Jahangiri: Mobile technology continues to make inroads in the banking sector. How do you see mobile-enabled services evolving as a wealth management customer channel? 


Pancino: For years, poor devices, poor performance and lack of functionality has always meant mobility equated to a crippled and bad internet experience. In the last couple of years we have seen an explosion in the number of consumer-friendly devices that are finally letting mobility live up to its hype. You only have to walk down the street to see the incredible diversity of people who now carry “smart” devices. Any industry that ignores mobility going forward would do so at their peril.


The opportunity in wealth management is to enable investors to be better informed and play a more active role in their investments. If this could drive an increase in engagement with people’s superannuation I think it would be a good thing for our industry and the superannuation system.


From Perpetual’s perspective, almost all of our new technologies, from client relationship management systems to our self-managed super fund admin systems will have clients that will support mobility.


Jahangiri: Perpetual has embarked on various server and data virtualisation initiatives. How have these progressed; and what are the business benefits of a virtualised environment?


Pancino: We have been pursuing a path of vitualisation for a number of years and have taken these concepts beyond vitalisation of our server fleet. We have virtualised our desktop fleet and our storage environments.
In the last 12 months alone the pressure has been on our team to quickly deploy and scale new capacity. Our storage environment has grown almost 30 per cent and our desktop fleet has grown by 27 per cent. All this has been achieved with very small increases in support effort and capital investment.


I mentioned last year that we were looking to aggressively move into cloud based offerings. We have been successful with the last two application purchases and we are looking to move some pretty major components of infrastructure into the cloud in the next 12-24 months.


We are coming to grips with the issues of security, governance and law that the cloud presents and we don’t have all the answers yet. In some respect it’s like the early days of virtualisation, there are problems and issues to overcome as the technology is in its early stages of maturity, but the benefits are too big to ignore.


Jahangiri: Can you elaborate on Perpetual’s MyClient initiative?


Pancino: MyClient is the next major IT investment after our Beethoven systems consolidation project. This capability is at the centre of Perpetual’s strategy to become the leading provider of wealth management services to financially successful investors and their advisers.


Not only does the system  provide a single view of our high net wealth clients to our advisers, the system aggregates all of the high touch service components Perpetual offers (for example estate planning, philanthropic services, investment advice) and links them together to create a seamless, full-service experience for our clients.


In the last 12 months Perpetual has acquired several advice businesses and part of our proposition was to leverage these businesses using this new capability. We have yet to encounter anything similar in the market and while its still early stages for us, we believe myClient will be a key differentiator to our business in future.


Jahangiri: What IT priorities are shaping your agenda for the year ahead?


Pancino: Our priorities are absolutely focused on ensuring the resources we deploy supports Perpetual’s vision to be the leading provider of wealth management services to financially successful investors and their advisers as well as being the leading corporate trustee.


In practical terms, that equates to continuing our investment overhauling our customer service systems (myClient) and scaling our infrastructure through virtualisation to support Private Wealth acquisitions we will continue to make.


Jahangiri: How far in advance do you formulate Perpetual’s IT and operations strategy; how flexible are such plans to market changes?


Pancino: Our IT and Ops strategy horizon aligns with the corporate strategy view, generally a three- to five-year horizon. That said, we are updating it as our business evolves and we’re getting much better alignment with the business planning cycles and resulting strategies. As a consequence, our IT organisation has to become better at communicating and educating the business more about what we can and cannot do to ensure we effectively manage expectations.


We still have to be extremely pragmatic about the environment we face today. Most IT organisations in the sector have demonstrated the need to be flexible over the last 18 months. September 2008 to Feb 2009 was pretty traumatic for all of us. I am very proud of the way the Perpetual IT team was able to respond to the GFC without compromising our long term ability to deliver, we retained our key talent.


Jahangiri: Perpetual claims to be among the few organisations to have championed the single customer view. How has this aided Perpetual’s customer acquisition and retention strategy?


Pancino: At Perpetual we have championed the cause and we look at it in two ways: customer acquisition and customer retention. From a retention point of view, the single customer view aligns our service offering with Perpetual’s brand attributes. Perpetual’s attributes are focused on quality, integrity and commitment.


Our operations team has introduced metrics into the way we serve our customers with these technologies. Since April our operations team has introduced metrics specifically around timeliness and quality; this has marked a difference in the quality of customer experience. The team has managed to get a 40 per cent improvement in timeliness, as well as a 60 per cent reduction in errors. More importantly this provides individuals in our organisation a direct contribution to customer service.  We are very proud of what the operation team has been able to do from a retention point of view.


This year we were able to deliver hundreds of thousands of statements in a matter of weeks. That is not just an industry-leading capability; it is something that hasn’t been seen at Perpetual in a very long time. 


With respect to acquisition we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible in having the single customer view. Over the last 18 months we have launched a new campaign management capability for one of our direct business. This really gives a much better line of sight for segmentation of customers which enables us to market the right products to the right sets of customers. We think this is a tremendous opportunity. I am hopeful that over the next couple of years we will see other parts of our business adopt these types of capabilities.


Jahangiri: Wealth management is based on a personal, relationship-driven business model between client and advisor. To what extent can this human element of customer service be transferred online?


Pancino: As an experiment I posed this question to the Perpetual team’s yammer network and had three responses within an hour. Though completely different answers, I thought they summed up the situation well.
The first response was highlighting the need for transactional components of our service are now expected to be online. What’s my return? What’s my balance? Where’s my statement? How can I transact with you? I think it’s clear that ever increasing numbers of people are having an expectation that certain capabilities will be online. This will become a minimum standard the industry has to meet moving forward.


The second response suggested that the “trust required to act on advice necessitates eyeballing the person who is making the recommendation” and with our target customer segment and our product, that is giving high net wealth individuals advice on how to build wealth, it’s  absolutely the case that human interaction will not be  replaced in the short time.


However, the third response pointed out that there are now numerous examples of trusted relationships being built in an online context in certain segments of the market. These examples are leading to deeper relationships that have commercial consequences. I’m not suggesting for a moment that we’ll see our customers wanting financial advice via Facebook anytime soon, but I think this is an area that many business should see how technology evolves in the future.


Jahangiri: What are some of the more notable IT trends and emerging disruptions you’re keeping an eye on right now?


Pancino: I get a sense that ongoing maturity of virtualisation technologies continues to be a theme for CIOs. Of course many companies, including Perpetual, are looking to take that a step further by utilising the cloud and at present, it feels like we are in the “hype” phase. I am hoping some of the challenges the hype presents will be solved, preferably by someone else; we are happy to be second in this instance.


The consumerisation of technology is a broader trend I’m interested in. Customers and employees alike are using far more advanced technologies and applications in their lives than many corporate organisations are capable of deploying today. Their personal experiences are rightly setting their expectations of their corporate experiences too. The proliferation of smart devices is consumerisation at work.


The consequence is more pressure on IT departments to move faster to be able to meet these rapidly increasing expectations.


Jahangiri: Perpetual is enjoying the benefits of its legacy systems overhaul – Project Beethoven. How was success measured throughout this project?


Pancino: Project Beethoven is pretty much a distant memory from an IT perspective but it continues to deliver on the promise that it was something more than IT savings and IT simplification. While it has delivered its business case benefits in terms of ongoing IT costs, that’s only part of the benefits story.


In the last 12 months we have been able to turn on new business capabilities that were not possible with our legacy technology. We have outsourced our document scanning processes and automated many of the manual components of our administration processes. We have reporting capabilities that enables us to track in real time both the productivity and quality of our process teams to the point where we can measure an individual’s performance. In the last twelve months we have seen error rates decrease by 60 per cent and throughput increase by 30 per cent using the system.


Jahangiri: What advice you can provide IT executives pitching a project at a board level?


Pancino: Diverse boards will always have differing levels of knowledge and understanding of technology. If you are pitching anything to a board it’s your role to provide them the right framework to make an informed decision in applying a technology to a business problem. This may take several iterations and even one-on-one sessions utilising relevant board member experiences. In the end, the board must be comfortable with the business problem you are trying to solve and confident that the way in which you intend solving it is in the best interests of the company. This can take time.


Confidence is further built if you are very clear about what can realistically be achieved by very specific delivery dates. Additionally, always be cognizant that boards will likely care little for the technology itself but rather focus on its application in supporting the business.


Finally, the board will not be considering the project on its merits alone. It will be evaluating you and your team. How have you and your team developed the idea? Who have you engaged through the process? Have you drawn the right conclusions? Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, what is your team’s track record in terms of delivery?


Jahangiri: What keeps you motivated about your job – is it the technology or the sector?


Pancino: Neither alone.  When we are able to apply technology to a business and make a sustainable difference that’s a good feeling. Irrespective of how great a technology is or how interesting the business problem may be, delivering on the promise of IT is almost solely about the people you have working for you. Building the right team is the thing I enjoy the most; in that sense I’m lucky as there is no end-point to building good teams.  We can always improve and teams are always (or should be) evolving.