More than three decades old, Intuit still considers itself to be a startup with a mindset of constant reinvention and self-disruption. The development centre in Bangalore, started in 2005, is its second largest after the Mountain View HQ of Intuit in California. Today, engineering teams at this centre drive end-to-end product development and management for Intuit’s high-value products, housing nearly 22% of Intuit’s global engineering talent.

The company, a global leader in financial software solutions, has marquee products like QuickBooks Online-Advanced, Mint and QB Commerce. Leveraging the power of Cloud, AI and ML, Intuit India has been creating new opportunities for these products. Prashanth Seshadri, Group Manager, Intuit AI & Data spoke to INDIAai's Sindhuja Balaji on how AI is a critical addition to Intuit’s flagship financial software products, the rising importance of the development centres in India and why skilling will be crucial to Intuit’s expansion plans in this geography.

Can you take me through how AI is a critical component/business offering in your flagship financial software products and services?

Having moved across four tech platform shifts from DOS to AI, Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company that gives everyone the opportunity to prosper. Our strategy of being an AI-driven expert platform is the cornerstone of our company. Using AI technologies, we are leveraging ML to build decision engines and algorithms that learn from rich datasets to transform user experiences; applying knowledge engineering and turning compliance rules into code; and using NLP to revolutionize how customers interact with products and services.

We are deploying innovative new solutions today that puts the power of AI on the side of people. Whether it’s Knowledge Engines personalizing the tax filing experience for millions of filers or QuickBooks Capital using AI to help small businesses access the money they need or Mint helping its users avoid millions in overdraft fees, we are tapping the power of technology to help people prosper.

An example of how we have been using AI is, during the pandemic, all our models continued to perform at the same rate as before the pandemic. This is because of continuous automation where training and testing is a part of our pipeline. Our models are self-learning models & learn from the evolving changes in the environment and predict these changes accordingly.  

Fintech is leading the entrepreneurial wave in India. What opportunities does this present to a company like Intuit?

India’s fintech wave is ready to scale higher benefiting all its stakeholders thanks to India’s robust Digital Payment Infrastructure, supportive government and regulators, and a wide range of banking services. According to a recent research by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and FICCI, India's FinTech industry is expected to grow to US$150-160bn by 2025, up from its present worth of US$50-60bn.

"Fintech has revolutionised and enhanced the financial industry by introducing numerous new services in the areas of payments and transfers, finance and banking, capital markets, and personal financial management. Emerging technologies like AI and ML are revolutionizing our relationships with money and the future of fintech. From fraud prevention to better human-machine collaboration, there are endless applications of AI that will redefine the fintech ecosystem."

Can you take me through Intuit's success from 2013 to now? Specifically in tech/product development, can you list some examples of Intuit's success that serve as proof of successful captive centres in India?

Over the years, we have pioneered a collaborative platform mindset at Intuit India that has helped accelerate our strategy of being an AI-driven expert platform with speed and agility. Our engineering teams in Bengaluru drive end-to-end product development and management for Intuit’s high-value products. Leveraging the power of Cloud, AI and ML, Intuit India has been creating new opportunities with products like QuickBooks Online-Advanced, Mint and more recently QB Commerce. 

For example, after realising the potential of the mid-market segment- QBO – Advanced was developed. A team of 80 engineers, including specialists in core engineering, mobile, data analytics, Intuit AI, and data platform, as well as skilled designers and product managers, have been working on QBO-Advanced smart solution, which is available as a Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS).

Our Virtual Expert Platform is another good example of how we are working on various applications of AI. Elevating AI and human collaboration to a new level, our platform allows experts to connect and help small businesses with their books in a more accurate and efficient way using AI. As experts use the product, the product gets smarter, in turn helps businesses to unlock a bunch of flexible expertise that expands, contracts with, even anticipates, their fluctuating needs.

How are you leveraging startups to build AI-driven financial products/solutions? Can you cite some examples of these solutions?

As a global technology company, Intuit sees itself playing a critical role in assisting small businesses, self- employed and customers in determining the best solution when it comes to financial management. One of Intuit’s core innovation principles is customer-driven innovation based on which we conduct an exercise called Follow Me Home. Through this we can understand the main challenges customers in the mid-sized business category encounter, the time and cost dependent activities to customise processes between applications and people to meet their needs. QuickBooks uses data and AI algorithms to minimise manual effort, provide cash flow insights, helping small businesses make decisions to increase cash flow and profit margins. Our AI-powered expert platform analyses a company's financial health, allows quicker payments, and connects users with financial help when they need it. AI/ ML based smart features are used to enable product business fit, few of them being Smart invoicing, right-for-me recommendations and suggestions and reducing human errors and fraud with ML-based anomaly detection.

Another interesting initiative that we launched last year was the Intuit Circles Codeathon. Intuit India has set out on a mission to create a platform for software companies to tackle real-world challenges that small businesses face today and utilise it as a springboard to expand. The Intuit Circles Codeathon provided a platform for entrepreneurs to develop and grow their products internationally by leveraging Intuit QuickBooks' cutting-edge platform, which allows them to develop solutions and tackle a wide range of challenges that small businesses confront.

How can fintech companies maximise data availability?

The importance of data in improving an organization's success cannot be overstated. Fintech businesses have a significant competitive edge if they can process the correct data. By combining data science with AI, enterprises improve resource allocation, identifying target client demographics, analysing changing user data and needs, fulfilling client demands, and allowing quality consumer decision making. As a result, businesses are dedicating a percentage of their budget to data management.

The fintech market is an ever-burgeoning market, with the increase in omni-channel commerce, digital payment platforms etc. This creates a great opportunity to identify and build smart products based on the data available, thus enabling better customization for customers.

Where does the Intuit Dev Centre go from here on? What plans do you have to expand on deeptech capabilities?

Intuit in India has 1,100+ employees. Being home to nearly 22% of Intuit’s engineering talent, we are a Centre of Excellence for end-to-end product and platform innovation. Our teams in India leverage the power of AI/ML, Data Science, Cloud, Open Source, NLP and other key technologies, playing a pivotal role in helping Intuit remain ahead of the curve as we focus on enabling our mission of powering prosperity.

Our teams in Bengaluru drive product development and management for some of Intuit’s high-value products and platforms - Lacerte, QuickBooks Desktop, TurboTax Desktop, Billing, Virtual Expert Platform etc. Leveraging the power of Cloud, AI and ML, Intuit India has been creating new opportunities with products like QuickBooks Online-Advanced targeted towards the global mid-market business segment. The site is emerging as a significant steerer piloting Intuit’s vision towards becoming an AI-driven expert platform company. 

"Currently, we are looking to grow our team in India and recruit 350+ positions across Software Engineering, Product Management, Experience Design and AI & Data Engineering roles in 2021 and 2022. We want to leverage the large pool of skilled technology talent available in India and invest in growing key tech capabilities that will drive innovation for their global products and platforms."

We continue to invest in building the tech capabilities of our people through various upskilling initiatives through tech learning programs and strategic partnerships such as the M.Tech Data Science & Machine Learning Program (WILP) in partnership with BITS Pilani.

How has COVID19 impacted your flagship products and services?

Our products, including TurboTax, QuickBooks and Mint, help our customers around the world make more money, with the least amount of work, while strengthening their confidence in their actions and decisions. Behind our strong technology expertise in delivering this customer confidence are our core innovation principles of Customer-driven innovation (CDI) and Design for delight (D4D) which go hand in hand and aid our engineering teams to deliver on our Customer Obsession.

At Intuit we are enabling our customers by continuous innovation in our existing products and creating unique offerings like. As part of our AI-driven expert platform strategy, we were already looking ahead at how we needed to support our customers in a virtual world during Covid-19

• The Intuit Aid Assist offering free, easy-to-use estimators to help the small businesses check their eligibility for federal relief programs, as well as estimate the portion of PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loan forgiveness, and estimate the amount they may be able to get from new tax credits like Employee Retention Credit (ERC) and paid leave.
• Intuit QuickBooks Paycheck Protection Program - creating an easy way for small business owners, self-employed individuals, and other eligible applicants to apply for a Paycheck Protection Program loan.
• During the initial onset of the pandemic, the Consult an Expert program launched to help our small business and accountants, by providing free, timely, relevant and virtual advice from a pool of experts during those early days.
• Our TurboTax Live customers connect with experts virtually through our Virtual Expert Platform technology, an offering that gives them an opportunity to get the right kind of help especially in the present situation.