Paromita Pramanik is a Product owner working at the intersection of business and technology, driving digital transformation for some of the world’s largest and most prestigious brands. As Senior Product Manager at a global leader in digital transformation, she applies her significant expertise in designing innovative software applications and digital channels to improve e-commerce operations by focusing on business strategy, digital product management, and enhancing the customer experience.
Since 2010, Paromita has led complex technology projects in the United States, Italy, and Thailand, facilitating comprehensive, omnichannel vision transformation for multinational clients serving customers in the department store, retail, apparel, recreation, banking, insurance, eyewear, and hotel industries. While working in the banking sector, she additionally gained highly specialized experience in applications for Asset and Wealth Management, insurance, and investments.
We spoke with Paromita about how she helps businesses optimize business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) operations, and how she develops e-commerce solutions to ensure exceptional customer experiences.
Q: Paromita, e-commerce has transformed the retail industry. What challenges are industry sectors such as retail, hotel, and banking working to overcome?
A: Critical challenges that still exist in retail are supply chain disruptions, managing inventory and logistics efficiently, rising consumer expectations for fast delivery, easy returns, and personalized experiences that require constant adaptation. As retail transactions increase online, protecting customer data from breaches and fraud is paramount for retailers to maintain customers’ trust. In the hotel industry, ensuring seamless integration between various booking platforms, and maintaining up-to-date availability, personalizing guest experiences, managing prices to stay competitive, and maintaining high standards of service in a competitive market can be a constant challenge. Having worked in a banking digital transformation, I know it can be difficult and expensive to integrate leading-edge mobile and web services with legacy core banking systems. Cybersecurity and complying with evolving regulations, including data protection and anti-fraud measures, can also pose significant challenges.
- While spearheading digital transformation for an international banking enterprise, you launched a new mobile app and were recognized for innovations in the product management space, specifically in Product Engine and Speed Layer technologies. Tell us about the solutions you designed.
A: Product Engine is a Low-code, configurable, and rule driven accelerator for managing the product life cycle (from Onboarding to Retirement), while minimizing effort to do so. In addition, Product Engine is a high-end, SaaS-based product life cycle management solution with a graphical user interface for administration. In a previous engagement working with a global bank, my team developed the Product Engine solution with an insurance product to reduce the time-to-market by half.
The configurable insurance component was developed in the mobile app, with required data fetching from bank’s backend system, and with an Application Programming Interface (API) that we created for channel and experience management. This made the Product Engine re-usable for all the upcoming insurance products; since the underlying components such as the mobile experience and banking backend system were the same, we only had to change the insurance domain, thereby speeding time-to-market in a cost-effective manner.
The bank operated on legacy core banking systems, which increased the response time for any payments and transfers. The core banking systems were not able to handle the load, especially at the end of the month during salary credit time. To solve this problem, we built a Speed Layer between core banking and web/mobile applications to save customers’ data, and ensure that sent read-only requests were not required to go to the core banking system. Implementing the Speed Layer provided the data 10 milliseconds faster, resulting in annual savings of up to $6 million.
We also used Speed Layer to improve upon the bank’s core digital banking infrastructure and capabilities—this was the foundation for an enterprise-wide operational data store (ODS). By enabling streaming, real-time data from HOST (the main system that holds all data and shares with other systems) and legacy systems of record, in a faster, cloud-ready cache infrastructure, Speed Layer unlocked critical benefits for the bank including improved up-time and resilience of the Digital Banking channel, reduced costs to support HOST systems, improved agility, an enhanced customer experience, a runway for migrating key digital and data infrastructure to the cloud, and new capabilities to develop real-time features.
Q: What are some of the newest e-commerce modules that you are deploying? And what do you see on the horizon?
A: I am currently working on implementing Gen AI in customer service. This application is going to be a game-changer for the retailer, who is now using a very outdated, non-Gen AI, customer service tool. Using Gen AI will improve the customer service rate—which is one of the KPIs for my team—and will also build a solid customer base.
User experience and technology always go hand in hand. It is extremely important for us to design an application that the user understands and feels comfortable using, while keeping in mind that it must be built on a scalable technology that is easily updated with current trends and improvements based on customers’ feedback.
Q: What other areas should e-commerce businesses be focusing on?
A: E-commerce is evolving rapidly, and several key areas require attention to stay ahead of the curve. I believe these include personalization and upgrading the customer experience, sustainability, augmented reality and virtual reality, enhanced payment options, advanced chatbots and virtual assistants, blockchain technology, real inventory management, voice enabled shopping, social commerce, faster and/or same-day delivery, and advanced data analytics.
Over the next decade, AI will be driving e-commerce. We will see advanced applications for AI in automated supply management, inventory management, targeted marketing, virtual try-on, customer sentiment analysis, and other areas. Companies that have not yet implemented a digital transformation plan will start to fall further behind as new technologies accelerate, so these organizations must start now to define their goals and develop a feasible transformation plan to achieve them.
