Daylight Automation with Art Harrison | E223

Empowering business workflows.

On today’s episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira is going to talk to Art Harrison, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of Daylight. It helps companies automate their data processes and create greater efficiencies around things like onboarding, documented population etc. TurboTax is a solution that will guide you through the right questions just to make sure that you contextually are providing the right information.

Episode Highlights:

  • 0.34: Daylight’s mission is to enable companies to improve any interaction between people in the process. 

  • 8.45: When you think about the problems that so many businesses encounter, we see a lot in the financial industry because of a new regulation. Jason sees that companies complain digitalization is moving so fast.

  • 9.38: COVID had a massive impact on the appetite for change and the realization that people need to change because the appetite is changing. You need a new champion in technology because people don’t know how to make the changes.

  • 10.50: To build a new platform or process, the developer starts from the inside and says, let’s build the data model or the data lake, and then we are going to build this new suite of tools that will change onboard everything, and then we will finally have clean data, and we see that still as a struggle.

  • 11.38: If you are always looking at that automation first, you are often not solving the root of the problem. We focus on breaking apart a traditional term that organizations use, digitization and automation.

  • 12.49: No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy. You can sit back and plan out every scenario you think will happen, but at the end of the day, the public is going to throw things out you never dreamed of. 

  • 17.37: Hart says that they focus on how they make companies on the ramp to map their business process and make sure that they are included while also satisfying all the data, security, compliance, and regulatory needs.

  • 18.11: The challenges are the people on the front lines don’t know how to speak the language of the people who are building technology stuff, says Jason.

  • 19.35: Art shares how organizations are now saying that they need something that they can govern, and they need something that they can understand how it works, that they can give to their lines of business and let them solve whether they have some technical resources, whether it’s the frontline people doing it.

  • 20.23: In terms of daylight, what Art and his team have done is they focus on the guardrails that are needed to bring the most value without letting even those frontline people overstep their bounds. 

  • 22.09: Daylight gives the users an ability to participate without overstepping their bounds, and then gives the other groups the ability to govern the release cycle and data flow in and out of the application.

  • 22.48: For Art and his company it was that separation of the experience from the data and really focusing on the different audiences that will participate in making the ideal experience for any process.

  • 24.31: Daylight kind of mirrors randomized approach to like how do we bring value today without burdening you with problems in the future?

  • 25.20: Daylight is focused on providing low code in terms of the process build. The SME is the expert but still empowers the IT folks to focus on what they want to do.

  • 31.19: Most people focus on doing the one thing they are told to do in front of them. They don’t necessarily understand that this is what is possible is feasible and just the enormous benefits to it.

  • 32.54: Let us build something immediately to make an impact. It doesn’t. We don’t have to plan for eight months down the road, let’s build something and see how it does.

3 Key Points

  1. Daylight is a workflow engine that provides the tools for putting workflow together for the end-user and all the intelligence, execution, and deliverables that go into it.

  2. Art tells the listeners about the origin - what was the genesis of daylight automation, and how did it come to be?

  3. When building a digital ideal customer experience, 95% of the use cases are always exceptions. When you get into the room and technology, some pragmatism gets lost with some people, says Art.

Tweetable Quotes

  • “In a busy business, you are moving so fast, and you don’t necessarily have time to think or map processes out, but then you pay the price in the long run.” - Jason

  • “What I have found is when you empower the people that are on the front line or step behind the front line who are living the pain of the process, they actually tend to be more pragmatic, and they just want to simplify what they’re doing.” - Art 

  • “We have kind of found this happy medium where it who is skeptical about some end user focused solution.”- Art Harrison

  • “It is interesting because of the mindset shift there because it stops becoming about the ones who control and action everything and it’s a relinquishing your control to ones who basically steward the efforts of the entire organization.” - Jason 

Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech