TCS Transformers - Feb 2011

AN IDG CUSTOM SOLUTIONS INITIATIVE IN ASSOCIATION WITH

TRANSFORMING BUSINESS THROUGH JUDICIOUS APPLICATION OF IT

ONLINE TRADING

MADE SMARTER Axis Bank, through its subsidiary, Axis Securities and Sales Ltd., wanted to setup an online trading portal that would stand out in the crowded market place. It used latest web technologies and the outsourcing model to make it happen.

PLUS INTERVIEW Pravir Vohra, Group CTO, ICICI Bank, tells us what’s changing in the banking sector and the role of technology and IT leaders in enabling the evolution.

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

ONLINE TRADING

MADE SMARTER Axis Bank, through its subsidiary, Axis Securities and Sales Ltd., wanted to setup an online trading portal that would stand out in the crowded market place.

It used latest Web technologies and the outsourcing model to make it happen.

Company Axis Securities and Sales Limited.

Industry Online Broking Offering Online stock trading for individuals

W

hen the Government of India allowed private entities to enter the banking space in the year 1994, Axis Bank, then called UTI Bank, became one of the very first private banks to begin operations in the country. Since then, Axis Bank has grown, both, in revenue and reach. As on 31st December 2010, the bank had 1,281 branches and 5,303 ATMs spread across the country. Having acquired a sizeable customer base (it is the third largest private bank in the country – and that’s saying something!), the bank started to focus its efforts on adding to its product and services portfolio. The bank saw the increasing interest amongst its customers in online stock trading.

Till about a decade ago, stock trading required a physical presence at the broking Exchange or constant telephone interaction with agents. More importantly,

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the trader needed to invest significant time and effort in keeping himself up to date with market indices. The coming of online trading services changed all of that.

Today, pretty much anyone can delve into the world of buying and selling shares, from the comfort of his home, armed with just a PC and an Internet connection. The size of the market today is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of potential customers. Axis Bank, eager to garner its fair share of current and future new age retail stock traders, conceptualized a portal for the same. In December 2009, under the aegis of Axis Securities and Sales Limited (ASSL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Axis Bank, the project to implement axisdirect.in took shape.

Elaborating on the scope of the market, Modan Saha, Joint Managing Director, ASSL, says, “By examining the overall demography of India and several economic indicators, one can tell that the penetration of financial products and equity is set to grow in the future.” Apart from the revenue this product generates, it is also a strategic fit to Axis Bank for more than one reason.

Adds Saha, “An equity broking platform is one of the most sticky products in financial services, both in India and outside. It helps in customer retention since the trading account is linked to the user’s Savings or Current account. When more transactions are conducted, the balance in the customers’ accounts increase.” It was hence imperative for Axis Bank and its subsidiary, ASSL to get this product absolutely right.

CREATING DIFFERENTIATORS Since the online trading space is rather crowded, with banks as well as several non-banking financial entities offering this service, ASSL had to make its offering stand out with clear differentiators. In the extremely competitive online space (across industries, not restricted to banking), customer experience and ease of use have become the focal points in design. While many online trading services did exist, ASSL, in its initial research by way of dipstick customer studies and one-on-one interactions understood user experience was going to be the differentiating factor in online broking as well. At that point, many existing products from other players still had ground

Our solution comprising of unique content, tools, and research offered in an integrated manner, help us address customer needs better. AxisDirect has partnered with TCS to develop this differentiated platform.

MODAN SAHA Joint Managing Director, Axis Securities and Sales Limited.

to cover in the key areas of rich user interface and ease of carrying out transactions. Hence, from ground up, the choice of tools as well as approach to design was clearly on building a portal which took user interface and overall customer experience in this space to the next level.

Since ASSL was building this portal from scratch, they could make use of current generation technologies like AJAX and concepts of Web 2.0 to build a portal that is aligned to current day user expectations.

SINGLE SIGN-ON: Multiple login for services from the same provider is now a thing of the past. Just like Internet companies offer email, photo gallery and social networking for the same user without requiring multiple logins, ASSL ensured its trading portal required only one instance of a user logging in. Traditionally, online trading companies require the user to first login to the portal itself, which has dashboards with information pertaining to the market, and then, use another set of credentials for trading. With user experience as the driving force in the design, ASSL ensured from the ground up that the user portfolio and trading were merged with the rest of the portal.

ONE CLICK TRADE: A characteristic feature of Axisdirect is the presence of a ‘T’ button that appears alongside the name of any company whose shares are listed. This clever feature is present across the

The use of Flash and AJAX, along with Web 2.0 concepts such as custom dashboards enrich user experience.

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

site, alongside any module that displays a company’s information or statistics. It allows the user to immediately open up a broking window when he sees a company whose shares he is interested in. Conventionally, one would have to navigate to the portfolio page, lookup the company in the listing and only then start the transaction. With ASSL’s hallmark ‘T’ button that appears site wide, users save considerable time and effort in trading.

This feature would not have been possible in the absence of single sign-on and integration of the broking and dashboard modules.

TRADEPASSPORT: A smart feature that was incorporated into the design and build stage, is TradePassport. This allows the trader to detach the trading panel from the browser and continue navigating anywhere on the Web while simultaneously being able to trade using the detached panel. The panel runs as an applet while maintaining

a secure connection to the portal. This feature is currently present only on ASSL’s portal in the online trading space.

IMPLEMENTATION While some brokers choose to build their own backend applications, ASSL, in the interest of goto-market timelines, chose TCS Bancs to power ASSL’s core trading platform. The frontend was customized by ASSL in consultation with TCS and other partners. Explaining the choice of TCS as the implementer, Saha says, “This is no short term project. We are in this for the future and wanted a technology partner who has the technical expertise as well as is stable in the long run.”

Subhakanta Satpathy, Senior Vice President, IT, Axis Bank, says one cannot stress enough on the criticality of implementing this project in the shortest possible time, since the market already

LAYERS OF INTELLIGENCE EMPOWERING USERS: Axisdirect is built with ‘layers of intelligence’ for the end user, in the words of Modan Saha, Joint MD, ASSL. To start with, users can select the portlets they wish to see when they log in. These portlets, or ‘screens’ as they are called include market tickers, events, current holdings, market mood, etc. These dashboards empower the trader with enough information to go beyond the famed broker’s intuition and take intelligent judgment calls when trading.

The Markets section of the portal, as the name suggests, offers a complete overview of market behavior in the form of eight different portlets.

A basic market performance portlet contains a graph that depicts Nifty and BSE points from start of day till current time. The trader can also view major Exchange

points of other markets from Asia, Americas and Europe.

A more detailed indices view is made available though another portlet which shows

trends for NSE and BSE. Sub-classifications like mid-cap, small-cap, BSE 100, BSE 200 or the CNX madcap, 100, 200 etc., are available for the serious trader.

For those interested in IPOs, there’s a separate dashboard that shows current, forthcoming and best performing IPOs along with issue price and date.

The hallmark ‘T‘ button is present against each company for one click trading.

A News and an Events portlet show updates from individual companies (such as declared results, M&A, etc) as well as overall market news. The Events portlet includes the ‘T’ button as well.

Movers and Shakers lists companies that have gained and lost in BSE and NSE, along with the T button.

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contained other players. Outsourcing the project to a vendor of repute was hence an important strategic decision, he says.

Elaborating on the kind of collaborative efforts required to churn a project of this nature, Saha adds, “Axis Bank and TCS worked more like partners rather than as vendor and client”.

Constant meetings and discussions ensured that both parties were on the same page at all times.

Since the portal was required to display in real time market data from different sources, ensuring tight integration with data sources was critical”.

HARDWARE AND APPLICATIONS: Pavan Gurtoo, IT Head, ASSL who was involved in the implementation of the portal from the word go, says the hardware and the backend software used are best in class for a Web application. The portal runs off an Oracle Weblogic Portal instance. It is paired with the Oracle Real Application Cluster, which allows a single database to pan across several servers, thereby providing a robust database immune from hardware failure. The compute infrastructure consists of Sun T-series and Sun Sparc servers.

ASSL has a complete N+1 redundancy where all data is replicated in either active-active or activepassive modes.

While this project was finalized strategy wise in the first quarter of 2010, the portal went live in the first week of January 2011. BFSI being one of the most dynamic sectors, is prone to frequent changes. To ensure that the project is fresh at the time of go-live, TCS and ASSL teams had to think of the site as futuristic, during the design stage itself. This ensured there were no significant changes mid-way to the project which would have resulted in delays. Elaborating on the use of latest web technologies, Gurtoo says the extensive use of AJAX and Flash on the portal enables multiple pieces of dynamic information to be floated on the same page.

While traditional Web design rules dictate keeping the page as light as possible, Gurtoo and the strategy teams at ASSL consciously opted for the AJAX heavy design in the interest of user experience which was focal to the entire project. Thanks to the market surveys conducted prior to sketching the portal plans, Gurtoo knew his target audience were almost always were equipped with broadband connections. Nevertheless, the portal’s pages did go through stages of code optimization and minification, especially with Java scripts. Gurtoo cities an example of a page whose size was reduced to one third of the original during the optimization process. About six weeks of effort went into such minification to ensure rich content as well as smooth user experience.

We have tried to leverage technology to provide our customers with a simple, intuitive, and futuristic trading experience.

SUBHAKANTA SATPATHY, Senior Vice President, IT, Axis Bank.

A JOB WELL DONE The site, axisdirect.in has been live only since the 5th of January 2011. In this short span of time, the response from customers and market observers has been extremely positive. In particular, the one click trade feature has won praises from all quarters. Since it is still early days, ASSL is paying keen attention to feedback and intends to incorporate suggestions during revision stages.

FUTURE PROOF ASSL is looking to add more products and services to its portal, like mutual funds, currency, futures trading, etc. The technologies used today support addition of new features into the site. Quoting an example, Gurtoo says, while today, Flash content is not dynamic, the ability exists, for instance, to later enhance the way Flash based graphs display. A lot of the choice of technology is based on what business expects in stage two, he adds.

A much sought after feature from the business stakeholders is to be able to do campaign management and content management themselves without having to seek IT’s help for every change. When this ability is brought in, ASSL’s business users can actively manage the content and promotions that gets displayed on the site, ensuring quick implementation of marketing ideas.

By using current generation Web technologies and concepts, Axis Securities and Sales Limited has developed its online broking portal which offers more than one ‘firsts’ in the industry. The judicious use of the outsourcing model enabled the organization to turn this project from design to go-live in a span of 12 months.

TRANSFORMERS INTERVIEW

MAKING

BUSINESS &

TECHNOLOGY

MEET

From customer focus to business acumen, the banking sector demands multiple strengths from its CIOs. PRAVIR VOHRA of ICICI BANK tells us what’s changing in the sector and how IT is enabling the change.

PRAVIR VOHRA Group CTO, ICICI Bank.

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Given the economic realities of 2011, should the priorities of a banking CIO change? What should garner an immediate spotlight?

Do you think IT is moving from an internally oriented processes to those that directly touch customer service, sales and marketing?

The banking scenario is set to witness further growth as demand from sectors like infrastructure and manufacturing increase. Hence, the focus would be on automating their banking needs in a seamless manner. Microbanking and electronic payments too will continue to receive attention.

The basic building blocks of technology are now hygiene factors - the competitive advantage would come from automation for customer satisfaction, proactive and accurate product proposals for prospects, and more responsive risk management systems.

ICICI has strived to leverage technology ahead of visible demand so as to proactively enable businesses to deliver on their goals. Pioneering efforts in the use of electronic channels of delivery, and the streamlining of backend operations were all ahead of the industry curve.

Typically, we see banking CIOs come from a business background. Does this make it easier to shift focus from internal users to external customers?

Technology in a bank is a complex environment. Automation is a very demanding processes which has stringent boundaries and controls in order to service customers of a varied product set. Managing such technology demands a high degree of understanding business parameters. Hence, it certainly helps if CIOs come from a business background or at least understand specific business contexts.

How important is it for a CIO to think like a CFO? Should they?

A CIO needs to be able to cost optimize. He needs to focus not only on the quantum of spending, but also have rigorous control on project costs, Opex, and the realisation of RoI by the user groups. At the same time, the CIO of today is also required to lead innovation in the organisation, and hence, needs to judiciously enable projects which cannot have a defined ROI or payback.

Is an explicit focus on customers and customer satisfaction a pre-requisite for banking CIOs? Customers are the raison d’etre for any organisation and a bank is no exception. Overall, the CIO needs to align with the organisation’s customer satisfaction efforts and deliver on it.

Do you think Indian CIOs need to do a better job of internally marketing the importance of technology?

Today, CIOs may not need to market the importance of technology in most organisations. However, they may need to help translate technology enablements into business language for their non-technology savvy colleagues.

What trends do you forecast in the banking space over the next couple of years that could be propelled by technology?

We are in the midst of many changes.

Here is my list of technology driven changes that the BFSI sector is likely to see: We estimate a large number of customers entering the banking system due to the variety of technological tools used in micro-banking initiatives.

We estimate an increasingly younger population moving to banking through electronic channels including plastic money.

Technology would also enable value added services on mobile phones, ATMs and other self-service devices.

With increasing adoption of self-service channels by customers, branches may now start focussing on value added services and products.

The improvements in business intelligence and location based services are expected to enhance customer experiences and cross-selling opportunities.

User demand is also expected to increase for access to services through a wider variety of access devices such as tablet PCs, television, etc.

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