Role Title - AVP - Innovation & Digital Experience

Reports To SVP - Innovations

Company - Bajaj Life Insurance Company (BALIC)

Function/ Department - CF/Enterprise Projects

JOB PURPOSE:

- Identify, lead and manage innovative approaches to business challenges and work with teams across departments to deliver customer centric products and services. Innovative solutions driven by technology for identified opportunities should provide simplified, digitized, disruptive and 1st mover advantage wherever possible.

- Understand online business / mobile App functional requirements and any limitations, as well as be responsible for gap analysis, benchmarking and translating them into user flows, customer journey maps, wireframes, mockups and prototypes. Suggest design / layout / simplification of content & overall functionality of the online product buy journey or mobile App designs to ensure a great user experience and conversion centric designs & journeys.

- Understand and lead projects driven by Gen AI.

PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTABILITIES:

(Accountabilities associated with the job)

Innovation Strategy:

- Identify new product / services by analyzing trends for emerging new - market disruptive opportunities

- Foster individual and collective creativity within the organization so they're able to create processes and procedures for ideation, prototyping and production

- Help employees generate ideas by setting up and running idea generation platforms and formats like jam sessions, internal or external crowdsourcing for the benefit of the organization

- Incorporate and support best practices by scouting and standardizing methods for novel ideas and insights; strategic innovation; promoting open innovation; and introducing group tools and processes that encourage creative thinking

- Balance risks against the potential rewards of the innovative project, based on organizational tolerance for risk and organizational objectives, as well as other factors.

- Ensure all innovative solutions or products (existing and new) have the organizations goals imbibed within them

- Innovation should be well backed-up and driven basis data which should help take decisions toward solutions

- Evaluate options for directing seed funding which can help the organization take equity / stake in startups and lower solution implementation costs

- Design resource allocation processes (basis toll-gates, capex, budgeting) to take potentially disruptive innovations forward from the seed stage to the market

Innovation Management:

- Support business units in new product and service initiatives by acting as methodology expert and facilitator for the critical innovation teams across the company, supporting them in "raising the bar" of their aspirations

- Identify, lead and manage innovative approaches to business challenges and work with teams across departments to deliver member and customer centric products and services

- Driving PoCs to discover, test and evaluate start-ups from fin-techs and insure-techs to decide how their innovative solutions help solve our problem statements

- Evaluate and help identify the most apt solution partner (post comparisons) for the given innovation project

- Conduct monthly discussions with identified stakeholders to identify and evaluate business challenges faced where innovative solutions can be plugged-in

- Track and monitor usage of digital innovation assets across the organization (for adoption and evangelization)

- Use analytical tools (Google analytics / Firebase etc) to measure/track application usage & customer adoption

- Propose how the business problem can be resolved with via the identified solution, and finalize requirements in consultation with Head- CEO Office

- Create and track all projects allocated (toll-gate based objectives, priorities, development, implementation plan) and seek requisite approvals for driving them from relevant stakeholders

- Present outcomes and progress updates to all concerned stakeholders such as Head- CEO Office and relevant teams, and incorporate feedback received

- Provide subject matter expertise to stakeholders on projects where innovative solutions are to be leveraged upon

- Digital & Online Experience (UI/UX - prototyping & building human centric designs)

Wireframing:

- Developing rough frameworks for the layout of a product and customer centric buy journeys i.e."skeletal framework"

- Stay abreast of advances in user interface (both technical and experiential) and look for ways to appropriately integrate these advances into products

- Creating a rough draft of what the product journey will look like, including elements like content, navigation and graphics to help visualize the final product before creating a prototype

- Creating prototypes provides a detailed representation that is tested before the final product is launched

User Persona / Scenario Development:

- Creating representations that reflect our target audience based on research and experience

- Developing hypothetical scenarios to anticipate how our target audience will interact with our products

User-Centered Design (UCD):

- Creating a product tailored to the behaviors and interests of our users. Recommending / building conversion centric designs and journeys

- Measuring the human-computer interaction (HCI) element of a design

- Building apps that respond to the natural human thought process

- Modeling patterns likely to surface when users interact with your product

- Create aesthetic and seamless navigation flows that reflect the marketing and sales funnel

Innovation team development

- Conduct or enroll for classroom/online training for team members, on relevant innovation, design thinking techniques

- Encourage team to attend innovation conferences and understand various capabilities provided by various start-ups that can be leveraged to solve our business problems using the expertise and new-age technologies provided by these insure-techs and fin-techs

- Monitor and track industry dynamics and evolving landscape of innovation (through conferences, publications, seminars etc.) and understand their application in BALIC's context and identify/ drive projects

- Collate secondary research material on new technologies, disruptive solutions and adoption results

Drive Gen AI cases:

- Collaborate with stakeholders to identify and implement opportunities.

- Conduct meetings with business teams to understand pain points and requirements.

- Evangelize Gen AI by presenting its capabilities to stakeholders, ensuring a clear understanding of its potential impact.

- Drive the creation of impactful and ROI-driven use cases leveraging Gen AI for organizational objectives.

- Oversee end-to-end use-case/project lifecycle and integration into business processes.

- Partner with development & business teams for use-case requirements, development and deployment.

- Ensure ethical AI compliance and contribute to responsible AI practices.

- Monitor and optimize AI performance through KPIs and metrics.

MAJOR CHALLENGES

(Challenges faced on an on-going basis in carrying out the job)

- Continuously support in influencing key stakeholders for identifying opportunities in business that can be prepared as a use-case to solve using data innovative solutions

- Finding the right balance between risk and innovation

- Going beyond perceived boundaries to pursue innovation

- Drive, track and report business impact associated with each project implementation

DECISIONS

(Key decisions taken by job holder at his/her end)

- Following decisions are taken by the role (within the allocated budget and in compliance with regulatory requirements):

- Management of all innovation projects driven in consultation with reporting manager

- Solution Partner finalization

- Selecting the apt use-case, solution, technology

INTERACTIONS

(Key working relationships a job holder needs to have INSIDE and OUTSIDE the company to accomplish the job)

Internal Clients

Roles you need to interact with inside the organization to enable success in your day to day work

IT: To create systems, integrate with partner (tech start-up or vendor) technologies, build API's, services, etc.. for project delivery. To test and evaluate software vendors to decide how to best meet their innovation needs while running PoCs. Monitor application up-time and down-time to ensure project supporting systems are up and running

Marketing: To conduct market research or get secondary research material to back a certain ideas, analyze trends and search for emerging new market opportunities.

Analytics: To understand various customer / prospect data pipes to identify and understand the delivery audience for respective projects

Operations: To understand opportunities, implement solutions and seek buy-in. Also for BETA testing within a controlled environment for testing solutions and gathering feedback for further improvisations

Regulatory, compliance and fraud prevention: To ensure the innovative use case and solution used abides to regulatory and compliance

Customer facing touch-points: To understand opportunities for improvement and for feedback during POC testing and proto-typing stage

Head Innovations - To seek requisite approvals and present final outcomes

External Clients

- Roles you need to interact with outside the organization to enable success in your day to day work

- Start-ups and vendors: To connect with start-ups providing various solutions to fin-techs and insure-techs who can partner by providing tools / data as required for a particular use case or project

- Companies outside our enterprise such as strategic partners to pursue endeavors that will change the market or create a new industry altogether

- Regulator interaction

SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE

(Minimum acceptable proficiency for this job which best indicates the education and/or experience requirements of this job and not the incumbent)

Educational Qualifications

Qualifications:

Graduate / Post-Graduation / MBA / Engineer

Additional / Optional: Certifications in Design thinking / Digitization / Design school (User centric UI / UX)

Work Experience:

- Overall 10-14 years of experience

- Experience in BFSI industry (IT / Digital domain preferred)

- Building culture of innovation

- Worked on latest technologies / projects leveraging such as Artificial Intelligence (AI, ML, NLP), Speech analytics, Robotics (Robotic Process Automation), IOT, Virtual / Augmented reality, chatbots, digital assets

- Automation and building web applications & mobile apps etc.

- Experience in Insurance industry

- Experience on creating online (web)/mobile user journeys which are conversion lead basis user persona's identified

- Knowledge of Digital marketing platforms like CDP & DMP would be an added advantage

- Experience in stakeholder management