average amount of money that customers spend.
Utility companies: The solution can help predict when equipment is in need of maintenance. Fixing equipment before it fails prevents costly outages, improves customer relations, and reduces operational costs.
And more: Wherever there’s a question (How can we get more customers to buy a product? Which equipment is about to fail?), our predictive analytics platform can help provide the answer.
Enhancing Your Data Science Strategy
In addition to leveraging a turn-key solution, modern data-driven organizations can pursue a multi-faceted strategy to maximize their capabilities. This approach is key to achieving success and improving long-term agility.
1. Invest in a Data Science Roadmap
Creating a clear roadmap is crucial for guiding a business’s data initiatives. A well-defined data science roadmap outlines goals, identifies key projects, and allocates resources effectively. This planning process helps align data efforts with overall business objectives and ensures that investments in technology, like the Prolifics platform, deliver maximum value. A good roadmap answers critical questions, such as: What are our most pressing business problems? What data do we need to solve them? And how will we measure success?
2. Upskill Your Existing Teams
Even with advanced tools, having an analytics-literate workforce is an asset. Encourage and invest in opportunities for employees to learn foundational concepts. Resources like online courses, internal training sessions, or mentorship programs can help elevate the data literacy of your staff. This not only makes your team more effective at consuming the output of machine learning solutions but also helps foster a culture of data-driven decision-making throughout the organization.
3. Embrace a Hybrid Approach
The most successful data strategies combine human talent with technological assistance. By using a platform like the Prolifics solution to handle automated tasks, your data scientists can dedicate their time to more complex problems, such as fine-tuning models, interpreting results, and exploring innovative new use cases. This hybrid model ensures that you get the best of both worlds: the speed and efficiency of automation and the strategic insight and expertise of human professionals.
Conclusion
The shortage of data science professionals doesn’t have to be a roadblock to progress. By leveraging strategic solutions like Prolifics’ turn-key machine learning platform, organizations can effectively bridge the data science skills gap. This approach not only provides the tools needed for timely, high-impact analytics outcomes but also empowers existing teams and fosters a more data-driven culture. By combining human ingenuity with powerful technology, businesses can unlock the full potential of their data and drive significant competitive advantage.
Michael L. Gonzales, Ph.D., is an active practitioner in the IT space with over 30 years of industry experience in roles of chief architect and senior solutions strategist. He specializes in the formulation of business analytics for competitive advantage in global organizations. Recent engagements include companies in the top global 100.
Dr. Gonzales holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas with a concentration in Information and Decision Science. His research includes analytics against extremely large data sets and success factors for IT-enabled competitive advantage.
Wayne Scott
Head of Enterprise Analytics
Wayne is Prolifics’ Senior Practice Manager for all things Analytics including: Data Visualization, Advanced Analytics, Natural Language Processing, Business Intelligence, Big Data Engineering and Data Science and Data Modeling.
He has been a dedicated professional with over 16 years of experience leading large IT projects through all phases of the systems development lifecycle from the preliminary business case through development to final implementation and steady state support.
Prolifics’ cutting-edge BA360 accelerator now features a powerful new Machine Learning capability. This feature utilizes automation to create and maintain test cases, identify exception processing scenarios, test data situations and logic permutations, and much more. Machine Learning is designed to overcome the common challenges in the testing arena, making your testing faster and smarter than ever before.
Your information lifecycle—the movement of data throughout the organization in the course of day-to-day business—is critical to your enterprise’s success. However, rising data volumes and complexity, data security issues, increasing regulations, and other drivers mean that organizations must take charge of the information lifecycle with a transformative data management initiative. Prolifics introduces key data integration, governance, and quality technologies, along with other solutions that help you protect your information throughout its lifecycle and leverage it to do better business.
