Giving Chennai a prominent place in the world IT map, Polaris recently launched a design centre on its sprawling campus, offering a one-stop destination for financial companies looking for technological solutions. The company plans to set up next such design centres in New York and London.
Polaris’ 8012 FT Design Centre, which was inaugurated on March 22, is theworld’s first design centre that helps financial institutions to use the power of Business Design, Technology Design and Operations Design fruitfully. In simple terms, it provides solution to the innumerable problems faced by the financial intuitions due to specific demands made by customers and clients. Polaris hopes to give their clients and customers an exclusive design space for distinctively connecting business, technology and operations which has made them come up with this design centre. The 100 million dollar centre, spread across 30,000 sq ft on the 22 acre Polaris Campus, IT Highway, Chennai, the centre currently employs around 250 experts which includes product developers, banking professionals, commutations expert, engineers and many more people from various technical background.
Polaris Financial Technology Limited conducted an innovation tour at their 8012 FT Design Centre recently.
As soon as you enter the design centre, you will be stunned by a huge world map made out of `one, two, five and 10 coins. According to Padmini Sharad Kumar, Partner and Global Head for marketing and communication “Polaris understands the lifecycle of money.” Going further, you will gradually understand why some lovely paintings are there on the walls of a centre that deals with finance, technology and so on. They actually represent the business, technology and finance frameworks. The path leading to the design labs will educate you about various things starting from the five principles of growth which they follow—skill, expertise, perspective, idea and alignment; the five major technologies which enables the financial institutions to help their customers; the various undertakings of Polaris—Lakshya, Konark, Ullas, Hum, Unmukt and Nalanda and much more.
Padmini said, “The team is being trained in such a way that they can make their own decisions while designing a product for a customer rather than just following a set of instructions.”
In fact, the centre has been designed in a way that enhances the efforts put in by the employees. The seating arrangement for the people working in the labs is flexible and can be changed according to their needs. The labs are glass rooms to facilitate eye contact between employees and designed in a way that enables the person standing in the first room to see the person in the last room.
While you are going through the labs you will spot a robot following you delivering reports of activities going on. The centre encourages innovation and so has six design zones which is developed using latest technologies. There is a separate space where designers can step into the shoes of a client and according design a product for them. There is a business design space which is equipped with nine screens so that the customer doesn’t miss out the previous slides keeping in view the short term memory span of humans. It also includes a space where complex procedures can be explained through magnetic cards. The operations design space enables to access full details of customers at a single touch. The technology design spaces helps customers follow the technology that will be used to design the product they wish for.
It is indeed a great innovation that will help millions of institutions find answers for questions put forth by customers and help them meet the customer’s demands in a short span of time.