In conversation with Manulife: Harnessing enterprise-wide data automation

We were delighted to share the stage with Manulife at CIBC Mellon’s Fintech Showcase in Montreal, to explore how our no-code data automation platform has empowered their teams to take control of data, automate manual processes, and unlock greater visibility and insights into their operations.

Check out the conversation between Gary Kennedy, Enterprise Sales Director at Duco, and Charles Juneau, AVP Operations at Manulife, moderated by CIBC Mellon’s Mike Garneau.

You can find the full transcript of the session below the recording.

Transcript

Mike Garneau

Good afternoon everyone. I’m Mike Garneau. I head up the insurance servicing segment at CIBC Mellon. I’m excited to be moderating this panel today.

We’ve got leaders from Manulife and Duco. They’re going to discuss the impact of low-code technology on in-house operations, including value extraction, the power of low-code for co-creation and quality of life improvements.

With me from Manulife Investment Management is Charles Juneau, AVP, Operations. Charles will speak about how Manulife is leveraging fintechs to advance their investment operations.

Also with me is Gary Kennedy. Gary’s Enterprise Sales Director at Duco. Duco automates front-to-back processing of all structured and unstructured data throughout its lifecycle to support data extraction, classification, transformation, reconciliation, validation and more.

Charles, Gary, thanks for joining today. So, Charles, I’m going to start with you. Can you describe the problem statement that you had to begin with? And, what were the challenges you were encountering?

Charles Juneau

Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me. I’m always looking for an opportunity to buy a new suit. I think, not only in finance, any industry, we always have a very similar challenge where we need to do more with less. And, especially in operations, this has to be solved with fintech and digital enablement.

From a front office perspective, the main goal is to generate alpha, right? When you think about back office and middle office, we need to be more efficient and we need to mitigate risk. We need to find other solutions to achieve these goals without just adding more people all the time.

And technology is the answer, and it should be the answer. But that’s the challenge that we see today in operations.

Gary Kennedy

Definitely. And just to expand on that, it’s not uncommon for financial services firms to have dozens, up to tens of thousands of manual data processes; grabbing a PDF from an email, manually keying that information into a database, or doing other low automation to zero automation tasks.

So Duco automates all of this.

Charles Juneau

We need to keep growing our business. So we need to grow as well and be just as flexible and nimble in operations to support that growth also while containing risk.

Mike Garneau

So, Manulife is a large global company with significant technology resources at its disposal. Why would you choose to work with a fintech?

Charles Juneau

I think the first reason is really speed to market. When we onboarded Duco, it was really like the best of both worlds because we had our in-house experts be able to solve their problems, really take the time to learn the new technology and come up with their own solutions for our own problems.

And then on the other side, we had Duco, which at that point was still in earlier phases of growth. It was a growth company. It allowed us to have some influence over the product and the roadmap that Duco was doing. And really, I saw this as more of a partnership than onboarding a new vendor. And this, for us, made a huge difference.

Gary Kennedy

Yeah. And that product partnership early in Duco’s lifecycle as a company was really important for us. It’s really wonderful and a privilege when a customer says “You’re doing jobs A, B, and C for us, it’s working well. I also think you’re the vendor that we should partner with to build something else.”

So we sometimes get to say yes, and your team get to work with our product team and our engineers. But also we’re working with other customers, globally (other leading financial services firms) on what they’re asking us to build. And then occasionally we get to surprise you and say, look what we’ve done with a massive bank in Spain or something like that.

Charles Juneau

Yeah. And Duco has been so flexible as well. For example, we were working with Duco and from my operational perspective, I knew what I wanted to do for the next year. I had the tool to do it and be more efficient. But then on the other side, I was able to go to Duco and tell them, listen, I know what I’m doing for the next year, but in a year I would like this to be available in the platform.

So when I’m at that point, we wouldn’t have to stop. So we were actually working on both fronts, both internally and externally with your help.

Mike Garneau

So you did all this work with Duco. What were the outcomes? What was the success that you saw?

Charles Juneau

I’m going to break them down into two different categories. The first one would be more the expected ones. Like, we were able to streamline our processes. We were able to onboard hundreds of different processes that we were doing, using spreadsheets. We were now able to have a centralized reporting architecture.

I would come in in the morning and I would know exactly what are the drivers today for all of my exceptions.

Obviously it is optimization, risk mitigation. Because we now had a robust platform that was established with all of the audit trails and all of that. So that was huge.

Then the second bucket, if I might call it that, and it was something that I was personally underestimating, but it turned out to be as critical.

It’s really the impact that it had on our engagement. Like, I know my team was super-excited to have Duco and have a new technology that would provide them just a very different perspective on operations. Instead of coming to work every day and doing the same things. They now had that power to find solutions and experience these solutions afterwards.

Gary Kennedy

Yeah. And we think about Duco as a way to enable the operations experts within the financial services firms to work on the insight and analysis-based tasks rather than acting like a data janitor.

And a lot of the younger employees that you’re hiring, they’re digital natives, right? They have 100 apps in their phone. They use Gen AI to plan their weekend. So if they’re to come into your office and you said, “Here’s a spreadsheet from nine years ago, your job is to key in information from the PDF and let me know if anything breaks”, that’s not going to be great for talent retention. And it’s not going to be the most fun job we have.

Instead, you’re telling them, “Here’s a leading AI platform for data automation we onboarded. Your job, even as a junior operations person, is to manage several data processes that we’re constantly refining and tweaking based on our own expertise and also, you’re tasked with providing analysis and insight from that operational data to the senior management”.

And young employees are also looking for more of a purpose and vocalizing that when that’s not present. It’s easier to feel a purpose at work when you’re more connected to the mission statement of the company you see on the website and you’re connected to what your C-level executives are talking about, rather than “I’m managing Gary’s spreadsheet” in the corner for months on end.

Charles Juneau

Yeah, absolutely. And at the end of the day, there’s no one who wants to come to work and do the same thing day in and day out. And then you leave, at home at night, like, “What I did today, I’m not even sure if it’s adding value”. Right?

I think everyone wants to come in and feel that they’re making a difference. And at Manulife, the way we’re using fintech, especially Duco, it allows our people to do that, to do the right thing and they feel valuable. But they’re the first ones to experience these issues on a daily basis.

And now they’re part of the solution. And it’s not only just be part of the solution, they’re also going to experience the after-life of these solutions. So that’s really powerful.

Mike Garneau

Yeah. Very interesting. Any other perspectives, Gary, from a fintech provider and looking at this project?

Gary Kennedy

Well, when our team was reflecting on the Manulife engagement, there were a couple of things your leadership team and you individually did very, very well.

Number one is: Duco wasn’t identified as a small tool to solve one problem here or there on smaller projects. It was identified as something that could be more transformational across the organization. But your leadership team gave very clear context to the rest of the organization that everybody knew, individually and collectively, the responsibilities they had, to achieve the outcomes that we and Manulife set out together. So that provided the right environment for the rest of the transformation to take place.

Secondly, the operating model and talent strategy that you put together really worked well. You told us very clearly, that you expected us not to be doing everything for you as a vendor, making every change you needed in your application. You said that we’re going to have a team in Montréal and other locations that are internal Duco experts. You told us exactly what you needed from us, as the vendor, to train and empower that team, and then you set them up for success.

And then that internal team of experts were the transformation leads, the people connecting with other parts of the Manulife organization.

And finally, the thing that was really impressive for us about the Manulife engagement was what they did with that trusted, enriched data once they’ve onboarded the process to Duco.

There have been some really advanced analytics and operational insights your team were able to glean from it, and also some very interesting downstream automation use cases that we hadn’t even thought about. But you are definitely some of the leaders of our client base doing that.

Charles Juneau

And just quickly going back to your comment about Manulife having an in-house team of Duco experts, it actually came from feedback from our team that when we initially onboarded Duco, they were like, I would like to learn that platform instead of having to go to the vendor for every type of enhancement or new process that we wanted to build. So that worked out really well for us, having that structure of working in finance, but also the excitement of working with a fintech and growing with the tool.

Mike Garneau

I’m sure there are a lot of people in the audience who have very similar problem statements to what you had, Charles. So, what are the lessons learned by going through this project? Do you have any advice you’d give to the people in the group here?

Charles Juneau

I think the biggest one. And in hindsight, at the time it was difficult to establish. But instead of seeing Duco as a reconciliation platform, we should have seen it as more than that. Like, how does it fit in our whole architecture?

Because yes, it reconciles. The primary driver is reconciliation. But how do we utilize all of the data that we will be feeding into Duco? And then from there it becomes so much more. But you were alluding to it earlier. Now we’re able to connect the Duco platform to our reporting structure. And then from there, we’re able to extract the information that we need and to feed it downstream to some internal applications.

And if we thought of this as of day one, then I think the overall integration would have been a lot more streamlined and efficient.

And the second thing I want to say we should have done differently has to do with the governance. One of the biggest benefits of Duco is it’s super user friendly. It’s flexible. So, it’s easy to just allow everyone to start using it the same way we would do with Excel or EUCs [end user computing] or now with the PowerSuite platform. But for us, in hindsight, implementing that governance that controls the access review and all of that has been a bit more challenging because we didn’t do it as of day one.

Gary Kennedy

Yeah. And that’s the lessons learned that we’re taking to new client implementations we’re doing. And we try and help customers get to the stage that Charles and team are at now, rather than the stage you were at several years ago, as we were both learning together about what bringing Duco to large enterprises looks like.

So some of the lessons learned for us there, are helping customers or new folks evaluating Duco to think of it as an enterprise-wide platform and help them think about this is a new capability you’re bringing into the enterprise, rather than we’re a tool to solve that problem over here or I have a director that complained, let’s bring that software in and they’ll stop complaining for a while. It’s an enterprise grade solution.

And also, just help us get organized together, as clients, as vendors; we do a better job now of mapping out what that plan looks like. So, we expect to have 200 users and some of these customers in the room using the platform. And really plan for that. Plan out that operating model. Plan out that solution design and do a bit more of that work upfront, so there’s less housekeeping and less reviews you have to do later on.

Charles Juneau

Yeah, I really feel like because we were able to reduce that dependency on your team in terms of configuration, it really allowed us to be more nimble and flexible. Right now we’re able to, on the fly, enhance any type of reconciliation that we have, because we have a team of experts that understand the platform from A to Z.

Gary Kennedy

Yeah. That’s perfect. That’s absolutely what we tried to do. So Duco’s a no-code platform. It’s easier than Excel to use. So, when we do training for the first couple of hours, people that are already operational experts that understand that data, they can already start working with it.

They don’t need us to fly in experts that have done this for ten years. It’s as you said, it’s easier to work with.

Mike Garneau

So what’s ahead now after all this? Gary, do you want to start with you.

Gary Kennedy

The biggest thing we’ve done this year is Duco can now take PDFs. For years, everybody here has been relying on us and thinking of us as the people to take structured data. An Excel broker file: okay. PDF broker file – that’s trickier. So this year we bought a company, a leading adaptive IDP company from Europe, that uses supervised learning in their models to understand what document types are coming into the platform and then ingest that.

So anything from PDFs, emails, email body screenshots, even a screenshot from a trading system, can all be ingested into the platform. And then as Charles is talking about, you can get the operational insights from that structured data and the unstructured data in the same way.

Charles Juneau

Yeah, I know we’re really looking forward to it because even if we have 5% of our reconciliations that are still manual, because of unstructured data, it ends up being 80% of the work and 80% of the risk because of that.

What’s next? I would say we’re at the point where we need to think about the next mile of optimization. Keep optimizing the right things, but also challenge ourselves.

It’s one thing to automate, but are we automating the right process in the first place? And for us, that’s really what’s next to keep evolving and challenging the status quo.

Gary Kennedy

Yeah, really look forward to working on that with you.

Mike Garneau

Okay. Thank you. And on the CIBC Mellon side, as I’m sure many of you saw we announced a partnership with Duco. So you know, it’s a lot more that’s next on our side as well, leveraging the work that Manulife and Duco have done already.