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Contents February 2017
n volume 03 n issue 01
cover story
Industry view
08 17
Streamlining Loan Processes to Create Delighted Customers
Industry speaks
Securing BFSI Digital Space With Cutting Edge Tech Special feature
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20
26
Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Cloudera
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Indus Net Technologies
Vice President, CRIF High Mark Credit Information Services Private Limited
Amr Awadallah
12 Small Finance Banks: Transforming Banking in India 27 Service Charge: A Matter of Customers’ Discretion or Obtrusiveness
Abhishek Rungta
Parijat Garg
28
46
48
Managing Director and CEO, Universal Sompo General Insurance Co Ltd
Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company
Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Pi DATACENTERS
Rajiv Kumar
Ritesh Kumar
Debmalya Dey Roy
50
Special story
Uday Vaishampayan
Director Teckinfo Solutions Pvt Ltd
22 Co-operative Banks: A Vital Lifeline for Indian Economy
24 Demonetisation – A Defining Moment For India
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flashback
The BFSI Security Summit 2016
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February 2017 volume 03 n issue 01 Our publications
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Dr Ravi Gupta
CIO
An Elets Technomedia Initiative
CONFERENCE | AWARDS | EXPO
EDITORIAL TEAM - DELHI/NCR Senior Assistant Editor: Souvik Goswami, Gautam Debroy Assistant Editor: Sandeep Datta, Vivek Ratnakar, Priyanka Sharma Senior Correspondent: Shivani Tyagi, Akash Tomer Correspondent: Rashi Aditi Ghosh, Rajbala BENGALURU BUREAU Associate Editor: T Radha Krishna MUMBAI BUREAU Senior Assistant Editor: Kartik Sharma Senior Correspondent: Poulami Chakraborty Correspondent: Harshal Yashwant Desai JAIPUR BUREAU Senior Assistant Editor: Kartik Sharma CHANDIGARH BUREAU Assistant Editor: Priya Yadav HYDERABAD BUREAU Assistant Editor: Sudheer Goutham B LUCKNOW BUREAU Assistant Editor: Arpit Gupta AHMEDABAD BUREAU Assistant Editor: Hemangini S Rajput SALES & MARKETING TEAM Product Head: Fahim Haq, Mobile: +91-8860651632 Senior Manager: Gaurav Srivastava, Mobile: +91-8527697685 Manager: Manu Raj Singhal, Mobile: +91-9871543890 Senior Executive - Shivam Pathania SUBSCRIPTION & CIRCULATION TEAM Manager Subscriptions: +91-8860635832, subscription@elets.in DESIGN TEAM Creative Heads: Pramod Gupta, Anjan Dey Deputy Art Director: Om Prakash Thakur, Gopal Thakur, Shyam Kishore Senior Graphic Designer: Pradeep G EveNt Team Assistant Manager: Amit Yadav WEB DEVELOPMENT LEAD Farhan Khan DIRECTOR, ADMINISTRATION Archana Jaiswal EDITORIAL & MARKETING CORRESPONDENCE
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editorial
Data Centre, Cloud Ensuring Security for BFSI
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ith the modern technology influencing nearly all sectors in India, the BFSI sector is perhaps the most significant one of them. In the wake of recent incidents of data breaches, data storage is slowly but steadily overwhelming a big section of business fraternity’s mindset. Our cover story 'Security BFSI Digital Space with Cutting-Edge Tech' has attempted to explore the world of datacenters and cloud – the modern-day technologies safeguarding important data of internet-driven companies. It explores the world of data centres, narrating the various ifs and buts linked with them while highlighting why these are actually worth relying upon, depending on any organisation’s infrastructural limitations and security needs. On the other hand, realising the importance of tech leaders in the BFSI spectrum, Elets Technomedia has organised “BFSI Data Centre Summit” at Trident hotel, Bandra Kurla, Mumbai, on 2nd March, 2017. This summit becomes all the more relevant as the country is witnessing digital payment revolution and the managers of the data centre ecosystem too becomes more important. Our special stories such as 'Payments Banks – The New Age Banking'; 'Cloud Technology: Rehashing the Banking Processes'; 'Demonetisation: A Defining Moment for India' and 'Small Finance Banks: Transforming Banking in India' touch on various others important issues concerning the banking and financial sector. The latest issue also carries a number of interviews of business leaders linked to data centres, cooperative banks and insurance companies. The idea was to highlight their viewpoints to share how such companies are driving transformation in India. Explaining their line of products and services, they give new insights into why using their services can make a difference to the BFSI sector. As the Indian BFSI sector has been burgeoning in various ways, ever since technology began effecting a major change in maintaining enormous data and large volume transactions, there is also a growing risk of getting exposed to various security threats and breaches. With the concern for technology-related threats and challenges on the rise, it was felt an opportune time to organise “The BFSI Security Summit 2016” recently. The conference aimed to highlight security perspectives in the banking and finance domain and place the BFSI industry at the forefront of a comprehensive, global approach to take the IT and Security needs head on while touching upon the challenges in managing the security risk. With such a bouquet of special stories, interviews, and articles we hope our endeavour in this February issue would a useful contribution in narrating the big story of Indian transformation. Looking forward to our readers’ invaluable feedback.
dr Ravi Gupta Editor-in-Chief Ravi.Gupta@elets.in
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Cover Story
While there is a growing concern for security among ITdriven companies to safeguard its highly valuable data, a lot of firms are getting drawn to adapt modern-day technologies – Cloud or Data Centres but usually find themselves in a fix, writes Sandeep Datta of Elets News Network (ENN).
Securing BFSI Digital Space
With Cutting-Edge Tech T
o many of us even if "cloud" and "data centre" may sound interchangeable technical jargon while mentioning about the same infrastructure, the two computing systems in fact have less in common than the fact that both are related to data storage. A section of business fraternity opines while the adoption to cloud and data centers commenced late in India in comparison to its global counterparts, it’s going with the supersonic rocket like speed today.
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India’s data centre infrastructure market, estimated to be worth $2.2 billion, is anticipated to touch $4.5 billion by 2018. The country is poised to be the second-largest market for data centres in Asia-Pacific by 2020 and the investments are expected to reach $7 billion, according to a report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). The report titled 'Conducive Policy & Regulatory Environment To Incentivise Data centre Infrastructure,' which highlighted opportunities for the sector, was
Cover Story released by NITI Aayog Chief Executive Officer Amitabh Kant last May. Stating that India could grow to an infrastructure hub drawing $7 billion or 4.5% of the world's investments by 2020, the report stressed there is “an urgent need to create appropriate incentives to attract the investments and enable better connectivity, data speed and create more jobs in the country". The report also highlighted various legal, policy and regulatory enablers that are essential to promote data centre industry and strengthen the county’s positioning in the global data centre market. A study reportedly has indicated the value of Indian Data Centre infrastructure and services market will be anywhere between $350 crore to $500 crore by 2018. The constant northward movement of the Indian data centre infrastructure and services market owes to the demand pooled by all major verticals like BFSI, IT & ITES, Manufacturing, Education, Health Care, Telecom and the Government.
Understanding Data Centres The data centers are basically a conglomeration of elements instead of being any single thing. At the minimum, data centers serve as the principal repositories for all manner of IT equipment, including servers, storage subsystems, networking switches, routers and firewalls, as well as the cabling and physical racks used to interconnect and organise the IT equipment. Physical size or style doesn’t matter when we are to define data centers. Small businesses may operate successfully with several servers and storage arrays networked within a convenient closet or small room, while major computing organizations like Google or Facebook may fill an enormous warehouse space with data centre
equipment and infrastructure. The data centers can also be assembled in mobile installations, such as shipping containers, which are also described as data centers in a box which be moved and deployed as required.
Data Centre versus Cloud While thinking about the factors distinguishing a cloud from a data centre, we need to understand that a cloud is an offpremise form of computing that stores data on the Internet. A data centre, however, refers to on-premise hardware that stores data within an organisation's local network. While cloud services are outsourced to third-party cloud providers who perform all updates and ongoing maintenance, data centers are typically run by an in-house IT department. It maybe noted that data centers are increasingly implementing private cloud software, which builds on virtualisation to add a level of automation, user self-service and billing/chargeback to data centre administration. The objective is to allow individual users to provision workloads and other computing resources on-demand, without IT administrative intervention.
What Suits Your Business -- Cloud or Data centre? We need to understand that a data centre is ideal for companies that need a customised, dedicated system which accords full control to them over their data and equipment. Since only the company will use the infrastructure's power, a data centre is also said to be more suitable for organisations running a host of varying applications and complex workloads. A data centre, however, has limited capacity -- once you build a data centre, you will not be able to change the
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Cover Story amount of storage and workload it can withstand without purchasing and installing more equipment. A cloud system, however, is scalable to your business needs, with potentially unlimited capacity, based on your vendor's offerings and service plans. A disadvantage of the cloud is that you will not have as much control as you would a data centre, since a third party is managing the system. Moreover, unless an organisation doesn’t have a private cloud within the company network, you will be sharing resources with other cloud users in your provider's public cloud.
Cloud Security vs. Data Centre Security Since the cloud is an external form of computing, it may be less secure or take more work to secure than a data centre. Unlike data centers, where you are responsible for your own security, you will be entrusting your data to a third-party provider that may or may not have the most up-to-date security certifications. If your cloud resides on several data centers in different locations, each location will also need the proper security measures. According to Debmalya Dey Roy, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Pi Datacenters, the global Datacentre traffic is growing multi-folds. With the high operational expenses “owing to the heavy energy consumption, service providers are now moving towards green Datacentres ensuring efficient consumption of resources and energy”.
Enterprises nowadays seek smart and intelligent datacenters with inbuilt features like scalability, flexibility, reliability, integrity and security to support their growth cycles.
Energy Efficient Green Datacentre The process of building a green Datacentre commences from analysing the existing resources and the usage to decide on the next steps. Energy efficiency is the major factor to be addressed by any green Datacentre. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is the most standard industry metric to measure the same. A Lower PUE is the sign of an efficient Datacentre. It can be achieved by effectively using the available resources. Optimised electrical and cooling design will enhance the power efficiency of the Datacentre. Be it enabling power management feature in Central Processing Unit’s (CPU), use of high efficiency equipment including Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS), adopting best practices in cooling, conducting energy audit, action to reduce energy consumption. Recent engineering innovations have made more options available. Using renewable energy resources is another way to improve the efficiency. Roy says that enterprises nowadays seek smart and intelligent datacenters with inbuilt features like scalability, flexibility, reliability, integrity and security to support their growth cycles. “High availability of infrastructure elements to avoid downtimes is of significance for the enterprises to ensure resilience.”
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How to Finally Decide? In case your firm requires customisable and a wholly dedicated system, a data centre option may be a good option, as you won’t be sharing any space with another organisation. But if you need more space or computing power, it translates into purchasing more equipment, staff to maintain it, and electricity. And, if you don’t need a customisable powerhouse dedicated only to your storage requirements, you can try a third party cloud system. It costs less. As in such a case, you will be sharing the space with other organisations hiring the third party to maintain their data. In case, you need extra space, most organisations will allow you to up your storage space without asking why? But still a big concern remains that you lose the element of control since you are contracting another organisation to hold your data within their system. The solution of this dilemma may lie in having a flexible approach depending upon our needs, placing the most essential and critical data in a data centre and less confidential information on the cloud to keep it more easily accessible.
Aayog
Special Feature
Small Finance Banks
Small Finance Banks:
Transforming Banking in India India is transforming in alignment with the digital revolution initiated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi led government. The present government from the very beginning of its tenure has portrayed financial inclusion as one of its top priorities by launching Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna (PMJDY) to ensure a bank account for everyone. In sync with this, the Indian banking sector came up with several new initiatives of smart and easy ways of banking. Small finance bank is one such out-of-the-box innovation that has the potential to change banking segment in India explains, Rashi Aditi Ghosh of Elets News Network (ENN).
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Special Feature
Small Finance Banks
I
nitiating the revolutionary way of banking
On 19 August, 2015, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) kicked off some transformative changes in the financial system of the country by giving licenses to 11 Payment banks and 10 small financial banks. The main aim of this initiative was to bring the unbanked section of the society under the periphery of the formal banking system. For payment banks, RBI granted licenses to big boys like Reliance Industries, Aditya Birla Group, telcos (Vodafone, Airtel), Indian Post, Tech Mahindra, Dilip Shanghvi (Sun Pharma promoter), PayTM, Vijay Shekhar Sharma (One97), National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) and Cholamandalam Distribution Services Ltd. The 10 applicants selected for setting up small finance banks include Au Financier Ltd., Disha Microfin, Equitas Holdings, Ujjivan Financial Services, ESAF Microfinance and Investments, Utkarsh Micro Finance, RGVN Micro Finance, Suryoday Micro Finance, Capital Local Area Bank and Janlakshmi Financial Services. Eight out of these 10 selected applicants are microfinance institutions (MFIs), one is a local area bank and one is a non-banking financial company (NBFC).
banks, but at a smaller level targeting low-income segment.
Significance of Small Finance Banks The main motive behind setting up of small finance banks was to expand the access to financial services in rural and semi-urban areas. These banks have the power to function almost like a normal commercial bank, but at a much smaller scale. It can offer basic banking services, accept deposits and lend to underserved sections of customers, including small business units, small and marginal farmers,
The main motive behind setting up of small finance banks was to expand the access to financial services in rural and semi-urban areas. These banks have the power to function almost like a normal commercial bank, but at a much smaller scale.
Need of the hour: Banking the Unbanked World Bank paper “The Global Findex Database 2014”: India, China and Indonesia accounted for 38% of the world’s unbanked adults. Both China and India reported strong growth in account ownership between 2011 and 2014. While banking penetration in China accounted an increase from 64% to 79%, India banking penetration rose from 35% to 53%. This growth showed that 180 million adults in China and 175 million in India became account holders with the two countries together accounting for about half (of) the 700 million new account holders globally. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) India 2015: India’s unbanked population in 2015 was 233 million, which was almost half of in 2011 - 557 million, primarily because of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana scheme aimed at making it easier for people to open new accounts.
Source: RBI, PMJDY and PWC
Small Finance Banks, Big Reach Small finance bank is a type of niche bank, which can provide banking services like accepting deposits and lending but mainly focusing on small businesses, small and marginal farmers, small and micro industries. Small finance banks can perform all the operations of normal commercial
micro and small industries, and even entities in the unorganised sector. While both payments banks and small finance banks may have some overlapping functional areas, there are many key differences as well.
Difference between Payments banks and Small Finance banks • Payments bank has a limit of Rs 1 lakh on deposit per account; small finance banks do not have limit. • Payments banks cannot lend, while small finance banks can give loans. • Small finance banks will also have to ensure that 50% of their loan portfolio constitutes advances of up to Rs 25 lakh. These banks are also allowed to distribute thirdparty products such as mutual funds, insurance and pension products. Initiation of small finance bank will bring a revolutionary change in the Indian banking section. It will help in making banking more competitive and more inclusive for both borrowers and depositors, making banking more affordable to the common man.
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Special Feature Green Data
Green Data Centre: Catering to Energy Efficiency The rising inclination towards cloud computing and growing demand for storage space are some of the leading factors for the rapid growth of the data centre segment in India. As the dependency on data centre is growing multiple folds, the need for ensuring efficient consumption of resources and energy is also increasing. Owing to high operational expenses due to the heavy energy consumption for data centres, service providers are now moving towards green data centres, explores Rashi Aditi Ghosh of Elets News Network (ENN).
G
reen Data Centres
A green data centre is one in which mechanical, electrical and computer systems are designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimum environmental impact. Several strategies can be used to reduce carbon footprint such as minimising the footprint of buildings, use of low-emission building materials, waste and water recycling, and use of alternative energy technologies such as evaporative cooling, photovoltaics, heat pumps, etc. In an effort to improve their environmental credentials and lower costs of operation, many companies are already working towards reducing electricity and water usage at their data centres. Apart from making fundamental changes in the design of data centres to reduce energy demand, companies are also planning to install energyefficient equipment and water-saving cooling devices.
Significance of Green Data Centres Green Data Centres don't just save energy; they reduce the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades to deal with increased power and cooling demand. With rising energy costs and information technology (IT) equipment stressing the power and cooling of infrastructure, many see an economic and operational crisis intimidating. Lately, Chief Information Officers (CIO) are being challenged to rethink their data centre strategies, adding energy efficiency to a list of critical operating parameters that
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already includes serviceability, reliability and performance. A green initiative can help a company regain power and cooling capacity, recapture resiliency and help meet business needs, at the same time, dramatically reducing energy costs and the total cost of ownership. Going green is becoming more than a humane aspiration to save the planet. It’s now clear that going green is a necessity that companies will need to embrace— sooner rather than later—to survive economically. Explaining about the significance of green data centre in terms of energy efficiency, Debmalya Dey Roy, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Pi DATACENTERS said, “Energy efficiency is the major factor to be addressed by any green data centre. PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is the most standard industry metric to measure the same. A Lower PUE is the sign of an efficient data centre.” “This can be achieved by effectively using the available resources. Optimised electrical and cooling design will enhance the power efficiency of the data centre. Be it enabling power management feature in CPU’s, use of high efficiency equipment including UPS, adopting best practices in cooling, conducting energy audit, action to reduce energy consumption. Recent engineering innovations have made more options available. Using renewable energy resources is another way to improve the efficiency,” he added.
Advantages of making Data Centre Green The primary functionality of any data centre is data processing which is achieved through servers, storage and networking, but modern data centre operating in virtualisation environment hosting a Varity of applications and to manage multiple applications in data centre creates the challenges of providing resources and allocation in response. The main advantages of making data centre's green is to achieve not only efficient processing and utilisation of resources but also include minimising energy consumption, resource management, power saving on virtualisation environment, cloud computing services with performance management and IT security.
Special Story
Data Storage
Evolving Space of
Data Storage
Banking industry is witnessing a paradigm shift due to consistent IT innovations. Over the years, most of the private sector banks have embraced the “anywhere and anytime banking” mode to deliver quality services. With rapid changes in the banking industry, data also needs to be stored in a secured manner. In the traditional data centre, enterprises would manage their storage needs by adding racks of servers. Today, financial institutions can store big data in a much more secured manner, observes Priyanka Sharma of Elets News Network (ENN).
A
t a time when Internet of Things (IoT), coupled with big data and video analytics, is the talk of the town across the world, making sense of data and its optimum secured storage is the key for the governments including in India. Let’s look at some of the latest data storage options available to financial institutions in the country.
Cloud Storage Cloud storage is a cloud computing model in which data is stored on remote servers, accessed from the internet, or cloud. A cloud storage service provider operates and manages it through storage servers that are built on virtualisation techniques. Sensing the big growth opportunities in the cloud market in India, large multinationals are finally putting their data centres in the country, financial institutions are looking to use cloud companies such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Microsoft has already opened data centres in Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai to get hold of those companies that had been unable to use public cloud services due to rules
surrounding data sovereignty. "We put the data centre in Mumbai mainly to be close to the financial institutions. Now, we are talking to them about Office 365 on the cloud, customer relationship management and disaster recovery. Banks don't have to build out infrastructure to service peak loads," a leading business daily quoted Gartenberg as saying recently. According to a report, public cloud service revenue is expected to grow to $1.9 billion in 2019 from about $730 million in 2015. “Public cloud surge is more than the hybrid cloud. The public cloud is on a roll and we want to help the customers to have a better cost manage economy where we have hybrid,” says Amit Mehta, Director-Sales, Emerging Technology Storage Division at DELL EMC, India & SAARC in an exclusive conversation with Elets. NetApp, an American multinational storage and data management company that recently declared revenues of $5.6 billion for fiscal 2015-16, also wants to capture a bigger pie in India with its top-of-the-line secured data storage and expertise in all-flash array market.
Storage convergence on the hybrid cloud Hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment which uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms. According to an IBM report, the hybrid cloud market is growing at an annual compound rate of 29.22% over the period of 2014 to 2019. The transition to hybrid environment will involve tapping storage repositories that span a variety of cloud-based and data centre platforms.
Blockchain Blockchains are an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically. This blockchain-based decentralisation allows developers to store data in a secure, performant, and inexpensive way, spreading it across many nodes. As for security, a blockchain approach means that each file is shredded, encrypted with its own key, and spread across the network until you are ready to use it again. On retrieval, files are decrypted and reassembled seamlessly on the fly. “I really see this technology picking up in the next five to ten years. It will give a lot of transparency to the end customer and client. It enhances trust between banks also. It reduces time of internal processes,” says K R C Murty, Vice President - Chief Technology Office, Deutsche Bank. The wide spread of storage infrastructure across many geographical locations and time zones makes the blockchain network very difficult to cripple. Thus, blockchain is considered by some as a democratisation of trust in this digital age.
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Special Story
Cloud Technology
Cloud Technology:
Rehashing the Banking Processes With modern technology influencing and transforming the way banking is done and playing a key role in uplift of the country’s image through its development in all sectors, cloud computing is drawing a lot of attention due to its huge scope to facilitate various processes writes Akash Tomer of Elets News Network (ENN).
I
n recent years, cloud computing has emerged as one of the fastest-growing technologies. Business applications are the largest markets for cloud services spending. It is well-known a major shift is taking place in banking sector as well. It’s a shift many banks have been pretty hush-hush about, and every bank is rapidly testing and moving to the cloud. It provides full scalability, reliability, high performance and relatively low cost feasible solution as compared to dedicated infrastructures. The rapid emergence of cloud computing is transforming the way financial institutions think about how they consume their IT resources. Also, cloud computing has the ability to make enterpriselevel banking systems and associated technologies available in the cloud on a pay-per-use basis, now there is no barriers associated with this technology as anyone, anywhere can have access to banking systems without the cost and other. Cloud computing offers more flexible business models to the financial institutions which lowers operational costs. However, it is essential to select the cloud service model that best matches the core business requirements. The banks are presently using cloud technology for its most of the operations, few of them are as follows:
Card and mobile payment processing through Visa, MasterCard and trusted third parties Most of the banks process their credit and debit cards, and ATM transactions through Visa, MasterCard, or a trusted
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third-party processor with a cooperative agreement. These card and mobile payment processors use cloud technology to operate.
Marketing and customer relationship management Cloud providers such as OMI provide help to the banks in their market research and analytics that enable banks and financial institutions to segment their markets to increase their customer bases and product penetration. Salesforce is also a leading cloud provider for sales and customer relationship management (CRM).
Core banking Large financial institutions maintain their own core banking systems, but this isn't always possible for small to mediumsize banks and credit unions. Well-established cloud services providers in this space are Fiserv and Jack Henry & Associates. Both companies offer a choice of cloudbased core banking systems.
Human Resources and talent management As in-house Human Resources (HR) systems age, more financial services companies are considering cloud-based HR that offers not only core HR software like payroll and benefits, but also emerging HR software like talent management. Popular choices for the cloud in this area include Oracle HCM (Human Capital Management) and SAP/SuccessFactors. 
Industry View
CRMNEXT
Streamlining Loan Processes to Create Delighted Customers With a clear vision of improving efficiencies of financial institutions, CRMNEXT, an Indian technology product company, has come up with an innovative banking solution to streamline their loan processes by seamlessly integrating operations, risk management and reducing complexities to ensure customer delight and enhanced business opportunities.
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hen it comes to managing loan processes, Indian banks face multitude of challenges ranging from infrastructure complexities to data entry error, data duplication and even data loss. Error prone processes often lead to delays, inefficiency and increased risks for financial institutions. In view of these serious challenges, there is a growing need of banking solutions that can aid banks to improve efficiency and agility by seamlessly integrating operations, risk management and thereby reduce complexity. After delving into the loan processing issues and identifying the major pain areas, CRMNEXT, an Indian technology product company with a user base of over one million, came up with ‘Loan in 3 minutes’ -- a comprehensive digital banking solution for managing loan processing. The solution seeks to address error prone manual steps, unitegrated multiple systems involved in the loan process leading to hopping between multiple systems, streamlining of credit and risk scoring of customers, consistancy of important criteria like loan eligibility, best rate, etc at various touchpoints and helping banks integrate centralise document management system with the loan processing system to avoid delays and rework, says Sushil Tyagi, Director of Global Sales and Marketing, CRMNEXT. "The primary goal was to bring up a single and complete loan origination and processing system, right from capturing an enquiry to loan disbursal process seamlessly on a single platform. The entire process was streamlined, duplicate and redundant processes were eliminated which resulted in an end-to-end automated process and lowered maintenance and operational costs," Tyagi said. CRMNEXT used this out-of-box solution to streamline loan processing for one of India's leading financial institutions. The company used innovative tools like David Decision Engine and Vividflow Designer Automated to enable faster loan eligibility check (within 30 seconds). CRMNEXT also used Autonoma Integration Engine enabled integration with third party credit scoring bodies
and back office transaction system to create faster approvals, exception handlings and disbursals. "This helped the institution to automate and accelerate process, giving way to a much simpler and more efficient system," Tyagi observed. To boost performance management, real-time dashboard reports were made available including processwise, product-wise, distributor-wise to get actionable insights. This automated report generation eliminates the need of manual data gathering and saves time and improve efficiency, according to Tyagi.
Benefits of CRMNEXT ‘Loan in 3 minutes’ • Agile, flexible and fully-customisable solution tailor-made to suit specific strategies of financial institutions. • Makes it possible to comply with changing industrial policies and regulatory norms. • Assists in digitisation of the entire loan process, resulting in zero paperwork and instant responses. • Eliminates all error prone processes and ensures higher productivity and efficiency. • CRMNEXT Digi-LOS, built on the Zero-Principle (Zero Touch, Zero TAT and Zero Rework) makes it possible to let a customer walk out with a loanapproval in just 3 minutes. • Ensures transparency to gain trust of customers which guarantees assured and instant business. • Enables institutions to drive greater focus on customer experience and turnaround time and in the process, create many delighted customers. "The financial institution now has every dealer on a common system to provide easy allocation based on the geography and product. All systems are brought to a common platform, a unified supplier-agency platform, thus easing pain of collaboration and consolidation," he said. February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
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Industry Speaks
Amr Awadallah
Cloudera –
Dealing with Data Monitoring and Processing Cloudera offers next generation software database and it has the ability to scale big. It processes various types of data, including structured and unstructured data, says Amr Awadallah, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Cloudera, in conversation with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN).
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K
indly take us through the journey of ‘Cloudera’ in the global market.
Cloudera was launched in 2008 with a bandwidth of four employees. In the present day, we are an institution having a strength of nearly 1,400 employees. Our software is a next-generation database and it has the ability to scale big. It processes various types of data, including structured and unstructured data. Further, it allows you to extract information and insights from them, which is not possible from legacy software like-Oracle and others. Moreover, our products are usable in any platform, for example, mobile platform, which is very scalable and agile. Our products have censors that measure everything, including cars, people, farms and vegetables; hence, implying that we are present in almost every sector one can think of. Our software finds implication in web and internet companies, telecommunication, financial services, and
Industry Speaks
Amr Awadallah
governance profoundly and any other sector which deals with huge volumes of data every day. In India, Airtel is one of our key customers, whom we serve in the telecommunication space, while in the global scenario we are catering to nine of the top ten telecommunication companies. For the health sector, ‘Predictive Analysis’ is very important and our software is used vividly in this space by leading healthcare brands. Within governance, there are many used cases, cyber security being one of the key focused areas by governments to ensure safe city in a particular region.
How is your organisation associated with the Indian government? We have been associated with the Indian government for past three years, and our services are in a much nascent phase. Though the infrastructure available in India is quite low, however, the technology is great and there are a lot of companies in this space who had been interested in our products and services to take the techinfra development to the next-level. Our products are more for extracting skills and information from the existing data and utilising it in a number of ways. In a nutshell, Cloudera works closely with universities, governance, and healthcare industry as well as with banking and finance industry. One of the key government agencies that use our technology and products is the intelligence agency in India. We have also worked closely with the Singapore and the Malaysian governments to establish that we have enough data proficiency and skill. We also cater to some universities across the world. The used cases of banking and finance is mainly in three main areas, firstly customer 360, which is about 360 view of the customer, understanding them and their needs. The second one is about anti-money laundering, which is extremely important for tracking the money and the relationship or trust that a financial institution develops in the mind of the customers; and the third issue that BFSI sector counters with is fraudulent activities. Our products and services to banks primarily cater in all the above areas and are hence used by several banks across the world.
Social media is a prime tool of marketing used by most brands and organisations to reach out to people, how is Cloudera using social media marketing to take their brand to more and more people? In Cloudera, we count on three basic pillars on which our brand is serving the entire market across several companies in the world, namely- skill, variety of data that we can process and the new types of algorithms that
Our products are usable in any platform, for example, mobile platform, which is very scalable and agile.” we can process. Social media needs all the three and hence we fit the criteria to cater them in a vast manner. Besides being an unstructured form of data, the social media forum has huge volume of data to be processed. Furthermore, social media deals with people and the graph of how they are connected to people and, hence monitoring the flow of data. Cloudera deals in data monitoring and processing in a big way and hence reach out to people and their sentiments.
Digital India is an ambitious project launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with a target time of 2019, how is Cloudera working to keep in lines with this concept? We are keen to be a part of the Indian government’s flagship initiatives, regarding data analysis and processing. Cloudera would be glad to be associated with the Government of India’s initiatives and programmes on a larger scale and hence work on data analysis, processing and management.
February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
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Industry Speaks
Abhishek Rungta
Syncing Technology and Digital marketing:
Indus Net Technologies
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India is embracing digitisation but there is also need to emphasise on enhancing digital literacy across the nation. The central government’s initiatives like “Digital India” and “Demonetisation” are pivotal but the nation has a lot to learn in terms of using the technology wisely, says Abhishek Rungta, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Indus Net Technologies, in conversation with Rashi Aditi Ghosh of Elets News Network (ENN). Excerpts:
Industry Speaks
Abhishek Rungta
G
ive us an overview of your product line and services in India.
We are an award winning, premier Internet strategy company with a unique combination of technology and creativity. We put a lot of emphasis on managing technology and marketing in a seamless manner for the digital domain. In terms of digital services, there are three parts of technology: Web, Mobile and Analytics. Our services include development of web application, mobile application, analytics and digital marketing.
What are the major challenges the central government may face in ensuring digital India dream became a reality for urban as well as rural India? The government should consider making user friendly websites. The content on the government websites should be lucid with very simple interface. As the content on the websites would be dealing with huge population of India, majority of which merely communicates in regional languages, importance should be given to vernacular options. It is essential for the government to lay emphasis on spreading awareness across the populace pertaining to the content and services on websites. Users should know the importance of information laid down online for them by the government, this will enhance their participation in government initiatives.
Indus Net Technologies has acquired quite a few companies last year. What was the motivation behind this move? We have done two acquisitions and one joint venture this year. One of these acquisitions is InFluxERP solutions, which is a product that runs the back office of stock broking companies. There are many financial service companies that are dealing in equityand trading market. We are already working in the BFSI sector, we found it interesting to look into this domain. We are now taking the capabilities of Influx and scaling it into different domains. It will not be limited to stock commodity broking segment. It will go beyond that. Indus Net Technologies has acquired majority stake in a digital marketing firm to expand it's customer base and extend the footprints. We have also invested in Indus Net Techshu, which emerges as the largest digital marketing agency in East India, with marquee brands in its portfolio. We are also into a joint venture in energy analytics because we feel that the use of digital aspects in the
We put a lot of emphasis on managing technology and marketing in a seamless manner for the digital domain. Interms of digital services,there are three parts of technology: Web, Mobile and Analytics. energy business will be the next big wave. Initially, there was a lot of buzz on FinTech and retail but in near future energy tech is going to be the talk of the town. There is a massive compulsion amongst global bodies, trade bodies, and businesses on becoming energy efficient. This is the reason why we have formed a joint venture in this domain.
Banking sector has faced a challenging time due to demonetisation. What kind of contribution your organisation can make in such times? It is very concerning to hear about instances like banking data breaches. As a matter of irony, financial and digital literacy in India is very low. In such circumstances, it is important to put a lot of emphasis on imparting digital literacy and generating awareness against the threats emerging due to the increased usage of digital payments. 
February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
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Special Story
Co-operative Banks
Co-operative Banks: A Vital Lifeline for Indian Economy
Co-operative banks have helped India usher in a new dawn of progress by taking banking to common people in villages and towns across the country. However, they need drastic changes as far as adoption of technology is concerned to catch up with the changing times, writes Elets News Network (ENN).
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T
he principles underpinning co-operative banks across the world include economic upliftment of the members with a great emphasis on preservation of moral principles and human values. In India, too, cooperative banks serve as the lifeline for millions of people, especially those in rural parts of the country, translating their hopes and aspirations into reality. Before the cooperative movement came into existence
Special Story
Co-operative Banks in the 20th Century, money lenders ruled the roost -advancing credit to the needy and desperate people at exorbitant rates of interest and sucking every last penny out of them. Though they still exist in India, penetration of cooperative banks across the country has put a stop to the powerful influence they used to wield on the people and the economy in general. Today, co-operative banks operate across the country side-by-side with commercial banks and play a crucial role in providing need-based finance, especially for people engaged in agricultural and agriculture-based operations including farming, cattle, milk, personal finance, etc, along with some small industries and self-employment driven activities. However despite all their socio-economic advantages, co-operative banks in India still have miles to go to catch up with the commercial banks, which are swift to adopt changes in an increasingly globalised and connected world. Parijit Garg, Vice President, CRIF High Mark, which offers credit information services, says, "Over 1,000 cooperative banks are our members. We have very strong coverage across the country especially from southern states and Gujarat. Over the years, cooperative banks have moved to adopting CBS. Some of the large cooperative banks have even implemented Loan Origination Systems. Though the cooperative banks have come a long way in computerising many of the processes, there are many things which can be done on the credit management and risk management front to be almost fully digital." Garg believes that co-operative banks adopting data and technology enabled cost-effective solutions "will lead the way in future". The need to digitise and build transparency into their systems was recently underscored when nearly 85 per cent of high-value currencies were banned by the government in a move to flush out black money from the system. It was found that most of the co-operative banks were either ill-equipped or dependent on archaic systems to handle measures of such a proportion as demonetisation. “Young and tech-savvy Indians are looking at more than just brick and mortar banking. ATMs, banking apps, net banking, and several other payment options have helped banks grow their reach and customer base along with reducing the need of individuals to go to the banks regularly,” says Vaishampayan, Director, Teckinfo Solutions Pvt. Ltd – a company that offers a wide range of banking and financial solutions. “We provide Self Service IVRs and Contact Center Solutions that help cooperative banks to give excellent service to their customers. Visual IVR is a new concept which can be used by cooperative banks. Our phone
banking solution integrates with core banking software to provide robust and effective customer service, helping banks to better their customer engagement and retention,” he adds. Taking measures to transform systems and operations of co-operative banks is important as they hold key to making financial inclusion a reality. “Over the years, primary (urban) cooperative banks have registered a significant growth in number, size and volume of business handled. As on 31st March, 2003 there were 2,104 UCBs of which 56 were scheduled
Today, co-operative banks operate across the country side-by-side with commercial banks and play a crucial role in providing need-based finance, especially for people engaged in agricultural and agriculture-based operations. banks. About 79 per cent of these are located in five states -- Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu,” says Reserve Bank of India, the apex bank that regulates banking system in India. The significant economic contributions made by the five states mentioned by the RBI, where co-operative banks are in good strength, indicates their direct role in transforming the economic growth scenario in India. The government and regulator too are not ignorant of this fact and “policy endeavours are geared to consolidating and strengthening this sector and improving governance”, says RBI. However despite efforts being made to transform this all important sector of the Indian financial system, the call for change needs to come from the co-operative banks themselves, as Mahatma Gandhi once rightly said: “Let us become the change we seek in this world.”
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Special Story
Demonetisation
Demonetisation – A Defining Moment For India Having initially invited a mixed response from general public besides witnessing the muchanticipated theatrics of political rivals, Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government finally appears to be having a sigh of relief following an overall good response of people, Sandeep Datta and Akash Tomer of Elets News Network (ENN) explore the post-demonetisation scenario in the country at large.
N
ot many may forget the historical evening of November 8, 2016 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi left millions of people flabbergasted, literally pushing them to run pillar to post to withdraw cash from the ATMs as Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes were declared invalid. The following weeks were full of hardship for every household which had not familiarised itself with net banking or phone banking – the new age modes of financial transactions. It may be mentioned that demonetisation is considered a radical monetary step in which a currency unit’s status as a legal tender is declared invalid. It is usually done whenever there is a change of national currency, replacing the old unit with a new one. Prior to the Indian government’s move, such a step was taken when the European Union decided to adopt Euro as their currency. However, the old currencies were allowed to convert into Euros for a period of time to ensure a smooth transition through demonetisation. Zimbabwe, Fiji, Singapore and the Philippines were other countries to have opted for currency demonetisation.
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The Modi Government’s Stance As per the central government’s explanation, the move to demonetise high value currency notes was aimed at hitting multi-pronged targets including that of curbing the menace of black money and counterfeit currency being circulated by some countries to support terrorism and other anti-national activities in the nation. Modi government decided to do it by reducing the amount of cash available in the system. It may be recalled the demonetisation move was not a maiden move of any Indian government till date. It was first implemented in 1946 when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) demonetised the then circulated Rs 1,000 and Rs 10,000 notes. The government of that time introduced higher denomination banknotes in Rs 1,000, Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000 in a fresh mold eight years later in 1954 before the Morarji Desai government demonetised these notes in 1978. In the latest instance, the transformative step brought some temporary hardship for citizens. For the larger benefit of the nation, common man underwent the temporary discomfort but largely with a smile. Thanks to bankers’
Special Story
Demonetisation resolute approach to assist a huge wave of customers, no stone was left unturned by the bank staff to make Modi government’s high-stake move a success. A study conducted by Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata on behalf of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) suggests that fake Indian currency notes amounting to Rs 400 crore are in circulation in the country at any given point of time and around Rs 70 crore fake notes are pumped into Indian economy every year. The estimation is based on recovery and seizure made by various agencies, though actual figure might be much larger.
which came in the run up to the crucial assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, and Uttarakhand, proved to be shocking news for many political parties, especially for those who largely depended on power of black money during polls. The move is also hoped to help make the election process clean and transparent. Real estate cleansing: According to an estimate at least 40 per cent of the real estate transactions in Delhi-NCR are in black. The demonetisation move is also likely to curtail the flow of black money into the real estate sector, making the much needed correction in the sector and leading to an unexpected dip in land and property prices.
Till November, 2016, the prevailing situation was as follows: Digital Banking: The 500 and 1,000 rupee notes made up about 86% of the currency in circulation by value in the country and represented the maximum—and most popular— currency denominations. An estimated 95% of transactions in the country were being carried out in cash, and for those squirreling money away, it was a necessity to survive. To support the public, banks have chosen and encouraged the digital way of transactions. Digital banking companies have also risen to the challenge, setting up shop in more convenient places to enable people to sign up and use their money as they wish. Paytm, an e-wallet firm, has witnessed a huge surge in transactions, for example— even a roadside stall has started to accept payments through e-wallet.
Demonetisation Draws Gujarat Village into Limelight The removal of old high value notes has brought the country’s first digital village, Akodara, 96 km from Ahmedabad, into the limelight. Today, majority of the 1,200 people in Akodara buy everything from wheat flour to potato chips through mobile banking and have little to worry about when it comes to the demonetisation.
The Real Impact Black Money: It’s pertinent to understand that of the Rs 17 lakh crore of total currency in circulation in the country, black money is estimated at mind-boggling Rs 3 lakh crore. Black money operators run a parallel economy which shakes the very foundation of the Indian economy. Economy: The move, primarily aimed at cleaning-up illegal cash, may have yet to yield its actual results but a section of experts are optimist that it will lead to the country’s economic turnaround in near future. But how it will be possible? First, it brings more borrowings to the exchequer, improving inflation outlook and increasing India’s gross domestic product (GDP). Second, it may revive investment opportunities and give a fillip to infrastructure and the manufacturing sector. A Setback to ‘Note-bank politics’: The announcement,
The transformative step brought some temporary hardship for citizens. For the larger benefit of the nation, common man underwent the temporary discomfort, but largely with a smile. Hawala transactions: Demonetisation has crippled the hawala rackets. Hawala is a method of transferring money without any actual money movement. Hawala route has been used as a means to facilitate money laundering and terror financing for years with black money suddenly being wiped out of the market, hawala operations have suffered a setback. Counterfeit currency: Counterfeit currency seriously devalues the real worth of Indian currency. Demonetisation has dealt a death blow to the counterfeit Indian currency syndicate operating both inside and outside the country. Terror financing: Terror financing is sourced through counterfeit currency and hawala transactions. Fake currency circulation is routed through a multi-layered network of hawala operators, closely linked to gambling and smuggling of drugs, opium and arms. With the circulation of counterfeit Indian currency completely stalled and hawala transactions stopped for now, all windows for terror financing have been attempted to close down.
Other Advantages The RBI has also appealed to citizens to use internet and mobile banking at least in the short-term, as it works to alleviate the pressure on the physical currency. Networking companies have set up the infrastructure and services in such a manner that will be helpful for the digitalisation of banking services. With the demonetisation and digitalisation now putting the country's economy in the fast mode, one can be optimist about a slew of big developmental measures in the days to come.
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Industry Speaks Parijat Garg
CRIF- Supporting Banks
in Digital Journey CRIF High Mark is covering nearly 35 crore borrowers across retail, rural, agricultural, MSME, corporate and microfinance segments. We’ve been recognised amongst top 100 FinTech by IDC Financial Insights and are a leading provider of solutions for predictive analytics, decision automation and loan management software, says Parijat Garg, Vice President, CRIF High Mark Credit Information Services Private Limited, in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN).
G
ive us an overview of your product line and services in India.
We are into FinTech, specialising in credit information, business information, analytics, scoring, decision and credit management solutions. We are mainly known for our Credit Bureau Business “CRIF High Mark”. CRIF High Mark is India’s largest credit bureau database covering nearly 35 crore borrowers across retail, rural, agricultural, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), corporate and microfinance segments. Over 3,000 financial institutions are our members including banks (co-operative banks as well), Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC), housing finance companies, ARCs and microfinance institutions. We also work with Telecom, Insurance and Broking companies. Our primary product line is CRIF credit reports and scores which is used by member financial institutions to evaluate loan applicants’ credit worthiness. Our clients also use our service for real-time verification of applicant’s KYC data before underwriting the application.
CRIF High Mark is the pioneer in building and operating the country's first and world's largest Microfinance Bureau Database, kindly share some details on the progress of this project. Our company’s vision is an all-inclusive credit bureau, so how can we miss any segment of borrowers? Credit Bureau business heavily depends on technology and the quality of underlying data. Microfinance sector then had very challenging data quality, but needed a credit bureau to enable recovery from 2010 Andhra Pradesh. We deployed some innovative technologies to effectively work with such data and launched India’s first Credit Bureau for Microfinance lending in March 2011, immediately after receiving our license from Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as a credit information company (CIC).
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Your organisation has been closely working on Cooperative banking platform, what changes in terms of digitisation do you see in cooperative banks? We have over 1,000 cooperative banks as members. We have very strong coverage across the country especially from southern states and Gujarat. Over the years, cooperative banks have moved to adopting Core Banking Solution (CBS). Some of the large cooperative banks have even implemented Loan Origination Systems. Though the cooperative banks have come a long way in computerising many of the processes, there are many things which can be done on the credit management and risk management front to be almost fully digital customer to apply online from the bank’s website, get an instant quote, upon acceptance share scanned copy of documents, approval or rejection etc. Banks adopting data and technology enabled cost-effective solution will lead the way in future. CRIF is poised to support banks in this exciting journey.
Tell us about your new centre for predictive analytics and decision solutions in Pune. CRIF, which has been recognised amongst top 100 FinTech by IDC Financial Insights, is a leading provider of solutions for predictive analytics, decision automation and loan management software. An experienced analytics team of data scientists and statisticians helps clients’ risk management, marketing, customer management and collections teams with bespoke scorecards and models. This team supports not only clients in India but also clients in South East Asia and West Asia, as well cooperates with CRIF offices in other geographies such as Europe, Russia, North and Central America. CRIF has operations in 50 countries across four continents.
Special Feature
Service Charge
Service Charge: A Matter of Customers’
Discretion or Obtrusiveness In a recent order by the Central Government, customers have been given the discretionary power to decide whether they feel like paying service charge or find it unjustifiable based on their personal experience in any restaurant or hotel. Such a directive influencing general public and eateries must be explored, writes Elets News Network (ENN).
A
t the advent of 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government announced service charges billed by restaurants are optional and it is up to the customers’ choice to pay it or not. The decision was taken by the Department of Consumer Affairs citing the complaints that hotels and restaurants are levying an additional 5 to 20% in bills in lieu of tips, regardless of the kind of service provided. To make public aware about the decision, the department has asked the State governments to order hotels and restaurants and advise for displaying the service charges at appropriate places on their premises or in menu. As per the order, service charges are discretionary/ voluntary and these can be waived off in case a consumer feels dissatisfied with the services.
What Does Indian Law say? Service Charge is totally different from "Service Tax" and not imposed or collected by the government. In lieu of services, offered by restaurants or by hotels, service charges are collected by them. In many restaurants, consumers are forced to pay additional "service charge" ranging from 5-20%, irrespective of the kind of services provided to them. Since this is not a government tax or charge, restaurants’ charging of service charges is not an offence under the Finance Act, 1994.
Hence the government cannot take any proactive action against hotels. According to the Consumer Protection Act, 1986, in case of unfair method or deceptive practice adopted by any business organisations for the purpose of promoting the sale, use, or the supply of any goods, or for the provision of any service, consumer forum must treat it as an unfair trade practice. In the same context, the Act further adds that consumers are free to make a complaint to the appropriate consumer forum against any such unfair trade practices. In other words, dissatisfied consumers can approach the relevant consumer forum for redressal of the deficiency in service. According to a government’s statement, Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution sought a clarification from the Hotel Association of India in this regard. In its reply to the ministry, the association stated that the service charge was completely discretionary, and a customer dissatisfied with the dining experience could waive it off. Therefore, the government could deem that its suggestion has been accepted voluntarily.
Reaction from Restaurants/Hotels: Soon after the announcement regarding service charge by the government, an instant reaction was made by National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI). The body said, “It is a matter of policy for a restaurant to decide if service charge is to be levied or not”. NRAI further stated that service charge being levied must be clearly mentioned in the menu or displayed, so that it is a consumer’s choice to eat there or not. A well-known restauranteur, opines instead of looking at service charge, the government should be reducing the taxes charged, which the diner has to pay mandatorily. A growing industry like Food and Beverage needs government support in order to deal with high cost escalations and a highly competitive market. In all fairness, it seems incorrect to force a customer to tip, regardless of the dining experience. Many restaurants already charge high prices for each dish, which a customer is ready to pay keeping in mind the location, the brand, the service levels and the overheads of the establishment. However, to be charged another 10% or so, to keep the staff happy seems to be something consumers are not comfortable with and feel that this should be the prerogative of the restaurant owners and managers.
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Industry Speaks Rajiv Kumar
‘Making Digital India A Reality’
Digital India is centred on three vision areas, first, is access to digital infrastructure to every citizen, second, is providing services on demand and third, digital empowerment of a citizen. We, at Universal Sompo General Insurance, are constantly working towards achieving this vision, says Rajiv Kumar, Managing Director and CEO, Universal Sompo General Insurance Co Ltd, in conversation with Arpit Gupta of Elets News Network (ENN).
G
ive us an overview of your product line and services in India.
We, at Universal Sompo General Insurance, have always envisioned providing superior value to the customers and continually enhancing the same to win their confidence. This philosophy drives us to offer Innovative and Customised Risk Solutions across customer segments including rural and social sector, utilising varied distribution channels. We have a bouquet of 125 insurance products to extend insurance cover to various customer segments like rural and urban
retail customers, corporate and MSMEs clients. The product line extends across business segments like fire, engineering, marine, motor insurance, health insurance (both retail and group mediclaim), liability including cyber liability, personal accident policy including Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana (PMSBY) and CROP Insurance under Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY). The extensive network of Bancassurance of our Founder banks viz. Allahabad bank, Indian Overseas Bank & Karnataka Bank and other bank partners has helped Universal Sompo General Insurance to reach across length and breadth of the country. Along with Bancassurance, Universal Sompo has strong traditional network of agents and brokers, coupled with emerging channels like Web Aggregators, Common Service Centres (CSCs) and Point of Sales. Universal Sompo General Insurance has specifically designed innovative products to reach potential customers through Point of Sales and CSCs channels.
Universal Sompo General Insurance in association with Karnataka Bank recently launched KBL Suraksha for coverage against all types of accidental deaths, how are your services different from other counterparts in this domain? KBL Suraksha is a Group Personal Accident Insurance scheme extended by Universal Sompo General Insurance in association with Karnataka Bank to all its Savings Bank customers against a nominal premium payment. On the service front, Universal Sompo General Insurance has simplified the overall process across the Insurance Value Chain starting from policy issuance to claims settlement. The claim settlement process has been made hassle-free, considering the ordeal suffered by victim’s kin in case of any unfortunate
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Industry Speaks
Rajiv Kumar
event. Dedicated helpline is provided for faster and smoother claims processing. In terms of coverage, Privilege Savings Banks' customers are offered the coverage free whereas the other Saving Banks' customers have to pay a Rs 50 annually for Rs 5 lakh coverage and Rs 100 annually for Rs 10 Lakh coverage. Also the renewal of policy can be done till the maximum age of 75 which is one of the highest coverage provided across all personal accident schemes available in the insurance industry.
India is getting digitised with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India dream, how is Universal Sompo assisting the nation in embracing digitisation? Universal Sompo has always maintained a forward looking attitude towards providing superior value to customers. Digital India is centred on three vision areas, first is access to digital infrastructure to every citizen, second is providing services on demand and third, digital empowerment of a citizen. We, at Universal Sompo General Insurance, are constantly working towards achieving this vision by enhancing capabilities on digital platform through the likes of Web Aggregators, Common Service Centers (CSCs) and Point of Sales (POS) to reach out to potential customers. Common Service Centres forms the strategic access points for delivery of essential services to rural India, thus of strategic importance under the Digital India Vision. Universal Sompo has been one of the frontrunners in extending insurance service to villages through CSCs with customised insurance products based on need-gap analysis for rural India. Universal Sompo is the first insurer to provide Cattle Insurance Policy through CSC channel. We are among the very few Insurers who provide Motor Comprehensive Policy (Both Own Damage and Third Party) through CSCs Channel. For semi-urban and urban masses, we have extended our services through Web-Aggregators and Point-of-Sales Person (POSP). The 13 Insurance products through POS are specifically designed keeping in view adequate protection as per customers’ need. Universal Sompo General Insurance has also run campaign for customers’ awareness regarding Digital India initiatives. Regular workshops are conducted for Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs), Agents, and employees of bank partners to create awareness about digital platform extended to them. Our employees and insurance partners’ work as change agents for making a digital India.
Instances like demonetisation and banking data breach have opened new vistas for digital
payments and Data centers, what kind of modifications have been made by insurance sector in this regard? Instances like demonetisation are defining moments for the India economy which has long term positive impact in terms of increased transparency and making a truly Digital India. Insurance sector has welcomed this step and have made required modifications across the insurance value chain to enhance customer service. This has led to E-issuance of insurance policies primarily motor insurance and will fasten the claim settlement process. Various E-Commerce players like wallet providers, web aggregators and online financial market place are joining as the distribution agents for
Universal Sompo has strong traditional network of agents and brokers, coupled with emerging channels like Web Aggregators, Common Service Centres (CSCs) and Point of Sales. General Insurance products. This can be seen in case of IRCTC extending Travel Insurance to passengers, Airtel Money extending Insurance for Wallet money and ET Money foraying into extending Motor & Health Insurance. In the long term, demonetisation will bring transparency and efficiency in the healthcare sector curbing fraudulent and suspicious claims cases and will benefit insurance companies in the long-run. Instances like banking data breach calls for an enhanced focus of insurance industry to come up with the comprehensive cyber security framework for the sector. Two separate working groups for Life and Non-life sector have been formed by Insurance Regulatory and Devolvement Authority of India (IRDAI) to recommend and provide a comprehensive framework to mitigate internal and external cyber threats, Cyber Security Audit, Fraud prevention and detection and access impact of various legal risks arising out of cyber laws. Along with it, the Government of India has announced to establish a Computer Emergency Response Team for Financial Sector (CERT-Fin) in recent union budget. This will further enhance the sector against the cyber security threats like hacking and phising. Moreover, Industry is working on Fraud Risk Mitigation Portal (FRMP) to identify and curb fraudulent and suspicious cases plaguing the Indian Insurance Industry. Major cases of frauds come from Motor and Health Line of Business. As per FICCI report, “Out of the total outgoings in health insurance, nearly 25% are fraudulent claims.”
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Special Story
Payments Bank constituted a committee headed by Dr Nachiket Mor to study comprehensive financial services for small businesses and low income households. It was meant to propose measures for achieving financial inclusion and increased access to financial services. The committee submitted its report to the RBI in January 2014. One of the key suggestions by the committee was to introduce specialised banks or 'payments bank' to cater to the lower income groups and small businesses so that by January 1, 2016 each Indian resident can have a global bank account.
Significance of Payments Bank
Payments Banks The New-Age Banking The Indian banking sector has undergone a digital makeover post-demonetisation. In this era, the payment methods are one of the few happening spaces and therefore various modes of digital payments are making their way to the cashless economy. One such mode gaining momentum lately is the Payments Bank, explores Rashi Aditi Ghosh of Elets News Network (ENN).
U
nderstanding Payments Banks
Payments Banks, the new simplified way of banking, are expected to reach the customers mainly via mobile phones. A payments bank is like any other bank, operating on a smaller scale without involving any credit risk. It can carry out most banking operations except advancing loans or issuing credit cards. It has the limit of accepting demand deposits up to Rs 1 lakh, offer remittance services, mobile payments/ transfers/purchases and other banking services like ATM/ debit cards, net banking and third party fund transfers.
Birth of Payments Bank System in India In September 2013, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)
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The idea behind Payments Bank was to provide financial services to the remotest corners of the country. It was something that the traditional banking model could not achieve to the optimal level. Today, the main objective of payments bank is to widen the spread of payment and financial services to small business, low-income households, and migrant labour workforce in secured technology-driven environment. Payments banks hold the potential to add wings to the government's ambitious financial inclusion targets. The RBI has given approval to 11 entities in principle to open these banks. Recently, the India Post became the third entity to receive the final nod from RBI to start its payment bank operations. Prior to this, telecom service provider Bharti Airtel and digital payments brand Paytm had received the license for Payments Bank. Airtel has already rolled out its operations. The country’s apex bank awarded license to the India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) last month and the latter’s operations are anticipated to commence before March 31 this year. The IPPB is expected to roll out in 650 districts with the help of its mammoth network of 1.54 lakh post offices in the country, a leading English daily recently reported.
RBI Guidelines for Payments Banks It is pertinent to mention that the payments banks are given the status of scheduled banks under Section 42 (6) (a) of the RBI Act, 1934. The words “Payments Bank”, however, have to be used by the companies in their name to distinguish it from other banks. The payments banks, which are licensed under section 22 of the Banking Regulation Act 1949, have to mainly accept the demand deposits and provision of payments and remittance services. A number of bodies, which will govern the payments include the Banking Regulation Act, 1949; Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934; Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007; Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation Act, 1961; Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999; and other relevant directives and statutes, according to a business daily.
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Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
The BFSI SECURITY SUMMIT 2016
Analysing Secured Banking Banking, Financial services and Insurance (BFSI) sector in India has been burgeoning in various ways, ever since technology and its usage started to replace the physical procedures involved in the entry and maintaining of enormous data and large volume transactions. As the inclination of banking sector towards digitisation is rising, the risk of getting exposed to various threats and breaches is also getting high. With the idea of discussing the threats and challenges related to BFSI sector- both digitally and physically, in tune with the modern technologies involved in securing networks and ensuring physical and digital safety to financial institutions and data, thus leaving behind the scope for further developments in this sector— Elets Technomedia organised “The BFSI Security Summit 2016” at Vivanta by Taj - President, Mumbai on 15 December 2016. The grand summit witnessed the confluence of key decision makers and experts from banking, insurance, financial, government, law enforcement sectors and solution providers to develop common views on the extent of the challenges and the actions that require immediate or long term attention.
32/BFSI | bfsi.eletsonline.com | February 2017
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
Inauguration Building a Digital Trust Platform for Secure Electronic Banking
digita l upgradation, it is When we are talking about certain the cha llenges. There are mandatory to think about y. We responsible for adaptabilit inhibiting factors that are ause bec n benefits of digitisatio are not able get complete of low digita l literacy.
M Nagarajan Chief Executive Officer Surat Smart City
All of us want to go for digita l transaction but we have fear of security. We need to have a customised secur ity framework and offering made available to the custom ers.
S Ganesh Kumar Chief General Manager, Reserve Bank of India
by the go ve rnment ve been undertaken ha s ive iat init of ts Lo India drea m a in ma king the Digital and the sta ke ho lde rs in the ecosyste m. tnes sing the change wi are all We . lity rea reg istered te ndig ita l payments have In addition to th is, emonetisatio n. fo ld inc rea se po st -d
shi Sumnesh Jo General, Assistant Director India UIDAI, Government of
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
Technology Presentation We are walk ing into a digital age and it is impo rtant to change our infra struc ture to embrace the digital theme. All applicatio ns will have to be integrated with secu rity.
Murtaza Bhatia
Practice Head – Security & Datacenter Services, Dimension Data
the history boo ks, a lot 20 16 has bee n certainly one for yea r, as far as nota ble of things have happened in the ned . The atta cke rs are security happen ings are con cer cre ative. And the cold hard very organised, scie ntific and d as the wea kest link . So trut h is security is only as goo kind s of IT reso urce s is gain ing complete visib ility of all n eve r. now becomi ng more critical tha
Taylor Chan Senior Sales Engineer, SolarWinds
We are helping the ban king sec tor in tak ing a leap in ter ms of dig itis ing the ir netwo rk. As Data Centre pro viders , our role has inc rea sed ma nifold . Alo ng wit h the gro wt h, we have als o see n the gro wt h of the sec urity.
Rip
Country Manager – Data Protectu Bajwa ion Solutions, Dell EMC
34/BFSI | bfsi.eletsonline.com | February 2017
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
In the Atlas of Big Data, India is play ing a dominant role and due to its relevance , Cloudera has become a foca l point in this next generation of cyber security solutions.
Vivek Ratna Country Manager, Cloudera
Panel Discussion
Rise of Cyber Crime: Managing the Cyber Security Threats to the BFSI Sector
There are two categories of threats known and unkno wn. You can probably build effective reasonable preventive mechanisms of known threats and of the known threat s you can also pre-empt based on the best practices. The concern is how do we handle the unknown threats.
Deval Mazmudar
Chief Information Security Officer, IndusInd Bank
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016 How much you Preve ntion would just be bette r than cure. It is good to prepare yourself is not going to be enough. -ready. You be prepared and called ourse lves preve ntion would be able to must have a respo nse team in place so you we are not just respo nd. We will have to strategise so that nse. looki ng at preve ntion but also immediate respo
Mannan Godil
Chief Information Security Officer, Edelweiss Financial Services
The focus now has to be on how to build strategy on mit igation. Preventing techniques have got matured and obsolete. The entire focus is on how we keep your bus iness ready.
Kersi Tavadia
Chief Information Officer, Bombay Stock Exchange
ts, Preve ntion is important but in terms of unkno wn threa larger detec tion is the key. When you are dealing with a lly actua is ntion amou nt of log data detec tion and preve proble m and troub lesome. In such circum stance s figuri ng out the the soluti on. putting up the contextual inform ation behind it is
Ramakrishna Murthy Director - APAC, Securenext Softwares
At Aditya Birla Financial Services, after getting alerts on threat, we look at the relevancy and take the actions out of the alerts. We have the list of all the IT components which are involved. After every alert, we go through the list and then take it forward.
Makesh Chandramohan Chief Information Security Officer, Aditya Birla Financial Services
36/BFSI | bfsi.eletsonline.com | February 2017
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
depending on the ndency of tota lly ities. But Banks have the te regulatory author e th by d ibe cr bs regulations su the Reserve Bank action and inform if we take prior e initia l phase, the threats on th of India regarding be initiated. and solutions can better detections
anjariwala
Zulkernain K Head IT, Doha Bank
Technology Presentation We have over a million custome rs at our platform. What I mean, from security perspectiv e, is the lessons learnt from over a million customers and pas s that buck to Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform for everyone to benefit from.
Myles Hosford
Security Solutions Architect APAC, Amazon Web Services
Panel Discussion
Leveraging Cloud and Datacenter for Business Benefits for Banks and Other Financial Service Providers
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
structure There is a lot of progress in terms of infra if we cially in banking industry for last 10 years, espe ed by talk about high-end, tier-4 Data Centres follow is we doing are Cloud Computing. Ultimately, what we are serving end-user or customer.
Prasanna Lohar Head Technology IT, DCB Bank
Banking is changing. It’s a customer-or iented world now. Customers are expecting more and more from banks in terms of delivery channels, products or innovative products. With that, the banks also have a competition edge with each other. Banks are coming up with more technical innovation s for their customers.
Vishal Madan
Senior Vice President - IT Capital Small Finance Bank Limited
le are re to stay. What peop Cloud Computing is he where ch oa pr ap for is hybrid inc reasingly looking up ns tio ca pli ap re have their co they would want to ations nis ga Or s. tre own Data Cen running out of their e cloud. ese services from th are directly buying th
Deepak GuptaManager Business Development Financial Services, Cisco
38/BFSI | bfsi.eletsonline.com | February 2017
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
Technology Presentation We are heading towards cashless economy where every financial transaction is in digita l form. Three key pillars in this transformation are – Digita l infrastructure, Governance and Services on Demand, and Digita l Empowerment of users.
Hari Shekar
Director Technical, TOCCSS Datacom Pvt Ltd
an isatio n th large st so ftware org BM C So ftware is 10 tomers mo re tha n 10 ,00 0 cus in the wo rld . We have as we ll. ica nt pre se nce in India wo rldwide wi th a sig nif d other se cure tra nsa ction s an We ba sically fo cus on ers . ba nks and the ir custom fin an cia l se rvice s fo r
Saurav Sinha Presales Manager, BMC Software India
Panel Discussion
Mobile Banking: Emerging Threats, Vulnerabilities and Counter-Measures
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
For the growth of any country’s economy, there are two key enablers – one is transportation and other one is communication. If a country follows progressive approach for these two enablers, there will be a tremendous rate of growth in a country.
Mukesh Malik
Chief Operating Officer, Aditya Birla Financial Services Group
From the banking perspective, we haven’t seen big frauds through digital/online banking or through mobile banking. But we have to be prepared for this as mobile is one of the most vulnerable devices from banking point of view.
Prashant Maldikar
Head – IT Security – Information Technology, IndusInd Bank
From the customer's perspective, the first thing they are looking at is convenience. We are trying to provide convenient and easy to use yet secure mob ile applications from customers as well as banks point of view so that there is no frau dulent.
Biju K
Chief Information Security Officer, Federal Bank Ltd
40/BFSI | bfsi.eletsonline.com | February 2017
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
ncia l transactions or third Threats are not only limited to fina any such threat, the security party payment gateways. To avoid as well irrespective of the must be checked at customers’ end the banks. fact that the responsibility lies with
anga
Solkar Nagaraj Panddur
Chief Information Security Officer, ed Reliance Nippon Life Insurance Company Limit
There are multiple things which custome rs as well as banks with the help of Reserve Bank of India (RBI ) should take care of. One important thing on banks’ end is serv ice charge on online transactions. As government is promoting the digital banking so there should be nominal service charge for online transactions.
Saurav Sinha Presales Manager, BMC Software India
sactions When you don’t have secure way of tran makes ity ectiv conn ork netw through mob ile, poor This ats. thre rity secu for a user more vulnerable in with deal to have s bank kind of pressure, the ices. serv ing bank re order to provide secu
Suresh A Shan
Head Innovation & Future Technology, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services
Technology Presentation We think like a web technology company, not as a boring security cloud company. We have a SaaS and a subsc ription model. We are a US-based company, having a subsidiary in Chennai with a team of 50 people there .
Shanmugavel Sankaran Chief Nixer, FixNix InC
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
Panel Discussion
Implementation of Innovative Technologies for NexGen Banking
laced by phone. Now you The branch is getting rep ct. ditional things to transa do not require many ad ia. Ind in g tgen bankin We are looking at the nex
Avtar Monga Chief Operating Officer, IDFC Bank
In our environment, one large innovation we are adopting is the Blockchain in terms of trust -based transactions which are universal now. Another solution which we adopted for security is machine learn ing.
M V Sheshadri
Chief Information Security Officer, National Stock Exchange
We need to develop new product and it services. We need to continuously revis This ices. serv and ucts prod al the tradition or. sect y ever for hour the of is the need
S K Mishra
Chief Information Security Officer, Central Bank of India
42/BFSI | bfsi.eletsonline.com | February 2017
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
kchain is the s peer to peer. Bloc rd wa to ing go is nd The tre e middlemen. ne are the days of th distributed ledger. Go nd industry fu al rds paperless. Mutu We are heading towa ison to ar mp co the technology in is somehow lagging in . up g ey are slowly pickin what banks do but th
khani Bhavesh Lal La y officer,
SVP & Chief Technolog Managers Pvt. Ltd. DSP Blackrock Investment
One small instance of nex t-gen banking is Jan Dh an Yoj ana. The responsibility was giv en to the banks. One mil estone has been grabbed and we wil l reach other milestones shortly.
Kanchan Kulkarni Regional Head Maharashtra, ICICI Bank
the We see lot of innovations happening at oin are break-neck speed. Blockchain with Bitc utions. instit cial being adopted by a lot of finan
Lalit Popli
Head- IT, ICICI Prudential Asset Management
As Accops, we enable virtual end user computing and we make sure it is secure and efficient. It is scalable. We provide our own think line solutions as well. We secure the end user computi ng, we reduce the cost and we enable enterprise mob ility.
Vijender Yadav Chief Executive Officer, Accops
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Conference Report BFSI SECURITY Summit 2016
Glimpses of expo
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thankpartners! you
Elets Technomedia Pvt Ltd thank you for participating in BFSI security Summit 2016
bfsi.eletsonline.com/security
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Industry Speaks Ritesh Kumar
Providing Right Insurance Solutions Digitally Digitisation is the future of transactions. With digitisation, customers have various other modes to make payments like - online transfers, websites, mobile apps, PoS, payzapp, e-wallets / mobile wallets as well as Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) says Ritesh Kumar, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company, in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN). products ranging from Motor, Health, Travel, Home and Personal Accident in the retail space and customised products like Property, Marine and Liability Insurance in the corporate space. Our Commercial Insurance covers a wide range of corporate risk including white-collar crimes, litigation, employment disputes and extortion attempts and more. Under Rural Insurance, we offer Crop, Health and Cattle Insurance, thereby touching the rural sector of India. Our focus is to provide the “Right Insurance Solutions” for all. It is our constant endeavour to improvise and cater to every need of the modern-day customer with superior customer support service. This helps us give our customers a seamless and hassle-free experience.
HDFC ERGO recently launched its mobile insurance portfolio organiser app on Apple Watch, can you apprise us about the product and its usage?
T
ell us about your products and services in India.
HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company, the third-largest non-life Insurance Company in India, is a joint venture between HDFC Ltd., the country’s premier Housing Finance Institution and ERGO International AG, the primary insurance entity of Munich Re Group. We offer a complete range of general insurance
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We have recently launched our “Insurance Portfolio Organiser” (IPO) app on the iWatch. IPO app on iWatch allows policyholders of HDFC ERGO to get a host of quick, hassle-free and easy-to-access services for Motor and non-Motor insurance policies at their fingertips. The app allows policyholders to access their policy related information like Policy Details, Heath Card, Register Motor and Health Claims. Policyholders can also easily locate nearby Branches, nearby hospitals/garages. The Geolocate feature on the app instantly navigates users to the nearest HDFC ERGO Branch and the nearby network of cashless hospitals and garages. In emergency, the user can locate the nearby network cashless hospitals in three swipes on the iWatch. The user can further change the distance range to search the nearest cashless hospitals on the iWatch. Once the user selects the required cashless hospital, the
Industry Speaks
Ritesh Kumar
exact location of the hospital will appear on the iWatch screen and the user can start the navigation without the loss of any time. The same facility is available for the Motor Insurance policyholder, to locate the nearest network cashless garages in the event of a motor related mishap. Customers can also conveniently Track Claim Status, request for the Policy Document on email and also request for the Health Card through the app on the iWatch. With just one click the required document will be mailed to the corresponding logged-in App ID. A click on “Call for Assistance” leads the call to HDFC ERGO’s official toll-free number, thus making navigation of the IPO app on the iWatch extremely easy and friendly for users.
India is getting digitised with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's digital India dream, how is HDFC ERGO assisting India in adapting digitisation? Digitisation is the future of transactions and more and more financial transactions are now becoming digital with the increasing penetration of Internet and growing adoption of mobile internet devices. With digitisation customers also have various other modes to make payments like - online transfers, websites, mobile apps, PoS, payzapp, e-wallets / mobile wallets as well as AEPS and USSD. Online purchases represent a small component of insurance related activity in India. But the overall influence of Internet on purchase of insurance products in India is growing steadily. Therefore, through our website we offer various payment options for our customers to buy insurance online like – Net banking, Credit Card / Debit Card, e-Wallets and mobile apps. This ensures that an essential service like General Insurance is made available to all easily.
Instances like demonetisation and banking data breach have opened new vistas for digital payments and Data centres, kindly share the innovations initiated by insurance sector in this regard. The central government’s recent drive to demonetise the high-value currency notes have given a great impetus to our population to go cashless and increased the adoption of online interactions. Transactions over the internet are playing a key role in how most organisations conduct business and reach out to their customers. Increasing penetration of Internet and growing acceptance of mobile internet devices like smartphones and tablets, online financial transactions in India have grown at rapid speed in the last couple of years.
In today's era all insurers offer the option of online payment of premiums. Apart from this, customers can also pay through an ECS or with the use of Credit / Debit cards wherein the customer can also avail of the EMI service. Moreover, the adoption of e-Wallets and payment via mobile apps is a trend that has been welcomed with open arms by the insurers as well. These trends are expected to have a far-reaching impact on the way insurance products are purchased and serviced in the country.
Our focus is to provide the “Right Insurance Solutions” for all. It is our constant endeavour to improvise and cater to every need of the modern day customer with superior customer support service. HDFC ERGO General Insurance recently entered the nascent trade credit insurance segment, offering cover to corporates against possible defaults by their clients, how would you distinguish your services competitors of the same domain? HDFC ERGO Trade Credit Insurance Policy safeguards suppliers against the risks of non-payment for the goods or services delivered to the buyers. Under this, the insurer covers a portfolio of buyers and pays an agreed percentage of the invoice or receivables that remain unpaid as a result of insolvency, bankruptcy or protracted default. Our Trade Credit Insurance provides a safety net for supplier to do business with peace of mind. It acts as a risk mitigation tool, playing a pivotal role in the trading cycle of a company by protecting its profit, cash flows, sales growth, the balance sheet and a company's customer base. This policy covers the business of the insured against the commercial risks of their buyer’s default. Under the policy, we cover a portfolio of buyers and pay an agreed percentage of an invoice or receivable that remains unpaid. The causes of loss covered under this policy are: • Insolvency: The insured business entity can protect its business against the risk of non-payment if a buyer becomes insolvent • Protracted Default: When buyer fails to pay the receivable within a pre-defined period calculated from the due date of payment of the receivable With this policy, we are playing a proactive role in helping customers trade more securely and helping businesses taking prudent risk management decisions about who to trade with.
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Industry Speaks
Debmalya Dey Roy
Pi Datacenters Ensuring output driven Efficiency G
ive us an overview of your product line and services in India.
Pi is a green field software defined strategic data centre and enterprise cloud service provider. It delivers top of the league end-to-end data centre services coupled with high level of automation, self-service and a robust layer of managed services. Pi offers off the shelf data centre services like get Co-
The global data centre traffic is growing in multiple folds and with the high operational expenditure owing to heavy energy consumption, service providers are now moving towards green data centres, ensuring efficient consumption of resources and energy, says Debmalya Dey Roy, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Pi DATACENTERS, in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN). Excerpts: Location, white space, hosting, and managed hosting at a TIER of customer’s choice. With Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data leading the industry today, Pi’s services around the IoT and Analytics would help enterprises in real time decision-making. Pi provides industry specific solutions and enterprise class cloud solutions, specific to the varied needs of key verticals like manufacturing, IT-ITES, government, BFSI, Health Care, Education and e-Tail. The company provides guidance around the areas of data centre, best practices, governance, and business purpose. It enables the customers to build and revamp their data centre strategy in line with their business goals by IT strategy optimisation and integrating with a relevant data centre framework.
According to a report, the value of Indian data centre infrastructure and services market will be anywhere between $350 crore to $500 crore by 2018. Tell us about the relevance of data centre and cloud computing in Indian context. While the adoption to cloud and data centres started late in India, compared to its global counterparts, it is catching up a rocket speed today. The constant northward movement of the Indian Data centre infrastructure and services market owes to the demand pooled by all major verticals like Banking, Financial services and Insurance (BFSI), IT and Information Technology enabled Services (ITES) , Manufacturing, Education, Health Care, Telecom and the Government. India stands as a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) driven nation in terms of business, and thus the status quo is constantly challenged for the best quality and innovative solutions at highly economical costs. The Capex and Opex variance brought in by outsourcing the data centre and cloud services is a key driving factor for the market growth. The cloud technology solutions today, with high inbuilt security are becoming the choice of customers for parking
48/BFSI | bfsi.eletsonline.com | February 2017
Industry Speaks
Debmalya Dey Roy base for data protection at Pi.
Kindly apprise us on the energy efficiency perspective of green data centre.
their data. Gartner’s Cloud Adoption Survey, which revealed 53% of organisations were already using cloud services and another 43% indicated planned adoption in near future, stands as evidence to the same. The increasing data driven nature of the industry in India today and the inclination towards optimisation of the business processes and costs, course the demand, with the State initiatives like Digital India backing them. With e-governance models from the federal bodies taking the centre play the demand further hikes for data centre and cloud services. With the Digitisation wave already hitting the Indian shores and the data wealth created by the tech trends like IoT, Big Data, Advanced Analytics and the e-Operation of businesses, the market would continue to take leaps of growth.
Instances like demonetisation and banking data breach have opened new vistas for Data centre and Cloud storage in the Banking and Finance sector, how do you ensure security and safety of the data stored? The demonetisation drive in India has seen and would continue to experience massive roll out of digital financial services in the nation, activating an e-economy from the roots. With services turning digital, an uncalled mandate is passed to the population to adopt and benefit from the online mode of operations. The benefits like quicker and on the move transactions have resonated with the public, making them opt for ‘e’ and ‘m’ mode of banking. With recent incidents like data breach, which is believed to be the one of the biggest financial data breaches in India, had the BFSI ecosystem alarmed and has chaired the security of data as the top agenda point, while outsourcing the infrastructure to data centre and cloud service providers. For service providers, while the growing opportunities are to be capitalised on, it also requires them to innovate and be in sync with the business needs of the industry. Cognising that security concerns are the top priority of the industry, Pi has designed the security modules for the enterprises with uncompromised standards both at a perimeter level and at a data level. The stringent and uncompromising security policies defined and efficient enforcement of the same form a strong
The global data centre traffic is growing multiple folds. With the high operational expenses owing to the heavy energy consumption, service providers are now moving towards green data centres ensuring efficient consumption of resources and energy. The process of building a green data centre, it starts from analysing the existing resources and the usage to decide on the next steps. Energy efficiency is the major factor to be addressed by any green data centre. PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is the most standard industry metric to measure the same. A Lower PUE is the sign of an efficient data centre. This can be achieved by effectively using the available resources. Optimised electrical and cooling design will enhance the power efficiency of the data centre. Be it enabling power management feature in Central Processing Units (CPU), use of high efficiency equipment including Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS), adopting best practices in cooling, conducting energy audit, action to reduce energy consumption. Recent engineering innovations have made more options available. Using renewable energy resources is another way to improve the efficiency.
Pi provides industry specific solutions and enterprise class cloud solutions, specific to the varied needs of key verticals like Manufacturing, IT-ITES, Government, BFSI, Health Care, Education and e-Tail. Pi is crafting a TIER-IV level data centre in Amaravati (Vijayawada), how far the progress has been made? We are is already catering to enterprises from heterogeneous industry verticals through tailored industry- based cloud enabled solutions around Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and off the shelf services like co-location, managed hosting and managed services. Beyond this infrastructure, we are crafting its landmark data centre at Amaravati, the capital of newly re-organised state of Andhra Pradesh. It is a 5 Lakhs sq.ft infrastructure, with 5,000 racks capacity, spread across 10 acres. The data centre is built to be UPTIME certified TIER IV and TIA 942 compliant. This facility would be launched by May 2017 and be ready to deliver a world-class experience to our customers.
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February 2017 | bfsi.eletsonline.com | BFSI
Industry Speaks
Uday Vaishampayan
Teckinfo: Simplifying Consumer Queries via Interactive Services Teckinfo’s well designed IVR solutions are assisting in easing up consumer services by taking care of the repetitive and complicated questions over the phone. We use our extensive domain expertise to deliver Industry Specific Customer Interaction Management solutions, says Uday Vaishampayan, Director, Teckinfo Solutions Pvt Ltd, in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN). Excerpts: Teckinfo is providing a lot of options in the Contact Centre domain to the banking and financial segment, tell us about some of your best selling products for the BFSI sector. We offer solutions for Self Service Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and agent assisted phone banking services by integration with the core banking software at the backend. InterDialog Unified Contact Centre Software and IVR Edge are some of our products of choice for the BFSI segment.
In the era of digital banking, how do you think IVR services are changing the banking sector in India?
G
ive us an overview of your product line and services in India.
Teckinfo is a leading provider of Unified Contact Centre, Self Service Interactive voice response (IVRs), Customer Interaction Management, Customer Care and Help Desk Solutions. We offer various products for the banking industry such as IVR Edge and InterDialog UCCS. • IVR Edge: A robust platform to create Self Service IVRs and integrate with databases in the back-end. • InterDialog UCCS: A highly reliable and scalable unified contact centre software which enhances customer experience for multichannel interactions via voice, chat, SMS, email or social media. Extensive domain expertise helps us to deliver Industry Specific Customer Interaction Management solutions. We have custom built solutions for banks, especially cooperative banks, where we see tremendous scope for growth.
50/BFSI | bfsi.eletsonline.com | February 2017
Providing services to customers in the traditional way is attracting a lot of cost, therefore our IVR services take care of the repetitive questions and ease up the pressure of consumer service. Rest of the queries or more complicated ones can be attended by the phone banking executives. More than 50% of the queries can be handled on the self service and only the remaining need to go to CSR’s (agent assisted service). Solutions like Visual IVR (IVRs with visually guided menus) on your customer’s smartphone or your website further enhances the customer’s web-based support experience.
Your organisation has been closely working with the cooperative banks in India, how are your products and services assisting these banks in getting digital? Young and tech savvy Indians are looking at more than just brick and mortar banking. ATMs, banking apps, net banking, and several other payment options have helped banks grow their reach and customer base along with reducing the need of individuals to go to the banks regularly. We provide Self Service IVRs and Contact Centre Solutions that help co-operative banks to give excellent service to their customers. Visual IVR is a new concept which can be used by cooperative banks. Our phone banking solution integrates with core banking software to provide robust and effective customer service, helping banks to better their customer engagement and retention.
EVENT LANDSCAPE
2017 MAY
JUNE
AUGUST
Digital Banking & Payments Conclave
National Cooperative Summit
2nd BFSI CTO Summit
MUMBAI
GOA
MUMBAI
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
DECEMBER
Elets NBFC & Insurance Summit
BFSI Security & Risk Summit
2nd BFSI Datacenter Summit
MUMBAI
MUMBAI
MUMBAI
2018 JANUARY
FEBRUARY
3rd Maharashtra Cooperative Summit
3rd BFSI Leadership Summit
MUMBAI
MUMBAI
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