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CIO interview: Damian Leach, Vistra
CIO Damian Leach discusses Vistra’s digital platform, which he says will harness artificial intelligence in its financial professional services offering
With its customers using multiple financial professional services in its portfolio, corporate services provider Vistra wants to provide a single platform. The digital backbone will also give customers access to better quality business information through embedded artificial intelligence (AI).
Damian Leach, recently installed chief AI and digital officer at Vistra, has been tasked with accelerating the group’s capabilities in digitally enabled and AI-powered professional financial services. Vistra has around 10,000 staff across 65 global locations, and offers tax, payroll, fund and entity management services among others.
A project to build the digital backbone platform will gradually enable customers to access more of its products and services through a single front-end, says Leach: “For us, [the digital platform] is a tremendous opportunity to make sure we are operating internationally with borderless, frictionless services.”
Vistra’s client businesses currently use a combination of digital services and products as well as teams of services, according to Leach. The platform will make them all accessible through a single interface.
“For example, iiPay – a recent acquisition that we made – is a multi-country global payroll provider, but we’ve also got local payroll solutions that we offer in certain markets,” he tells Computer Weekly. “So, we’re intending to unify them and make them readily available across the platform.”
Better data
One of the key benefits for Vistra’s customers, according to Leach, is providing them with better quality data about their business: “Data remains one of the largest issues for our customers. Often, organisations have fragmented data in silos, working from multiple sources, which leads to fragmented output and multiple answers to the same question.
“We can play a pivotal role in cleaning up that view for customers within their portfolios that we have under management, not only unifying the clean data that we have, but providing the ability to ask questions of that data to gain intelligent insights.”
Leach says that by infusing AI into the workflow behind the scenes, a modern approach to the customer journey is created. Vistra is building the platform itself and will use AI offered by hyperscalers, with orchestration and automation tools.
“We are coming up with a tenanted architecture that allows us to promote granularity to each of our individual clients while keeping their data secure,” says Leach.
He adds that the project will be ongoing with regular iterations, but it all starts with “the boring stuff”. According to Leach, this is of “upmost importance” and includes “designing policies and the guardrails, setting the standards, doing the architecture, setting the roadmap, engineering blueprints, and addressing regulatory issues and trust and privacy concerns that our clients have”.
He adds: “We have a blueprint and it is released into certain markets with features. We work in iterative agile sprints to release features and capabilities into the platform on an ongoing basis.”
Vistra plans on releasing new capability for the business to test every two weeks, says Leach: “Once tested and approved, we then release it to our clients.”
The company intends to roll out to major market hubs by the end of the year.
AI opportunity
Leach tells Computer Weekly that AI is a huge opportunity for Vistra to improve its services despite some misgivings across wider industry.
“There’s a lot of judgement that comes about through the topic of AI, because a lot of people tend to think AI is about automating processes,” he says. “This is somewhat true, but I think the real benefit is improving the client experience. If you connect the client to the data that they have and put intelligent services over it to build those ‘what if?’ scenarios, they can question the data and we can open new services.”
A key opportunity is also to offer services as part of an integrated suite of products through relationships and integration into other platforms, adds Leach. “One of the things that I’m looking at is how to build strategic relationships with other cloud native platform vendors to include our products and services which are different to theirs in their marketplace,” he says.
“We are coming up with a tenanted architecture that allows us to promote granularity to each of our individual clients while keeping their data secure”
Damian Leach, Vistra
In terms of its own IT resources, Vistra has 450 tech staff which all sit in Leach’s team. He describes his role as being like a CIO, chief technology officer (CTO) and chief data officer (CDO) rolled into one, heading up infrastructure core services such as datacentres, end user computing, as well as networks, voice and collaboration services and cloud.
In addition, he is responsible for Vistra Digital, which covers all the customer-facing products and services, and traditional enterprise applications, while cyber security, architecture, engineering and all the functional also falls within his remit.
Leach spent 13 years in global banking technology roles leading global teams and has been the CTO of a global fortune 500 software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. Until recently, he was global CIO at container leasing company Seaco where he led the modernisation and scaling of enterprise technology capabilities.
Skills challenge
Leach says one of the biggest challenges faced when adopting AI is the availability of the right skills, which are “the biggest challenge as we enter the AI era, and learning and focusing on talent and skills within the existing team”.
He says to address this he has three combined strategies. The first is to build and foster grassroots innovation in the existing workforce: “It’s important for us to lift the existing core team skills and expertise that we have and arm them with the right tools and support needed to succeed. This includes providing psychological safety for the team to experiment, innovate and even fail as they learn, but at least [they gain] progress.”
He says employees understand the challenges the company has but perhaps lack the tools to help solve them. “Through innovation grassroots mindset, we can encourage the best-in-class ideas to surface and for people to stay as they learn and continue to contribute,” he adds.
The current drive is to encourage the development of a community of builders by releasing AI tools to them to start coding to meet some needs that they have.
Leach says the company is also “sprinting” using new talent: “I’ll be setting up strategic relationships with key universities and taking in fresh graduates. It’s a focused project, building new talent from the ground up. And of course, here in Singapore, there’s great opportunity and very supportive government initiatives to meet the national AI strategy.”
The company is also building on existing capacity in delivery centres in Malaysia, China and India.
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