AI/ML will blend tax, accounting products into personal finance solutions: Raji Arasu, Intuit
Financial software firm Intuit’s Bengaluru research and development (R&D) operations are its largest outside its home base in California. Since the setting up of the R&D operations here in 2005, India has grown into one of the company’s important product development hubs as well as a strategic office. About one-third of the company’s 3000-people strong global R&D workforce now work out of Bengaluru.
Intuit faces multiple challenges in adapting to new financial services models emerging globally and in India with the growing presence of fintech startups. The $6.7 billion company’s more well known solutions include Quickbooks, a tax filing product for small businesses, individual tax filing product Turbotax, wealth management product Mint and Proconnect, a platform for tax professionals.
In an interview with TechCircle, Raji Arasu, senior vice president, Intuit Platform, spoke about the growing role of the India operations in product development and the evolution of the tax platform on the back of emerging technologies. Arasu, who is based in San Francisco, leads the development of the platform and strategic services that power Intuit’s financial product experiences on mobile, web and conversational UI.
Edited excerpts:
What is the role of the India development office?
This office has been one of the important product development hubs for us as well as a strategic office. We have a lot of customer revenue generating product development work done here including our small business and self-employed customers product or our Turbotax product as well as a lot of platform-related work apart from supporting some of these products.
A lot of our workloads are run on external cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and we did migrate some of our products onto the cloud and a lot of that work happened in India. It was not just migration, but thinking through how it works architecturally from security, scalability and working on the hybrid cloud platform. A ton of innovations happened to make that possible with a lot of support coming from the India office.
Intuit also is going through changes in the container journey as well as in the open-source space. Again, a lot of work is done here. We are also building a team around AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) in the India centre, which will play a key part in automating the personalisation of our products for customers.
Are there products that are completely owned and run by the India centre?
The migration from a private cloud to a public cloud firm in three years is unprecedented in the industry and the India centre worked closely with the US headquarters team. A significant part of all our products gets developed in India. It is not one product or one area that’s done out of India. One-third of our employees in the global R&D division is here. We have 3,000 people in the division globally, so around a thousand are here.
Your Indian employees don’t have much exposure to US customers or US tax policies. How much of a challenge is that given that your products are very local?
We collectively spend 10,000 hours a year speaking with customers. For us to have the centre participate in all our revenue-generating products and keep innovating, it is important that one understands the problems of the customers. We do a lot of programmes virtually and physically to interact with customers to build products according to their requirements. They don't lose customer empathy and make that part of our culture.
The centre has product managers, who interact with product managers in the US to connect the dots by speaking with business managers as well. Our engineers have a strong say in the products we build and the customer experience we deliver.
We increasingly see tax software being able to auto-fill most of the data. How are automation and AI reshaping the tax filing space and do you see it disrupting Intuit as well?
You need a culture that keeps on pushing the boundaries on disruption. We have innovated and changed several times in our 35-year history. The most recent one was to move to the public cloud. The kind of technology we use will depend on the kind of outcome we want, and it is not about the impact on our products but also in the external world.
The US tax code is 80,000 pages thick. So we use AI to compress that in an automated fashion to able to implement the Turbotax product. All the customers get the latest changes in the code. It will take months for individuals to comprehend and implement the changes. Now is the time to use AI, newer concepts that are changing accounting and personal finance management and we are building capabilities in these technologies across the development centres.
We are trying to understand how do we use technologies like AI, ML, natural language processing (NLP) etc. to recommend the right advice. We use ML to autofill Turbotax applications, but we give that option to our customers and we end up saving 40% of the taxpayers' time. Doing taxes is stressful and what we are able to do is really helpful.
Tell us more about your big bet on open source.
By embracing open source, you tap into the innovations of everybody else. These technologies have helped us integrate our solutions with our partner ecosystem like G-Suite because it is important to understand how small businesses function. The G-Suite will manage invoices and send out reminders and we don't need to do anything. These have changed customer experiences. We are trying to up our game on container technology using cloud-native technology like Kubernetes. We have built on open source technologies like Argo project, which are ways to create workflows, continuous deployment solution among other things.
We see a lot more people contributing to our products both internally and externally. The more ideas mean the faster we move.
You have an outreach initiative, Intuit Circles, to work with startups. What are your expectations from the programme?
One of the initiatives that have been facilitated by our open source culture is the integration of the apps created in the startup ecosystem with our products through our open application programming interface (API).
The Indian startup ecosystem is one of the most vibrant ones in the world and this provides an opportunity for them to work with us while catering to the small business community. We have started the programme here and will expand internationally. We already have a large number of startups signed up with us. The majority of startups fail within the first five years and many of those because of financial mismanagement. We can help them with that. We have an app marketplace and now these entrepreneurs have the possibility of more than four million of our Quickbooks customers being able to access it.
This initiative will also help the startups to connect with other startups, ecosystem players and we are partnering with incubators and accelerators as well.
With fintech startups bringing disruption to the financial services sector, do you see Intuit evolving into a personal finance player rather than a tax filing facilitator?
It cannot be about tax or accounting anymore but all this has to blend in a way to be more about personal prosperity. Emerging technologies have a huge role to play in being able to do that. You would want it to be like a push thing where the financial product that you use can also be a financial advisor by telling you what to do next. It demystifies the nuances of what goes into all of these capabilities to make it simple for the customer. It can be done for you faster and simpler. It will have an impact on our revenue streams as well in the future but cannot predict how as of now.