From Silos to Simplicity, Arun Jain, Chairman & MD, Intellect Design Arena

By Gloria Methri

Intellect-driven platforms are leading this evolution, enabling seamless decision-making and smarter customer experiences

How does your new AI platform Purple Fabric address issues such as data silos and the integration of AI with existing processes? What specific problems were you aiming to solve?

Purple Fabric is Intellect’s pioneering AI platform designed to address critical challenges in AI adoption by financial institutions. It leverages cutting-edge generative AI to enable enterprise-connected intelligence. Today, while AI, incredibly generative AI, has captured immense attention and experimentation, the gap lies in the move to meaningful, enterprise-grade applications. Purple Fabric bridges this gap by creating a unified platform that integrates multiple technologies to enable secure, comprehensive, and actionable AI solutions.

Financial institutions face the challenge of fragmented data. Structured data (D1) is relatively well-managed using traditional database systems, but most actionable insights—70% of data—are unstructured (D2: internal documents, and D3: external sources such as media and websites). Purple Fabric consolidates these data sources into a single enterprise library, breaking down silos and creating a seamless flow of information. Doing so converts raw data into knowledge and intelligence through a robust four-stage data refinery process—ingesting, classifying, extracting, and validating data.

Purple Fabric employs eight advanced technologies to integrate AI seamlessly with organisational workflows:

• Data Ingestion: Crawls external and internal data sources to collect structured and unstructured data.
• Data Classification: Organises and categorises data into financial, non-financial and risk-related segments that enable better organisation and management.
• Data Extraction: Implements algorithms to highlight and extract critical data for decision-making.
• Trust Evaluation: Ensures data accuracy and validates credibility by comparing inputs from multiple sources.
• Enterprise Document Library: A unified repository that eliminates fragmented data storage and allows shared use of documents across organisational roles.
• Multi-Agent Framework: Handles multiple expert agents – each agent is trained with specific personas, objectives, and decisionmaking frameworks.
• Socratic Dialogue: Agents interact to resolve contradictions and generate reliable recommendations. This mimics a collaborative meeting environment to refine and finalise insights.
• Comprehensive Case File: Creates a complete file from the refined data for decisions or further analysis.

By resolving data silos, enhancing integration, and addressing the complexity of real-world financial challenges, Purple Fabric empowers institutions to adopt AI confidently, driving operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and compliance.

Intellect Design Arena has consistently won the IBSi Sales League Table award in multiple categories. To what do you attribute this ongoing success?

Thank you for the recognition—it’s incredibly gratifying. Achieving consistent accolades like the IBSi Sales League Table award reflects the commitment and resilience of our associates and R&D talent. They operate in the trenches, solving some of the most complex challenges in the financial technology space. This success can be attributed to the culture of design thinking we’ve nurtured at Intellect.

Consistency doesn’t come from individual brilliance alone; it’s the culture that sustains success. The time and effort we’ve invested in building a design-thinking culture over the past decade have been transformative. Since 2013, we’ve invested heavily in creating this culture, starting with our 30,000-square-foot Design Thinking Centre, which serves as a space to reframe mindsets—from being order-takers to agenda-setters.

This culture, coupled with the commitment of over 1,200 R&D engineers and an investment of 20 million hours in research over the past decade, translates to a staggering $2 billion in global R&D value which has enabled us to innovate and excel across multiple business lines continuously. It’s this combination of a strong cultural foundation and a relentless focus on R&D that has made our recognition year after year possible.

With Intellect’s global footprint, how do you approach scaling your solutions to meet the diverse needs of financial institutions across different regions?

Our approach begins with first principles thinking, which drives simplification and adaptability. eMACH.ai, the most comprehensive, composable and innovative open finance platform, breaks down the banking domain into modular, zip-coded knowledge sets, effectively codifying every workflow and component. This allows us to create composable solutions tailored to the unique needs of each geography and institution.

Think of it as the ‘IKEA approach’—just as IKEA designs versatile, easily assembled furniture for global markets, we design our banking solutions to integrate seamlessly, empowering banks and partners to customise and implement them independently. Additionally, this approach enables cost efficiency by addressing legacy inefficiencies. For example, many banks operate with outdated systems, bloated with redundant data models—often 100 where only five are needed. By removing this complexity, we help institutions achieve transformative outcomes at a fraction of the cost.

Balancing innovation with compliance is integral to our strategy. We embed compliance into our modular frameworks, ensuring that our solutions adapt to the regulatory and operational nuances of each region. We provide financial institutions with tools that are both forward-thinking and grounded in regional requirements.

How do you see your solutions addressing the unique challenges faced by Indian banks, and what impact do you anticipate on their operational efficiency and customer experience across various business areas?

At Intellect, we are uniquely positioned to address the diverse needs of Indian banks thanks to our extensive global experience spanning regions from Japan to Chile and across Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. This diversity allows us to bring the best practices from various geographies and apply them innovatively to the Indian banking context.

India is not a singular market but a collection of at least six distinct markets, each with its customer behaviour and requirements. For example, the needs of a Tamil Nadu-based customer differ significantly from those in Uttar Pradesh. Our approach banks to create tailored offerings for each unique segment. Our solutions allow banks to develop signature products for different regions, fostering deeper customer engagement and relevance.

This localisation not only enhances customer experience by catering to regional nuances but also drives operational efficiency by aligning product designs more closely with customer expectations. Our vision is to help Indian banks innovate continuously, creating segmented and scalable solutions that elevate their role as leaders in the financial ecosystem.

What role do advanced technologies like blockchain and real-time analytics play in protecting financial institutions against emerging cyber threats?

Cybersecurity is a major concern as organisations increasingly shift to the cloud. Recognising the evolving threat landscape, Intellect prioritises embedding robust security measures directly into our solutions. While we do not sell standalone cybersecurity solutions, our offerings feature a comprehensive five-layered security architecture. This multilayered approach helps mitigate risks for our clients with a dedicated cybersecurity team.

While blockchain has niche use cases, its inefficiency and high costs limit its appeal. Instead, Intellect focuses on scalable, API-driven open finance platforms.

The future lies in real-time intelligence, which goes beyond analytics by transforming data into actionable insights for faster decision-making—a core element of Intellect’s strategy.

How do you envision the evolution of banking technology in the next 5-10 years? What key trends should industry leaders be preparing for today, and how do your niche offerings align with these trends?

The banking technology landscape is constantly evolving. Leaders in the US, Canada, and Europe are grappling with the complexity of five generations of technology, managing a myriad of products and legacy systems. In contrast, Indian banks are navigating only three generations of technology with their own unique set of challenges. However, one common thread across all regions is the increasing complexity of banking products, which has led to a disconnect between banks and their customers.

The key trend moving forward is simplification. Just as WhatsApp revolutionised communication by consolidating multiple tools into a single, simple platform, banking needs to become more seamless and embedded into everyday life. The future of banking technology should focus on ease of access and relevance, delivering services when and where customers need them.

At Intellect, we believe this future is embodied in our eMACH.ai platform. It follows six guiding principles that will shape the next decade: e for Events, M for microservices, A for APIs, C for cloud, H for headless that drives personalised solutions and ai for Artificial Intelligence. These principles provide the framework that defines the trend for the next decade of banking technology.