Imagine having a task that takes almost seven hours of absolute concentration to avoid mistakes and errors, and then finding a way to automate it so that it takes less than an hour. That’s exactly what Hiral Patel and Ashutosh Verma from the Compliance & Operational Risk Control (C&ORC) team in Mumbai did. Hiral holds an MBA in finance and Ashutosh, is a Chartered Accountant. And they both work in the team which handles the flow of price sensitive information and support thematic reviews.
Neither one of them has a technical background, nor did they previously work on the process they automated. Together with 80 other UBS colleagues, Hiral and Ashutosh enrolled in a python training offered by IB C&ORC DAT.
After completing the training successfully, they, together with their manager Clinton Sequeira, begun looking for an opportunity to apply their newly acquired skill and soon they were looking at the client complaints reporting process. With more than 22,000 rows, the task was time consuming and prone to errors given that there were a lot of manual workarounds involved.
Working as one team is key
As automating the creation of the FCA filing was something they were doing on top of their day-to-day jobs, Hiral and Ashutosh agreed with Clinton how to manage their workload and to ensure that their daily tasks were not affected.
Relying on their curiosity and the information freely available on the internet (for example, search engines, how-to videos), Hiral and Ashutosh soon began coding. They enlisted the help of Sakshi Singh, their Python coding trainer, who works on the data analytics team on automation, deep dives and thematic analysis. Being a data scientist, her support was instrumental in successfully coding the final product. All in all, Hiral and Ashutosh spent about 50 hours over the course of one month working on this project.
Getting to the finished product
Once the first iteration of the solution was completed, they assisted the process owners with performing a pilot run and further improved their code based on the output.
The solution is sustainable and can be modified to cater to similar reporting processes.
The efficiency of the reporting process was also increased by introducing additional comparative analysis and reducing the need for secondary checks. Having gotten their feet wet, the team has additional automation projects that they plan to work on over the course of this year.
This is a great example of how anyone can identify opportunities to innovate and actually deliver real change.
While technical skills and sound knowledge are certainly required to change old ways of working, having a vision and a support network is paramount in bringing our firm to the next level of agile working.
