Kunal Jhanji

Walk us through your role at BCG. 

I am a Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and lead our payments business in the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands.  

Also, as a part of BCG’s global payments management team, I lead the Payments Infrastructure and Schemes/Network segment, our Digital Assets (digital currencies, including CBDCs and stable coins) business and our work on Open Banking and Open Finance. 

Take us down memory lane a little bit. How has your career path taken you to  BCG? 

I had the good fortune of working with three strong consulting firms before joining BCG, each of which brought out different capabilities and skills in me and shaped me into who I am today.  Joining BCG in 2020 was the right next step for me as well as an outcome of the strong foundations I’d built through my work at the previous firms. 

Is where you are now anything like you envisaged growing up? What was your dream job as a child?

No kid knows what management consulting is, so it certainly wasn’t a career path I saw myself on. A younger me wanted to do and be many things – I’ve had a strong liking for theatre, singing  (been doing so ever since I can remember!), being a medical doctor and an entrepreneur. 

What do you most enjoy about your role, and what are some of the biggest challenges?

I have been fortunate to be in an incredibly innovative and fast-paced part of the market. The  FinTech sector demands that we constantly evolve and spot future trends early to stay ahead of the game and ensure that we offer the best advice to our clients.  

On to the serious stuff. Gen AI in financial services is the big buzz today. How can it go from ‘hype’ into real, beneficial applications to drive efficiencies? What are its best use cases?

Though Gen AI is in its early days of development, across our conversations with clients, many see it as a real game-changer. The technology offers a chance to transform customer relationships and widen product and service offerings. However, the challenge our clients are trying to solve now is to move from hype to actual profitability on their investment in GenAI and move from pilots to widespread use across organisations. 

Gen AI also presents a significant opportunity for players – large and small – in the financial services sector, especially across banks and insurance providers, to accelerate modernisation while developing and defining technology that works for their organisation. 

In 2023, Gen AI entered the picture, and for companies and individuals, it was a year of experimentation. In 2024, the focus will be on scaling up so businesses can deliver impact and critically, profitability. 

However, AI algorithms will not deliver on their own. Real competitive advantage will come from AI combined with human input. 

In this discussion of the transformative power of technology, the key enabler will be talent – 9 out of 10 CEOs rank AI as a top priority for this year but less than 1 in 10 has managed to train more than a quarter of their employees on GenAI tools so far. 

This is a sizeable misalignment. This year will determine the winners and losers in this space. “Wait and see” won’t work when it comes to rolling out GenAI. 

Following on from that, how important is it to curate the right, bespoke digital strategy if you’re a financial services company? How should they best go about achieving that? 

Digitisation has radically changed the business models for financial institutions. However,  legacy technology and infrastructure debt build up fast, even in relatively modern fintechs. 

This limits their ability to move at pace and cover all aspects of their services/customer journeys with more and better digital services. 

So, it needs to be proactively managed to avoid having  “investment walls” and an out-of-control cost base through build to run. For a fintech firm, having a digital strategy that tackles this is not just essential but table stakes in this market.  

A successful digital strategy requires clarity of vision, a strong culture, and a team to see it through. Fintechs also need to ensure that the core elements of the digital strategy are aligned with their unique value proposition, and it is focused on “digital simplification”. 

Also, bringing in a degree of harmonisation can provide a base to automate at scale, and leverage AI/ Gen AI use cases to further amplify the benefits.  

The key to success is having a methodology to identify, test, and scale use cases while ensuring that the right people, technology, and governance enablers are in place and linked to the overarching digital strategy. 

Additionally, any digital strategy cannot be complete without setting the right culture – securing the best ways of working goes beyond adjusting the organisation to make it look agile. 

It requires shifting the way they think about resource allocation, products, the development life cycle of technology, as well as reviews and process management. 

This year we’ll see AI regulations come into force. What do you expect to see, and where can regulators draw the right line?

Regulators around the globe have been busy finalising specific AI laws, amending them with Gen AI provisions, and updating data privacy, liability, and copyright laws for the new technology.  

However, the technology and its effects are evolving faster than ever, so regulatory uncertainty around Gen AI is likely to prevail for some time. Nevertheless, three frameworks are particularly noteworthy for financial institutions.  

With appropriate guardrails in place to guide AI developers and users, companies should be able to deploy and quickly scale even rapidly changing technologies, with clear controls on the risks and with high regulatory compliance. 

These guardrails should centre on a framework that ensures alignment of AI development and operation with the bank’s purpose and values while still delivering transformative business impact. We call this approach responsible AI. 

As AI and Gen AI are evolving, questions will arise that the new AI regulations do not answer. However, executives who are now preparing for this eventuality by developing a holistic,  responsible AI framework will have a critical advantage and will set up their AI transformations for success. 

In the coming year and beyond, how are you and BCG looking to stay at the forefront of consultation when it comes to Gen AI’s adoption in financial services? 

BCG has invested heavily in building our own capabilities and deploying AI/Gen AI solutions at scale across our own organisation.  

We see AI as both a strategic lever and a cutting-edge frontier. AI has the power to address high-level CEO agenda items while helping solve humanity’s most pressing challenges, including climate change, disease and energy shortages.  

BCG assists executives in weaving AI and GenAI into the fabric of their organisations,  enabling enterprise-grade transformations while inspiring their workforces to embrace significant change. 

For CEOs in financial services, successfully integrating AI and generative AI presents a dual challenge. Consider Gen AI as the creative, imaginative right brain of an organisation and traditional AI as the logical, analytical left brain – Gen AI can craft marketing content, for example, while AI computes marketing ROI. 

AI is also rapidly evolving and a competitive consulting landscape, and we have to ensure that our counsel helps clients stay on top of these developments. 

Above all, BCG champions unlocking AI’s potential purposefully and ethically. We see responsible AI not just as a safeguard but as a pivotal value creator. 

By responsibly harnessing this technology, we can build a future where organisations perform more effectively,  where human creativity thrives, and where the boundaries of business potential are redefined. 

We always end on a light note. If you were trapped on a desert island with three other people (excluding friends and family), who would they be and why?! 

• Either Ray Dalio or Tony Robbins (both bring out something special in people) 

• Arijit Singh (one of my favourite singers) 

• Jane Anson (I love wine, and she understands Bordeaux like no one else)

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