The CIO today is clearly playing multiple roles

With a legacy of over 150 years, Credit Suisse is reminiscent of the
Swiss contribution to the modern banking industry. Having undergone its own
share of trials and tribulations, mergers and acquisitions, ups and downs,
recent controversies and huge financial losses last fiscal, Credit Suisse stands
out in dignified silence with its signature vigor to surmount whatever comes its
way, including the present downturn.

Being one of the earliest financial institutions to introduce technology
into banking, Credit Suisse continues on its path of adopting innovative IT
models to drive its growth and operations. Over the past few years, the company
has been leveraging technology to integrate its large global footprint and has
been exploring new geographies to build its IT capabilities. One of the key
minds behind the structuring of Credit Suisses IT enabled business growth
strategy is Divyesh Vithlani, CIO,Credit Suisse, Asia Pacific. He is credited
with the creation of the banks offshoring model through the IT Center of
Excellence strategy which resulted in the deployment of over 3,000 IT
professionals into the banks offshoring centers in Singapore and India. Divyesh
has also played an integral role in building the banks shared services division
for IT, which has translated into huge business benefits for the group.

In an exclusive interview with Dataquest, Vithlani shares his views on the
Credit Suisses IT sourcing strategy, the challenges faced and much more.
Excerpts

What role does India play in your global sourcing strategy and operations?

We have always followed a multi-center sourcing strategy to meet the
requirements of our three diverse businesses-investment banking, private banking
and asset management. The needs of each of these businesses are distinct. Today,
there is not a single location or operating model that is capable of meeting all
the requirements of these businesses. Hence what we need is a multi-location,
multi-operating model strategy to solve our business needs. To that end, we have
four main locations across the globe from where we leverage the global talent
pool. We have centers in Singapore, Pune (India), North Carolina and Poland. Of
our total workforce of 50,000 employees, we have 12,000 IT professionals working
on support functions. A couple of years ago we executed the IT Centre of
Excellence strategy under which 3,000 roles were deployed to our off shoring
centers in Singapore and India. Today, there are 2,000 IT professionals based in
our Singapore centre and 1,600 based in Pune.

From an IT standpoint we are focusing on Singapore, Pune and North Carolina.
The North Carolina center services the US time zone; the Singapore center
services the Asia and European time zones from the support standpoint, and also
focuses on the global development functions. Singapore and North Carolina cater
to projects related to risk, regulatory functions, intellectual property and
process maturity that needs to be carried out in a captive environment. We
leverage on Pune to service a predominantly outsourced operating model. That is
how we broadly distinguish each of our centers.

Certain type of work lends itself to being done in an outsourced model
whereas others need to be in captive. However, our underlying theme and strategy
is to constantly look towards driving up productivity, quality and efficiency.
Hence, we will continue to look at Singapore and North Carolina to see what work
can be further monetized, matured into a process and standardized with a view to
moving some of that to an outsourced model as well.

In India, we are looking at working with our vendor partners in order to
drive high level productivity improvements year on year. Wipro and Cognizant are
our strategic partners and provide services around application development,
support, testing, etc. Apart from these, we also engage with a second set of
vendors for their domain specific skills in private banking and investment
banking.

What are the outsourcing and vendor specific challenges faced by you?

The biggest challenge is that there is no one size fits all. That is why
its important for vendors to understand the different requirements that we have
from the business domain perspective. We look toward vendors that have expertise
in investment banking, and within that space equities and fixed income derivates
and the corresponding back office function. Similarly, there are specific
skill-sets required in private banking too. From an operating model standpoint,
certain kind of work requires to be done in a captive set-up whereas others lend
themselves to a managed model. In a managed or outsourced model, we augment our
internal resources with vendor resources, and pay the vendors to essentially
provide skilled professionals with the day-to day operations managed by us. On
the other hand there are certain projects that need to be carried out based on a
pure actuals model. The challenge here is that vendors are quite fixated with
the outsourced model but for Credit Suisse, moving a function to an outsourced
model is a phased evolution. It will be a gradual process. Some of the vendors
do not want to work with us in a captive model. What we need is vendors to grow
with us in a captive or co-managed model, where they acquire the knowledge which
in turn gives us greater confidence in their ability to service a particular
function in an outsourced model.

The other challenge is around responsiveness. Vendors need to be up to speed
as we need to react very quickly to the changes in the market. Our internal
clients demand high levels of responsiveness and we need corresponding levels of
responsiveness from vendors.

What has been the key IT deployment done at Credit Suisse recently?

We recently set up our Quality Assurance (QA) competency at the Pune center.
We have started consolidating the QA work that is being done within different
teams into a single competency that can be leveraged across multiple parties.
The benefits of having an effective QA process is minimal disruption to a
production environment, which further reduces the outages and corresponding
negative impact on the business. And by standardizing that into a single
competency we have realized efficiency benefits.

We are planning projects similar to the QA process in the testing space and
around technology platforms such as .NET, Java etc.

Have you been exploring green technology concepts within the company?

Green IT has captivated our interest and imagination both from the
perspective of realizing the efficiencies through more efficient power
consumption, increasing the utilization of server farms, and ultimately
contributing towards corporate social responsibility around reducing the carbon
footprint. So there is a lot of work going on presently in building up our
internal data centre. We are in the process of finalizing a data center that we
plan to build in Singapore. This data center will cater to our operations in the
entire Asia Pacific region and is being built based on the latest design and
operational standards and is slated to have high PUE. We are exploring
virtualization and innovative cooling techniques and are incorporating cutting
edge technologies ground up right from the design stage. We at Credit Suisse are
exploring a holistic strategy around green IT.

What according to you will be the technology trend for 2009-10?

On the application side, open source will become popular. From the
infrastructure standpoint, we will continue to focus on virtualization and SOA.

How is the role of the CIO evolving in such trying times?

The present scenario is very challenging and at the same time very
interesting for a CIO. There is increased pressure on a CIO to maintain the
stability of the IT set-up so that business disruptions are at an absolute
minimum, especially during such volatile times. Also, CIOs today have to go out
and leverage a combination of business models, processes and tools to ensure the
efficiency levels. A CIO also plays a key role in managing the human capital and
creating an environment within the company which makes it the best place for
employees aspiring to work there.

What are the areas you plan to focus on while battling the downturn?

Our focus on building an agile organization along the dimensions of people,
process and technology will place us in a very good position as we emerge out of
this downturn.

Priya Kekre

priyak@cybermedia.co.in