'We Are Technology Partners to New Economy Leaders': Shoaib Mohammad of Lumiq
How did you establish Lumiq?
About a decade ago during my stints in the US, I witnessed a new paradigm with digital-first new world companies. There was a lot of focus on collecting data, leveraging it, and using it to generate business value. Innovative ideas were emerging on how to use the data to understand customers and see how to leverage it to predict their behaviour. This was in stark contrast to what most traditional enterprises were doing, even in the West. In India, we were lagging even more with most enterprises still only focussed on efficient digitisation.
My idea was to bring this data-driven culture and mindset change to India and allow enterprises to adopt the same practices that digital-first companies were adopting. We wanted to be a one-stop-shop for any data-driven initiatives for our customers, in how data gets organised, how to leverage and how to monetise it.
How is Lumiq relevant?
It is relevant for all the departments within an enterprise. For example, it enables enterprise marketing teams to understand their customers better, discover their needs, and serve them with relevant experiences embedded with hyper-personalised offerings. Similarly, it allows the operations team to augment decision making – reduce time to action, increase efficiency while minimising the underlying risk. The possibilities have only increased over the years.
We started our journey with insurers and then slowly expanded to banks and the larger gamut of financial services. Today, we have 30+ enterprises as customers for whom we are the go-to partners for any data-related initiatives.
What is your vision for Lumiq?
Data has been called the new oil often enough to be cliché. And it’s not just about looking at Data Platforms as a system of record but redefining them to deliver Business Intelligence combined with enhanced data management. Future-proof companies take data seriously; for them, data is simply not about reporting what is happening in business or answering a business question. For them, DATA IS THE BUSINESS.
My vision for Lumiq is simple – whenever enterprises think of data or data-driven initiatives, they should think of Lumiq. Our potential customers today are financial services companies. We are already working with leading banks, NBFCs, insurers, AMCs, and are rapidly expanding our base.
What is unique about your product? What sets you apart?
Our solutions are built for financial service providers who want to take a proactive approach to handling and optimizing their data. As a result, not only does it accelerate the confluence of AI, BI and DI (Data Interchange or Data as a Service) operations in an FSI organization but also helps to monetize data insights. We help financial enterprises with their data-driven decision-making with AI and machine learning solutions, enabling improved productivity and the enhanced customer experience in their chosen business function. This is achieved by leveraging deep domain expertise and experience across data engineering and data science.
What are the key factors driving your business growth?
To expand our domain expertise and continually innovate, we created an ecosystem for collaboration with academia and technology partners like AWS. Our collaboration with AWS as a trusted partner has helped us respond to the FSI (financial services & insurance) industry’s need to shift from a POC (Proof of Concept) to a BOT model.
We are working towards enhancing our product offerings, doubling our revenue as we increase our customer base by 150 per cent this fiscal, and move towards being a 500-people products and services organization by 2023.
What are the key problems Lumiq helps solve?
For enabling a data-driven culture, our solution helps to remove traditional data-driven innovation hurdles ranging from data silos and formats to sources and the availability of experienced skillsets. This leads to speedily driving business outcomes with real customer data, improving business interaction and eliminating guesswork. We are driving ourselves to solve the new age business problems alongside our partners like AWS who have been greatly helpful in achieving better customer satisfaction.
For AI/ML initiatives – we have adopted an end-to-end approach right from the organization of data to model development, model deployment and model governance. This focus across data engineering, data science and Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) has ensured that the business value creation is continuous, and transformations are successful. Alongside, we have embedded transparency and explainability into our solutions to ensure easy adoption and understanding of model recommendations.
What are the key challenges?
Our key challenge is to scale and drive non-linear growth. We are aware that the digital transformation driven across enterprises is a marathon and not a sprint. Enterprise-wide adoption is critical across business lines and service functions for digital transformation. In terms of technology, one of the major roadblocks is rising concerns about security and data compliance, especially in cloud adoption in the financial services sector. Adoption has been relatively slow among FSI enterprises as they start to move non-critical applications onto the cloud. Talent acquisition is also a perennial hindrance to growth. We operate in the deep tech of data science and data engineering. In addition to stand-alone skills, getting full-stack engineers on board is a challenge across the realm of data science and data engineering. There is also a dearth of digital skills availability and quality along with retention.
