Jahangiri: What are your top technology priorities for 2010/2011?


Mansour: We have a big regulatory agenda in front of us with several initiatives underway, the largest being the National Consumer Credit Reform.


We’re also investing heavily in our channel strategies, looking at how we go to market in this space, and how we can enhance our customer service offering.


Finally, we’ll continue down the path of our transformation plan that will allow us to be more efficient, flexible and smarter about the way we use technology in GE Capital,


Jahangiri: GE Capital has embarked on a three-year IT transformation initiative. Can you briefly describe your progress?


Mansour: We have made great strides in the journey down the path of simplifying our technological environment.
We are in the final stages of solidifying our data centre strategy, and have already significantly decreased the complexity of our network.  This has produced a multimillion-dollar productivity benefit in its own right. In addition, we have completed the first stage of consolidation of our client relationship management (CRM) environment on Salesforce.


We’ve also commenced re-platforming one of our largest businesses - Custom Fleet - onto a new core operating system. This project alone will significantly enhance our capability to do business as well as remediate several legacy systems.


Jahangiri: In what capacity do you envisage a future for mobile technology and contactless payments in consumer finance? 


Mansour: In the embryonic stage, mobile technologies were seen as an addendum of existing channels. I believe they need to be treated as a channel in their own right.


We see close to 10 per cent of our customer interactions coming through this space already and it is consistently growing. We will see some exciting movements over the next few years, especially the convergence of contactless into mobile devices and the growing trend of debit cards opening up this space to a whole new demographic.


Jahangiri: GE Capital prides itself on being, among many things, a sustainable business. What do you think is the next frontier in how financial services embrace sustainability?


Mansour: As you mentioned GE prides itself on being a sustainable business, through our Ecomagination program.  We were recently named the ‘Global 100 World’s most sustainable company’ at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. 


Throughout financial services, these kinds of initiatives have been around for a while. I think the next great frontier is how the industry ties this back to a great service offering for the customer


In this space, we have implemented a ‘Drive Lightly’ product in our Custom Fleet business. Drive Lightly is a fleet carbon management program designed to help you understand your fleet carbon emissions, reduce your existing fleet costs and emissions and offset what’s left.


GE is also very proud of its multibillion-dollar ecomagination initiative, and with the help of our employees, we cut total carbon emissions from 10.8 million tonnes to 6.5 million tonnes, while increasing sales from $150 billion to $181 billion between 2006 and 2008.


Sustainability is also a top priority for IT here in Australia and New Zealand. We recognise that data centres leave a huge carbon footprint; therefore we have a strategy that will reduce our local footprint by at least half over the next three years.


Jahangiri: GE Capital works with selected partners on shared-profit agreement if cost-reduction targets are met.  Do you foresee this as the new wave of vendor management?


Mansour: I see this as one lever to use with the partners that you work with. Everybody has to win. There needs to be incentives to drive efficiencies and there also needs to be consequences for not performing.


I firmly believe there will be a trend to move away from service level agreement (SLA)-based agreements to operational risk-based agreements. Put simply, an outage is an outage and customers feel that.


It’s also no good having a customer not able to use their credit card, yet from a vendor’s point of view they are still within the SLA in terms of downtime.


When you can equate an event to a dollar term or reduction in customer satisfaction, there needs to be consequences for that.


Jahangiri: GE Capital was formed out of merging GE Money and GE Commercial Finance. What are the business objectives for this initiative?


Mansour: The integration has seen GE Capital become the ‘smart alternative’ to the big four banks for a variety of consumer and commercial finance needs. By integrating the operations of GE’s two main finance businesses – GE Money and GE Commercial Finance – we have been able to leverage the scale and the strengths of a combined business.


GE Capital is able to utilise its scale and expertise in product manufacturing - such as the white labelling of personal loans, leasing and fleet management, and credit cards - to manufacture at a scale that exceeds the capability of most local banks.


It has also reduced areas of duplication – without impacting customer service.


Jahangiri: Every IT leader, particularly at your level, has a legacy they wish to be remembered for. What is yours?


Mansour: Having delivered a simple scalable technology platform that is a key competitive advantage for GE Capital, run by one of the strongest technology teams in the industry.