Express Computer (Vol.29, No.4) April, 2018

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EXPRESS COMPUTER

3 | EVENT

8 | OPINION

9 | FEATURE

9 | INTERVIEW

10 | FEATURE

Mohit Kapoor, Head – DBS Asia Hub 2

Edelweiss Tokio launches ‘Transcend’: A digital based business transformation project

Subrat Mohanty, Senior Executive Vice President, HDFC Life

Technology has the power to transform healthcare in India

AN INDIAN EXPRESS GROUP PUBLICATION

VOLUME NO. 29, NO.4, PAGES 12, APRIL, 2018, ` 75

ICICI BANK REIMAGINES BANKING FOR THE DIGITAL WORLD The bank is using emerging technologies to significantly alter the way banking services are consumed and delivered

B Madhivanan, CTDO, ICICI Bank

Technology Sabha: Catalyst for e-Governance

EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

2| EDIT MORE INSIDE

EXPRESS COMPUTER Vol 29. No. 4. April, 2018 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Sr Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Editor Srikanth RP* Delhi Mohd Ujaley, Sandhya Michu Mumbai Nivedan Prakash, Abhishek Raval, Mohit Rathod Bengaluru Rachana Jha

EVENT Srikanth RP, Editor srikanth.rp@expressindia.com

Expanding the ecosystem using digital levers COVER STORY

DESIGN National Design Editor Bivash Barua Asst. Art Director Pravin Temble Chief Designer Prasad Tate Senior Graphic Designer Rekha Bisht

6 | ICICI Bank reimagines banking for the digital world

DIGITALTEAM Head of Internet Viraj Mehta Web Developer Dhaval Das Layout Vinayak Mestry

OPINION 8 | Enterprise DDoS Protection: The need of the hour for organizations

Photo Editor Sandeep Patil

Digital to be at the centre of SBI General’s business expansion drive

MARKETING Regional Heads Harit Mohanty - West Prabhas Jha - North Kailash Purohit - South Debnarayan Dutta - East

Digital Transformation: making banking invisible!

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3 | Technology Sabha: Catalyst for e-Governance

11 | Digitization: Transition not seamless, yet essential

D

igital technologies have completely altered the face of banking. New incumbents and born in the cloud startups are changing the customer experience completely. While some banks have followed trends; ICICI Bank has tried to relook at the way banking services are traditionally delivered. The bank, has smartly, tried to expand the ecosystem or its addressable customer base, while keeping customer experience at the center.

This is an era of collaboration, and ICICI Bank is using its strengths in technology to create innovative partnerships. For example, the bank has entered into a partnership with Municipal Corporation of Gurugram, wherein the bank will provide a digital service to facilitate doorstep payment of property tax and water bill, by owners of properties in Gurugram. Another example of a

This is an era of collaboration, and ICICI Bank is using its strengths in technology to create innovative partnerships. For example, the bank has entered into a partnership with the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram partnership is the MoU that the bank has signed with the Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of Odisha to provide e-governance services to the people of the state.

Collection is a big business for any bank, and any government related service is a regular and high volume business.

At the same time, the bank is also reaching out to other non-competing players for providing innovative services. For example, the bank has tied up with Paytm to offer an instant digital credit account with no hassles of documentation or branch visits. This enables lakhs of new credit customers to

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get instant digital credit. ICICI uses a big data algorithm to gauge real-time credit assessment of customers. The algorithm uses an intelligent combination of financial and digital behavior of the customer including credit bureau check, purchase patterns, frequency of purchase to ascertain the credit. Paytm is just one example, and the bank is looking at entering into a series of such partnerships with other players, where the bank’s platform can be leveraged to co-create and deliver services that leverage both players’ capabilities and create a mutually beneficial relationship.

Another innovative offering is the launch of a unique mobile banking app for rural customers that allow them to access banking services as well as information on agri services. The ‘Mera iMobile’ allows users in rural areas to avail as many as 135 services. The list of services include Kisan Credit Card, Gold Loan, Farm Equipment Loan and loans to Self-Help Groups (SHGs). Additionally, it is the first banking app to offer agriculture related information like cropwise mandi prices of nearly 230 crop varieties across 460 mandis. It also displays taluka-wise weather update for close to 3700 talukas across and over 300 districts, aiding farmers to plan their sowing and harvesting activities conveniently and in an informed manner.

Rural India is a big market, and the bank is superbly positioned to capture the next level of growth.

The bank is also looking at the mobile platform to reimagine the way banking services are delivered.

Currently, the bank has over 180 services offered on its mobile app. The bank is now trying to create services and products that could have never been possible in a branch. For instance, a low priced insurance product can be quickly offered via a mobile app. Another big trend that the bank has identified rightly is that this is an era of instant consumption. Accordingly, the bank has launched products that enable instant disbursal of personal loans through ATMs or instant credit cards using intelligent algorithms. The example of ICICI Bank is a superb case in point on how banks can take advantage of new opportunities, while leveraging the potential of partners to expand the ecosystem.

The banking industry is changing rapidly, and banks like ICICI Bank are showing how banks can compete in the new era.

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12 | Invisible banking for all

FEATURE 9 | Edelweiss Tokio launches ‘Transcend’: A digital based business transformation project

10 | Mafatlal Industries reports 30-40% cost savings with SD WAN deployment Technology has the power to transform healthcare in India

INTERVIEW 9 | Subrat Mohanty, Senior Executive Vice President, HDFC Life

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EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

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EVENT

Technology Sabha: Catalyst for e-Governance LIVE STREAMED ACROSS three days, Express Computer's flagship event Technology Sabha reiterated its position as the premier e-governance event, with participation from leading industry associates

T

he 23rd edition of Express Technology Sabha brought together key industry stakeholders from the public sector space and IT solutions providers. Organized by Express Computer from February 22-24, 2018, the event was inaugurated by Manu Srivastava, Principal Secretary, New & Renewable Energy Department, Science & Technology, Government of Madhya Pradesh; Sanjay Jaju, Director, NHIDCL, Government of India; Barun Lala, Director, Sales, HPE and Srikanth RP, Editor, Express Computer. The three-day knowledge packed event featured numerous sessions by industry partners and panel discussions on prevalent topics. Following inauguration, Manu Srivastava gave his keynote address, wherein he highlighted that 90 per cent of the state's population is associated with Aadhaar, underlining the success of the initiative in Madhya Pradesh.

Insightful speaker sessions on the first day included private companies and government representations.

Barun Lala, Director, Sales, HPE conducted a session themed, 'Leveraging digital to build new India'. Lala said, "Digital transformartion is happening everywhere. In India we have technological transitions happening in multiple verticals. Mobile internet, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, advanced robotics are some of the technologies that will transform our day-to-day lives. It is crucial for all of us to get a pulse of the changing landscape. Gone are the days when people talked about artificial intelligence; people are now talking about selective intelligence."

Kamal Arora, Senior Director, Sales, Dell spoke on 'Digital transformation: How technology is transforming the way we live and work at an ever-increasing pace'.

Whereas, the special address

by N T Arun Kumar, Special Representative (IT & Innovation), Government of Andhra Pradesh, focused on using blockchain technology to increase data security of government records. During his address, Kumar commented, "After the birth of the internet, blockchain is the second most disruptive innovation. There are several elements of blockchain that make it unique and disruptive. The core is the way its architecture is

[L-R] Barun Lala, Sanjay Jaju, Manu Srivastava, Srikanth RP

Rajat Taneja

Barun Lala

Panel Discussion: Smart Governance: Making today's government ready for tomorrow

distributed and trusted."

Among other sessions, included 'Accelerating development through mobility'

by Sumit Wadhwa, General Manager, Enterprise Business, Samsung India; 'Secure networking for robust governance' by Rajeshkumar S, Advanced Tecnology Specialist, Juniper Networks; 'Invisible infrastructure for digital ready India' by Vikas Sharma, System Engineer North - East India, Nutanix; 'Writing your next cloud RFP'

by Dr Rajeev Papneja, EVP & COO, ESDS Software Solutions; 'Reimagining government procurement using GeM' by H R Sharma, Additional CEO, GeM; and 'Tech and government infrastructure' by Sanjay Jaju, Joint Secretary, Director, NHIDCL, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways,

Government of India.

In this session titled, 'Securing networking for robust governance', S Rajesh Kumar stated that the Digital India program has created huge potential for superior infrastructure in the country. He was of the view that emerging technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization are playing crucial role in achieving the goals of Digital India.

He expressed the view that with the movement towards digitization, there will now be focus on ensuring that there is efficient use of data centers. Kumar said, “The interaction within the data centers has increased and we are coming to a situation where management of data center has become an

important subject for the enterprises and government, therefore both security and continuity is key. He said networks are becoming

intuitive and secure than what it used to be.

While highlighting the importance of connectivity, he said, “Right bandwidth should be available at the right place

N T Arun Kumar

Panel Discussion: Role of emerging technologies for future governance

and at the right time." He emphasized that now the focus is on ensuring that there is intelligence in the network infrastructure.

Vikas Sharma began his presentation by stating that hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is being discussed at various government departments as a new age infrastructure, which simplifies data centers by replacing complex storage and servers with a simple, scalable converged solution. He said, given the flexibility and simplicity that hyperconvergence brings to the datacenter, it should not be viewed as the end point objective, but as a foundation for building an enterprise cloud. Similar to public cloud services, hyperconverged

infrastructure solutions enable IT teams to start small and scale incrementally to precisely meet application demands. With an enterprise cloud, IT teams gain the security and control they need to manage their infrastructure with confidence.

He also highlighted that in terms of HCI, government is more mature than enterprises.

“Most of the time, government departments are struggling to scale up the IT infrastructure as there is a need of a faster roll out of services. The ground reality is, acceptability to HCI in government is seeing an uptake. Some of the state governments which were previously working with the cloud service providers, are now looking for alternatives,” he said.

Dr Rajeev Papneja began his presentation by stating

that with cloudification, there is a growing challenge for government organizations to write an RFP that can encompass everything they need. He was of the view that multi-cloud or hybrid cloud is going to be the future. “People will consume cloud technology from different services providers for different needs.

This really reduces cost and allow companies to scale-up on the go but we all have to address the challenge of security and upcoming GDPR,” said Papneja.

On the future challenges, he was of the view that with multicloud becoming the new norm the world will need experts who can gel different platforms, but there are not enough experts today who can do that. In addition, he also cautioned about security between different cloud. He

EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

4 | EVENT

Power Discussion- Juniper Networks

Kamal Arora

Technology Presentation by Nutanix

Fireside Chat: Dinesh Tyagi with Sumit Wadhwa

Prakash Kumar

Raghavendran Kandaswami

Prof Dr Triveni Singh

H R Sharma

Tanvir Malik

Power Discussion: SAS

was of the view that in multicloud structure, security is not only about securiing one thing, it is beyond that so security has to be holistic.

The first day also featured a panel discussion on 'The role of emerging technologies for future governance', moderated

by Sanjay Jaju. The panel included Anvar Sadath K, Vice Chairman and Executive Director, General Education, KITE, Government of Kerala; Deepak Agarwal, Executive Director, Indian Oil Corporation; Sabarish Karunakaran, Head, eGovernance, Department of Information Technology, Kerala State IT Mission; and Kamal Kashyap, Country Manager, Public Sector, HPE India.

Highlighting the intervention of technology in Kerala's education sector, Anvar Sadath K said, "The

Power Discussion: Agile Labs

Kerala government has announced four missions last year, including education, wherein we have placed technology as a requirement for the public education system. As part of this, we have put 45,000 classrooms in the state, of which 20,000 are have been completed. We have also given training to 1.5 lakh teachers and the use of content is available 100 per cent free of cost, on opensource platform – it's made available on an online portal".

Adding to this, Karunakaran expressed that blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT will be the key factors to revolutionalize e-governance.

Whereas, speaking about HPE's strengths in egovernance space, Kashyap said, “HPE has an e-Health Centre, developed completely in India at HPE Labs in collaboration with the startup

ecosystem. We have place IoT enabled medical equipment connected to a cloud setup.

Around five lakh patients have benefitted from this. The biggest advantage is that secondary healthcare can be provided at door, in every remlote locations across the country."

Identifying innovations The second day of the event kick-started with power breakfast sessions by Juniper Networks and Dell EMC. Following the sessions, Dinesh Tyagi CEO, CSC e-Governance Services India, Government of India gave a special address titled 'CSCs: The vehicles of digital India'. “Today there are 280,000 CSCs operating across the country, and our objective is to have one centre in every Jilla Panchayat,” informed Tyagi. This was followed by an interesting

conversation between Tyagi and Sumit Wadhwa of Samsung India, wherein they elaborated various use cases, how enterprises and goverment can work in tandem to boost efficiencies of initiatives like CSC. Rajat Taneja, Regional Sales Manager - Dell EMC and Nikhil Madan, General Manager and Area Director (India and South East Asia) Data Lake & Object Storage, Dell EMC hosted the Dell EMC power discussion. They discussed the Isilon platform with the attendees. Isilon is a single cluster storage platform that helps companies manage the exponentially growing structured and unstructured data.

It is increasingly becoming important for large enterprises to distinguish between critical and important data to take long and short

J. G. Mondal & S Bhattacharjee

term decisions. Thus the need for an intelligent and scalable storage platform that provides data when required. The USP of Isilon is that data is stored on a single cluster and analytics can be run on it. Both structured and unstructured data can be processed together in the same cluster.

NIC, GSTN, SBI, Tata Sky, Dish TV, Ahmedabad Smart city, Mumbai and Pune video surveillance are some of the top customers using Isilon.

The power breakfast session by Juniper was led by S Rajesh Kumar, Tech Lead, Juniper Networks. He began the discussion with a presentation highlighting how SDN and SDWAN are changing the dynamics of networking.

He said that organizations are looking to create superior infrastructure. He gave an example of Flipkart and how it has deployed security at

network level. While explaining the changing nature of security challenges and how companies are trying to address the issue, he said that security is no longer only about perimeters. “There is application based security now,” he said.

He also shared information about Junos Fusion technology. He said, “Junos Fusion provides a method of significantly expanding the number of available network interfaces on a device – called an aggregation device – by allowing the aggregation device to add interfaces through interconnections with satellite devices. The entire system – the interconnected aggregation device and satellite devices – is called a Junos Fusion. A Junos Fusion simplifies network topologies and administration because it appears to the larger network

as a single, port-dense device that is managed using one IP address.”

Junos Fusion Enterprise brings the Junos Fusion technology to enterprise switching networks. In a Junos Fusion Enterprise, EX9200 switches act as aggregation devices while EX2300, EX3400, EX4300 or QFX5100 switches act as satellite devices. In a Junos Fusion Enterprise, each satellite device has at least one connection to the aggregation device. The aggregation device acts as the single point of management for all devices in the Junos Fusion Enterprise.

The satellite devices provide network interfaces that send and receive network traffic.

He expressed the view that with the movement towards digitization, there will now be focus on ensuring that there is efficient and secured

EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

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EVENT

Sabarish also informed that some of the state governments such as Rajasthan and West Bengal are already using this platform. When asked about the new functionalities, given the fact that emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning are adopted in all the products these days, he said that Axpert is now fully focusing on AI and blockchain.

With reference to blockchain, he said government needed to put an enabling policy framework in place.

A major highlight of the second day was the ‘Technology Sabha Innovation Awards’ which recognized excellence in the public sector across a diverse spectrum of areas, via breakthrough efforts. A total of 32 winners were awarded for their well implemented initiatives in the area of e-governance.

Technology Sabha Innovation Awards were given away to government department / agency / institution, who demonstrated innovative use of a particular technology or a combination of technologies for distinct benefits to the stakeholders. This included deploying a completely new solution or an innovative use of an existing technology to gain a competitive edge, improve operations, become more responsive to customers and partners, or simply to add to the top or bottom line. The awards were conferred by Dr M Ravi Kanth, IAS, Chairman and Managing Director, HUDCO. The day concluded with classical singer performance

by Madhya Pradesh Culture Department, and entertainment night and gala dinner hosted by Samsung India.

Technology Sabha Innovation Awards

Power Discussion: ESDS Software Solutions

Bhagwan Lal Soni

Uday Shankar

Shobhit Jain

Sanjay Dubey

Panel Discussion: Securing the digital frontiers of India's Digital Economy

Ruchin Kumar

networking.

Keynote speakers on the second day included a diverse mix of public and private sector stakeholders. Raghavendran Kandaswami, Public Sector Practice Head, SAS provided insights of ‘Accelerated e-Governance using analytics; Tanvir Malik, AGM, Panasonic India spoke on 'B2B solutions for PSUs/government; Abir Banerjee, CTO, HPE Aruba conducted a session on 'Building connected India'; Sabarish Santhanam, MD, Agile Labs presented on 'Digital platforms for government; J G Mondal, DGM (SWAN) and S Bhattacharjee, DGM (e-Gov), WTL jointly provided an overview on WTL and its role as SIA in digital transformation of government processes and service delivery; Shobhit Jain, Technical Manager, CommScope presented on ‘Smart connectivity: Meeting

responsibility to GSTN to take care of the technological aspect of implementing the GST. On the question of centralized invoice, he said, “The country is not ready for a centralized invoice generation.”

Other sessions included 'Data protecting everyone' by Shubham Mishra, Speciality System Engineer, Dell; and 'Lessons from high profile cyber attacks and cber scams'

by Prof Dr Triveni Singh, Additional SP, Special Task Force, UP Police. During this keynote, Singh explained the changing cyber threat scenario and how it can be mitigated by preventive measures involving awareness. Day 2 also witnessed two power discussions by SAS and Agile Labs.

Mishra began his presentation by stating that data protection should not be an afterthought for any

the needs of today and tomorrow’; followed by a special keynote address by Prakash Kumar, CEO of GSTN, wherein he began his presentation by outlying some of the achievements of GSTN since its inception. He was of the view that speed at which such as massive technology framework has been built is commendable. He informed that GST Network Limited is a non-government, private limited company promoted by the central and state governments with the specific mandate to build the IT infrastructure and the services required for implementing GST, including the software which tax payers use to file returns.

GST subsumes many existing indirect taxes and introduces one tax policy, but its implementation is possible only through technology. So, the government has assigned the

Vivekananda Pani

Vikas Dube

organization. He was of the view that with proliferation of technology in government organizations and private firms, the vector for attack has also increased, so the usual way of defending the IT infrastructure and data has to change. He suggested that security should be implemented at application level to protect data. “With the growing intervention of technology, the scope for cyber attacks has also increased, therefore an organization needs to make security, data protection and integral part of their core strategy,” said Mishra. During his presentation, he also shared details about different solutions offered by Dell EMC for data protection. He also informed that solution works well with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft platforms among others.

The panel discussion on

'Smart governance: Making today's government ready for tomorrow' was moderated by Srikanth RP and participated

by Amit Kumar Sarkar, Joint Secretary, Finance Department, Government of West Bengal; Sourabh Gupta, SIO, Uttar Pradesh, NIC; Bijesh Babu Earesseril, Vice President, Information Technology – Data Center, GSTN; Aditya Shukla, Head, SEMT, Government of Chhattisgarh; and Kamal Kashyap, Country Manager – Public Sector, HPE. The power discussion by Agile Labs showcased its a patented software development technology called ‘Axpert’. This solution eliminates coding for the government department, so that they can focus on their core competencies. So, if a department has to create a software, it can do it by drag

and drop method, rather than fully writing the codes. "This reduces time to build new software and allows government department to launch e-governance services on the go," said Sabarish Santhanam, CTO and Director, Agile Labs while discussing about his companies offering during a power discussion.

Sabarish began the power discussion by explaining the conventional Software Development Cycle followed by how Axpert enables the same development to be done more efficiently and in a faster way.

“Every organization has a need to build custom software.

If you follow the usual process it takes time and many a times they are not intuitive, so users face problems, but with platform like Axpert application development can be done in 50 per cent less time and with full control,” he said.

Digital focus The final day of the threeday event commenced with a power discussion on multicloud services by ESDS; followed by session on ‘Innovative and gamechanging e-governance practices’ by Uday Shankar, Director (Technical), Raj Comp Info Services; ‘Empowering citizen engagement in Indian languages for wider adoption of Digital India’ by Vivekananda Pani, CTO, Reverie Language Technologies; ‘Security for Indian citizens’ credentials’ by Ruchin Kumar, Business Head – Government and Defense, Identity and Data Protection of Enterprise and Cybersecurity, Gemalto; ‘Empowering vital applications for a digital world’

by Vikas Dube, National Sales Manager – Smart Solution, Vertiv Energy.

The panel discussion on ‘Securing the digital frontiers of India’s digital economy’, the last session of the three-day event, brought together key industry leaders including Bhagwan Lal Soni, ADG, Police Force, Government of Madhya Pradesh; Cylesh Gadi, Deputy General Manager, Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation; and Piyush Somani, MD and CEO, ESDS Software Solutions.

“Apart from cyber attacks, which we understand well, there are numerous other things happening in the society. Every individual carrying any kind of gadget is subjected to cyber crime these days. The number of cases reported to the police is very low. Even in the reported cases, the police department is not equipped enough to mitigate these attacks,” Soni said, while urging the private private sector to join hands with police departments and form a special body to provide technological expertise and intelligence, in order to form a mechanism to reduce cyber attacks and crimes.

The event concluded with a special keynote address by Sanjay Dubey, IAS, Commissioner, Indore. He said, “With emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and IoT, there are infinite possibilities. Through these technologies we can provide our citizens a better quality of life.”

EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

6|COVER STORY

ICICI BANK REIMAGINES BANKING FOR THE DIGITAL WORLD The bank, while continuing to undertake transformational steps in the current scheme of operations, and introducing instant banking products and services, has also ensured adoption of new age digital technologies to serve the current banking products and services at a fraction of the cost. Express Computer’s Srikanth R P, Abhishek Raval and Mohit Rathod report on how the bank is using emerging technologies to significantly alter the way banking services are consumed and delivered

T

echnology has been in the DNA of ICICI bank since its inception. Be it one of the first banks to offer ATMs or banking using social media, ICICI Bank has been a pioneer in identifying market trends much more earlier than its competitors. Today, the market has completely changed, with bornin-the-cloud startups competing with traditional banks.

The first impact of digital has been on the payments business - from cash to cards, to mobile payments. Anything that can be converted from physical mechanism to a completely digital mechanism is digital transformation. The way employees interact with the systems is different, the same is the case with how employees interact with the customers.

“This digital transformation is forcing us to do a lot of rethinking on three bases. Our existing business is very critical; for incumbents like us, the traditional business model is important. Within our existing businesses, we are making the processes much more efficient. This includes things like robotic process automation covering 950 processes,” states B Madhivanan, CTDO, ICICI Bank. Another important element has been the ability to service customers, both existing and new. In terms of existing customers, it’s about crossselling; whereas it’s about creating bases in terms of new customers. For instance, providing tablets to the front-end for the sales teams or digital forms for SMB retail customers.

B Madhivanan, CTDO, ICICI Bank

Transforming and reimagining banking On the digital front, the bank’s efforts include a different approach on how processes are viewed end-to-end and how decisions are taken; alongside high level Robotic Process Automation. On the transformation side, the bank wants to steer businesses in a completely different way.

“Our Executive Director and MD are driving the agenda of direct-to-consumer (D2C).

Until now the model has been intermediary in nature - it could be an employee, or a channel partner. Now as the world is becoming bigger and more connected, it’s creating an ability for us to reach out

directly to the customers - which is crucial for us,” explains Madhivanan. Whether customers do banking through retail internet banking, or mobile, it contributes to the digital story. Transformation for the bank is about virtually recreating a model wherein the customers come directly without any intermediary.

Additionally, a thought process is underway in completely reimagining the bank and the services offered. “We are thinking if there is a way to reimagine the most often used banking services, from a mobile perspective - such as payments, lending, trade, financial management, buying policies, investing. Our iMobile app, for example, acts as a channel on one hand; we have about 180 services on mobile currently. We are also trying to reimagine if we can do things that we have never thought on iMobile. We are also working on voice activated services,” says Madhivanan.

There are various products on the sidelines of current and savings accounts, wherein the bank is trying to reimagine the experience and context. The price points of insurance are high because it is being delivered by a physical mechanism. If the same insurance product is offered on a mobile app, there is a possibility of creating customized products at a cost that would have never been possible in a branch scenario. The impact of this is not just on cost-to-income, but there is a new segment of revenue. For instance, a policy can be sold over a phone, which is not possible in physical bank branches. This is making the entire context more relevant – it is a unique combination of driving consumer journeys.

Run, transform and reimagine are the three areas being worked upon. The first two will primarily focus on cost-to-income; whereas reimagination will create completely new business segments. This is being made possible through a three-way process. Transformation is a combination of the technology and the innovation teams.

Whereas, the reimagination part is a combination of new age technologies such as retail internet banking, corporate internet banking, iMobile, etc.

Furthermore, from a mobile perspective, the bank is open to build partnerships. “The idea is that we need not own everything;

EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

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COVER STORY there are certain things that our partners can do well. The last part is about continuing innovations; this includes two areas – hackathons, wherein we encourage people to pitch to us. If we find a particular fintech company solving our problems, we try to engage with them and build them – sometimes we even invest in them.

Going forward we want to build this complete Sand Box, wherein we will put 30-40 APIs for developers.

There are plans to open up the API platform, but it will happen over a period of time. While we talk about openness, no platform in the world is completely open; so there will be APIs and we will participate, but it will be within certain boundaries.

There is a fine line between experimentation for developers and where we will put up APIs for payments. We keep opening our APIs during our hackathons – our development portal for experimentation will be made permanent,” states Madhivanan.

Creating instant consumption models with technology as a foundation This is an era of instant consumption, and the bank realizes the strategic importance of creating products that can be consumed immediately. Backed by powerful analytics, the bank has created several instant products instant credit card, instant PPF facility, instant digital credit.

Several of these products are unique. For example, the bank has tied up with Paytm to jointly launch ‘Paytm-ICICI Bank Postpaid’, a digital credit account with instant activation: with no hassles of documentation or branch visit, while activation is fully online.This enables lakhs of new-to-credit customers to get instant digital credit for shopping. This is based on a new Big Data based algorithm

by ICICI Bank for real-time credit assessment of customers. The algorithm uses an intelligent combination of financial and digital behavior of the customer including credit bureau check, purchase patterns, frequency of purchase to ascertain the credit – worthiness of a customer within a few seconds.

Based on the credit-score of the customer, the bank offers upto 45 days interest-free credit limit.

Similarly, the bank has announced a facility of issuing instant credit cards. This enables the savings account customers of the bank to get a credit card instantly, in a completely digital and paperless manner. This new offering enables a few lakhs of prequalified customers to instantly get the credit card number and other important details online, using which, he/she can immediately start shopping online, without having to wait for the physical card to arrive. The facility significantly improves customer experience as it allows to choose from a suite of credit cards and create a credit card instantly. More recently, the bank also launched the country’s first instant PPF account facility making it completely paperless and digital. With this new facility, customers of the bank are no longer required to visit a branch and submit physical documents to open a PPF account. They can now conveniently open a PPF account anytime, anywhere using the bank’s digital channels of internet and mobile banking.

ICICI Bank has also announced the launch of instant disbursal of personal loans through ATMs. This service enables existing salaried customers of the bank to get prequalified personal loans in their savings account instantly, in a digital form. No papers involved.

The bank has announced the launch of an instant overdraft facility for MSME (Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises) customers in a completely online format.

Christened ‘InstaOD’, this offering in the Indian banking industry enables a few lakhs of pre-qualified current account customers of the bank to instantly avail of the facility without visiting a branch and submitting physical documents.

Acting as a technology facilitator With technology in its genes, the bank realizes the value that it can bring to a partnership. For instance, the partnership with the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram. The bank has announced the launch of a digital service to facilitate doorstep payment of property tax and water bill, by owners of properties in

Gurugram. A first-of-its-kind solution in the country, it integrates a hand held point-ofsale (PoS) machine with the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) server. This enables it to instantly fetch and update real time data from the MCG server.

“When we do collection for a government entity, huge money is made because we are their primary bankers. Whether it is smart city or a transit business, we invest in technology in each one of them directly or with our partners. Another instance is, working with a department, for instance Surat Municipal Corporation, wherein we will try to cover everything. The right term for this is ‘ecosystem banking’. Here technological expertise also comes into play; sometimes we work directly, other times we work with TCS, payment partners, depending upon our flagship role in the project. Cocreation is the way to go, because the standardized system will only work for businesses like retail,” explains Madhivanan.

Another innovative offering is the launch of a unique mobile banking app for rural customers that allow them to access banking services as well as information on agri services. Christened, ‘Mera iMobile’, it allows users in rural areas to avail as many as 135 services — on their mobile phone, helping them to save the time and cost of visiting a branch to avail these services. The list of services include Kisan Credit Card, Gold Loan, Farm Equipment Loan and loans to Self-Help Groups (SHGs).

The app also enables them to undertake an array of frequently used banking services from their smartphone, without using mobile internet services.

Additionally, it is the first banking app to offer agriculture related information like crop-wise mandi prices of nearly 230 crop varieties across 460 mandis. It also displays taluka-wise weather update for close to 3,700 talukas across and over 300 districts, aiding farmers to plan their sowing and harvesting activities conveniently and in an informed manner. ‘Mera iMobile’ is the only banking app to provide these value added services in one single app for the rural customer. ICICI Bank believes that the next wave of growth in internet usage will come from rural India due to growth in cheaper smartphone handsets, spread of wireless networks and evolving consumer behavior. The launch of this app is a step in this direction. ‘Mera iMobile’ has been specially created to be ‘light’ to enable customers in rural and semiurban markets to download and run it easily even with low internet speed.

Another example is the MoU that the bank has signed with the Government of Odisha. The bank has signed an MoU with the Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of Odisha to provide e-governance services to the people of the state. This initiative will enable anyone including non-ICICI Bank customers to pay their utility bills, including electricity, water, withholding tax, etc directly on the website of the Government of Odisha, using an ICICI Bank payment gateway.

Riding on new age technologies ICICI Bank is among the first few globally to exchange and authenticate remittance transaction messages as well as original international trade documents related to purchase order, invoice, shipping and insurance, among others, electronically on blockchain in real time. The usage of blockchain technology simplifies the process and makes it almost instant - to only a few minutes.

Typically, this process takes a few days.

ICICI Bank executed these pilot transactions via its blockchain network with Emirates NBD on a custom-made blockchain application, cocreated with EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys.

The blockchain application co-created by ICICI Bank replicates the paper-intensive international trade finance process as an electronic decentralised ledger that gives

all the participating entities including banks the ability to access a single source of information. This enabled all the parties, viz, the importer in Mumbai; ICICI Bank, Mumbai; the exporter in Dubai and Emirates NBD, Dubai to view the data in real time. It also enabled them to track documentation and authenticate ownership of assets digitally, as an unalterable ledger in real time. This facilitated the stakeholders to execute a trade finance transaction through a series of encrypted and secure digital contracts. Further, it allowed each participant to check online the status of the application, transfer of title and transmission of original trade documents through a secure network, while preserving client and commercial confidentiality.

It brings in the improved convenience of accurate and quick transactions eliminating manual intervention, courier of paper documents across countries and verification through trade intermediaries.

This is in contrast to the current process which involves a complex and lengthy paper trail that requires international shipping and courier. The pilot transaction was executed to showcase confirmation of import of shredded steel melting scrap by a Mumbai-based exportimport firm from a Dubai-based supplier.

The second initiative involved a transaction on the blockchain application that enabled an ICICI Bank branch in Mumbai to remit funds to an Emirates NBD branch in Dubai in real time. It could do so as the blockchain technology is equipped to send real time financial message to the recipient bank allowing the remittance transaction to take place instantly.

The pilot transaction eliminates the need for financial messaging between banks and heralds the convenience of instant crossborder remittances for retail customers. Currently, international remittances take a few hours to upto two days. It is also envisaged to reduce the cost of remittance for customers as well as banks.

“The underlying technology of blockchain including its features – instant transmission of data, protection from frauds – is very positive. For us, adaptation of blockchain through a private network is what we are banking on.

It plays well in anything that involves multiple players and takes a lot of time today. We have picked up key areas wherein we will work on blockchain. Trade is a very complex area, involving a lot of paperwork, regulation, physical movement of goods, requiring trust among the participants. Today we are all dependent on some third party, where the time taken for any transaction is 15 days. Whereas, blockchain can effectively accomplish it in 20 minutes,” states Madhivanan.

We plan to scale up to over 1000 software robotics led business processes by end of this fiscal, which will be able to perform a large percentage of our transaction processing B Madhivanan, CTDO, ICICI Bank

PIONEERING INITIATIVES App / Digital Initiative

Features

◗ Mobile banking app for rural Allows users in rural areas to avail as many as 135 customers services on their mobile phone, helping them to save the time and cost of visiting a branch to avail these services. The list of services include Kisan Credit Card, Gold Loan, Farm Equipment Loan and loans to Self-Help Groups (SHGs). Additionally, it is the first banking app to offer agriculture related information like crop-wise mandi prices of nearly 230 crop varieties across 460 mandis. It also displays taluka-wise weather update for close to 3,700 talukas across and over 300 districts, aiding farmers to plan their sowing and harvesting activities conveniently and in an informed manner ◗ Instant PPF facility

With this new facility, customers of the bank are no longer required to visit a branch and submit physical documents to open a PPF account. They can now conveniently open a PPF account anytime, anywhere using the bank’s digital channels of internet and mobile banking

◗ Instant loans using ATMs

This service enables existing salaried customers of the bank to get pre-qualified personal loans in their savings account instantly, in a completely digital and paperless manner

◗ Instant credit cards

This offering enables a few lakhs of pre-qualified customers to instantly get the credit card number and other important details online, using which, he/she can immediately start shopping online, without having to wait for the physical card to arrive

AI, robotics and machine learning use cases In remittance, ICICI Bank has started using robotics. However, the challenge with robotics and NLP is that, until now the structured and complex things have been done. “The biggest achievement will come when we start doing unstructured and complex things. For instance, taking a credit decision which is still not AI driven. These are the areas that we are going to explore.

Apart from this, we are seeing that it will move from app to voice services such as Siri and Alexa,” says Madhivanan.

In September 2016, ICICI Bank announced the deployment of ‘Software Robotics’ in over 200 business processes across various functions of the bank including retail banking operations, agribusiness, trade and forex, treasury and human resources management among others. The bank is the first in the country and among few globally to deploy ‘Software Robotics’ that emulates human actions to automate and perform repetitive, high volume and time consuming business tasks cutting across multiple applications.

At ICICI Bank, software robots have reduced the response time to customers by up to 60 per cent and increased accuracy to 100 per cent, thereby sharply improving the bank’s productivity and efficiency.

It has also enabled the bank’s employees to focus more on valueadded and customer-related functions. The software robots at ICICI Bank are configured to capture and interpret information from systems, recognize patterns and run business processes across multiple applications to execute activities including data entry and validation, automated formatting, multi-format message creation, text mining, workflow acceleration, reconciliations and currency exchange rate processing among others.

The software robots now perform over 1.5 million banking transactions every working day.

“We plan to scale up to over 1000 software robotics led business processes by end of this fiscal, which will be able to perform a large percentage of our transaction processing ,” says Madhivanan. iPal – ICICI Bank’s AI enabled chatbot ICICI Bank announced the launch of iPal, artificial intelligence (AI) powered virtual personal assistant. This chatbot addresses about one million queries/chats monthly on the bank’s website and mobile application - iMobile, making it the country’s largest and most comprehensive AI-led chatbot.

ICICI Bank is the only bank in the country to offer AI-led chatbot services on its website and mobile application. In the last eight months, iPal has interacted with

nearly 3.1 million customers with nearly 90 per cent accuracy. It also handles close to one million queries monthly on the website and mobile banking application. It offers customers resolution to their queries instantly 24x7 and on all days, thus offering unparalleled customer convenience.

In addition to offering instant responses to queries, the iPal engine on iMobile undertakes financial transactions as well – an industry first feature. It enables customers to resolve their queries and also undertake financial transactions of bill pay, fund transfer and recharges. This too is available on all days and at any time.

Currently, the bank’s iPal chatbot is serving the customers by AI driven information - either by self learning or by the agents feeding information and making the bot more intelligent. The chatbot has been servicing requests accurately. Servicing is the use case for AI now, however going forward, personalization will be the trend.

The other big trend besides personalization will be voice. Siri, Alexa are becoming more and more mature in the ecosystem. This simply means, instead of typing, the customer can do voice enabled transactions with AI running on top.

Voice as the enabler In November 2017, ICICI Bank launched voice-based international remittance service to enable nonresident Indians (NRIs) to send money to any bank in India. With this new feature in the ICICI Bank’s Money2India app, an NRI customer can instantly initiate a remittance to his/her existing payees in India with just a simple voice command to Apple’s virtual voice assistant, Siri, on his/her Apple iPhone/iPad. It improves customer’s convenience significantly as it replaces a five-step process, which was required to initiate a remittance to India earlier.

To get the benefit of this unique offering, the customer needs to simply speak out the ‘nickname’ of the registered payee in the Money2India (M2I) app to whom he/she wants to send the money to and the amount to be sent. For example, the customer can initiate the process by simply saying “Send $100 to Mom with Money2India”.

Based on this voice instruction, Siri converts the voice command to text using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and populates an interface for confirmation with the details. The customer is no longer required to enter the payee name or amount to be transferred, since he/she would be using a voice command to provide instructions to Siri. iMobile - Handling transactions worth trillions iMobile, the bank’s mobile

banking application completed a decade this year. It started off as an SMS banking platform, which continues till this date in rural areas. The internet banking and the ICICI Bank’s digital wallet, Pockets co-existed with iMobile.

“The emergence of the millennial population, change in the demographics, the rapid penetration of the mobile device and the corresponding decline in the data charges made iMobile as a relevant proposition,” he informs. iMobile has been growing by leaps and bounds since the last four years. “The transactions have doubled in the last four years and have almost trebled in the last two years,” says Madhivanan. Overall, the number of digital transactions in December 2017 was 84 per cent of the overall transactions, of which more than 50 per cent of the transactions happened on the mobile channel - the rest were done at ATMs and branches. The trend coming out is - mobile channel is fast outpacing internet banking.

Not only with regards to the number of transactions, but also in terms of the acquisition of new customers.

In the last fiscal, 2016-17, ICICI Bank processed transactions on the mobile channel, worth ` 2.64 trillion and was the numero uno in the Indian private sector bank space. In 2017-18, until October, the mobile channel has processed ` 3.1 trillion worth of transactions.

On the iMobile application, the bank has been able to acquire eight million customers. There are 180 services available in the app. So, the app that started offering SMS and few other services a decade back now enables 180 services. It includes the most used services like account viewing, person to person transfer, bill pay etc. For high value cheque tracking, the customer can track it on his mobile, as to at which stage of processing is the cheque lying at any given point of time before it’s credited / debited. This feature is being used heavily.

Banking as a platform The next big ticket item for the ICICI Bank will be the story of banking as a platform. The financial products/services like insurance, protection, lending, payments (mostly small ticket).

This is ‘sachetisation’ (buying banking products and services in small consumable formats) of banking. This becomes possible because of the API infrastructure built by the bank. Some of the robust and stronger services are run on APIs while microservices will be created for specific transactions. For example, the iMobile app may be used to provide a loan as less than ` 5,000. Even a ` 500 SIP is possible. Giving small ticket, hi frequency products and then backing it up with personalization will be the next big trend.

EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

8 | OPINION Amar Chakravarty, CIO & Head of IT, SBI General Insurance

Mathan Babu Kasilingam, Chief Information Security Officer, NPCI

Enterprise DDoS Protection: The need of the hour for organizations

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n present day, organizations are a lot more dependent on the internet for day-to-day business operations compared with what it used to be earlier. Though it is agreed that the internet offers enormous potential, it also exposes an organization to cyber-attacks.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is one such risk which has the potential to create havoc. It is an attack wherein multiple compromised systems on the internet (most often), infected with malware are used to target an organization’s IT infrastructure (mostly single service, like web portal) causing a Denial of Service to legitimate customer’s access.

In 2016, MIRAI attack used Internet of Things (IoT) for attacking DYN DNS that brought down services of Twitter / LinkedIn. This is an example of DDoS where over 380,000 IoT devices were used from various geographies including from India as BOTs. Typical way a bot is used in DDoS While not all DDoS attacks come from botnets, but here’s why botnets are effective: ◗ Obfuscation – The attackers is able to conceal themselves from the victim ◗ Amplification – By using compromised systems, the attacker can launch a larger attack ◗ Geographical dispersion – A large botnet can span the globe making for a massively distributed attack that is hard to mitigate There’s nothing new about botnets. They’ve been with us for a long time. In fact, some very large ones existed in the early 2000s that involved millions of nodes.

The US Federal officials have arrested three hackers

who have pleaded guilty to computer crimes charges for creating and distributing MIRAI botnet.

Paras Jha (a 21-year-old from New Jersey), Josiah White (20-year-old from Washington) and Dalton Norman (21-year-old from Louisiana) were indicted by an Alaska court in December 2017 on multiple charges for their role in massive cyber attacks conducted using MIRAI botnet.

The attackers have by then already made the MIRAI attack code open to the market to be used by other cyber criminals.

DDoS attacks can be broadly divided into three types: Volume Based Attacks This type of attack includes UDP floods, ICMP floods, and other spoofed-packet floods.

The attack’s goal is to saturate the bandwidth of the attacked site or associated services like DNS, and magnitude is measured in bits per second (bps). This attack targets the Network Layer (L3) of the OSI Stack. MIRAI was this type of attack.

This type of attack is mostly identified reactively and can be mitigated only by Scrubbing Services, wherein the entire traffic is re-routed to a Scrub Center which filters our bad and sends only good traffic.

Few intelligent Layer 7 inspection devices that can be deployed in Enterprise Perimeter (next to ISP Router) have the ability to identify these types of attacks and automatically signal the Scrub Center to mitigate such attacks.

It is essential that an organization aligns with a Cloud Scrubbing provider who has the ability to accept traffic re-routing from any of

the subscribed Internet Service Provider that the organization use.

State exhaustion (TCP) attacks This attack includes SYN floods, fragmented packet attacks, Ping of Death, Smurf DDoS and more. This type of attack consumes actual server resources, or those of intermediate communication equipment, such as firewalls and load balancers, and is measured in packets per second. This attack targets layers like network (fragmented attacks), transport (SYN Flood, Varying State Flood, IPSEC Flood), Session Layer (Connection flood exhaustion, Long lived TCP Session) and Presentation Layer (SSL Exhaustion, DNS Query Flood), (L3 to L6) of the OSI Stack. These attacks are hard to detect and need integrated monitoring systems / intelligent Layer 7 inspection devices that can study patterns and decide to filter out traffic when it sees malformed packets (SYN Flood / fragmented packets etc).

Application Layer Attacks This includes low and slow attacks, GET/POST floods, attacks that target Apache, Windows or OpenBSD vulnerabilities and more.

Comprised of seemingly legitimate and innocent requests, the goal of these attacks is to crash the web server, and the magnitude is measured in requests per second (RPS). This attacks targets only Application Layer (L7) of the OSI Stack and especially HTTP and HTTPS. These attacks are defended by Web Application Firewalls (WAF) that can learn, inspect and defend an enterprise from such attacks.

The way forward There has been a major shift over time in the motivation of the people behind the DDoS attacks.

Instead of simply using them for spam, botnet operators have figured out a way to monetize their efforts through extortion or by launching a DDoS-for-hire platform like MIRAI. In the current era we are aware that hampering the digital presence of an organization can bring down the organization to kneel. To combat against such attacks, an organization needs to deploy multi-pronged and multi-layered DDoS Protection to sustain their infrastructure availability as there are various elements in the IT landscape than can come handy to tackle DDoS attacks.

How can one sustain a DDoS attack?

DNS forms the core in ensuring the digital channels are available to all customers at all time and hence deploying DNS infrastructure in a resilient data center, meaning either on public clouds or on multiple data centers, will be able to sustain large scale attacks on DNS. Ideally if the DNS infrastructure is geographically distributed, it can sustain attacks of larger scale.

In case of volumetric attacks it is essential that a Cloud-based Scrubbing service is subscribed from either the ISP or independent Scrubbing providers to mitigate attacks. Most of these providers do not provide Clean Pipe service which means, they should be able to block all attack traffic irrespective of the size of attack and organization should review the agreement as appropriately to include clauses for Clean Pipe or as per their risk appetite.

Building resilient infrastructure is core to sustaining DDoS attack and quickly recovering from the same. Most often leveraging cross platforms of infrastructure has also helped many organizations to tackle attacks that are low and slow (called Slow Lorris attacks that are hard to detect). On detection, if there are resilient copies of web servers running from non-uniform infrastructure, meaning, a primary location and DR location having websites, for example running in Windows IIS infrastructure and a copy of the application (either static code of website or dynamic code) running in any other non-windows environment, for example running in Linux – Java infrastructure.

There are other security components that can come handy in defending DDoS attacks and most often, it is seen that Intrusion Prevention Systems and Load Balancers have significant controls that can mitigate some types of DDoS attacks. It is essential that the network and security teams work in conjunction to identify the layers of security that the organization has deployed and have understanding to the ability of such devices which can be used while under attack and a comprehensive DDoS response Hand Book helps.

It is also essential to periodically engage professional firms that can simulate DDoS attacks to measure the response ability of the solutions that are deployed and tweak them basis results of the simulation.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of NPCI

Mohit Kapoor, Head – DBS Asia Hub 2

Digital Transformation: making banking invisible!

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anking is becoming more and more invisible.

Today, customers are more fast paced and so are their banking needs.

Transactions – big or small, need to be quick and intelligent.

Happy lifestyles play a major role in the lives of our customers. Hence, at DBS, we are making banking joyful.

“Banking is necessary; banks are not” – Bill Gates As customer expectations continue to transform, technology continues to disrupt banking.

Banking industry is moving towards being more agile and nimble. We are all experimenting with banking solutions and making them more evolved. Banks are reimagining banking to create an integrated ecosystem for the customers by participating in their journeys. So, it is important for us to get inspired by the technology companies and adopt their models of transformation and digital disruption.

With digital wallets, UPI and QR codes, payments have taken lead in being digital to the core. And then there is next level of banking – loans, quick account opening, investments and so much more. True digitalization happens when we talk of banking in entirety

and transform that into a complete digital journey for the customer. With Bitcoins and blockchain further disrupting the industry, the possibility of invisible banking becomes even stronger. I am a firm believer of the fact that the transformation has just begun and bigger surprises await us.

Re-imagining banking – a strong ecosystem Look at a consumer today – everything runs on the device he/she owns. It is a strongly knitted network of needs, lifestyle choices, education, family, social network and ofcourse banking. How can we then talk of banking as a standalone act? I believe that we need to develop an ecosystem for consumers; ecosystem of sorts by weaving in various customer journeys.

Consumer needs, aspirations, consumption patterns,

shopping carts, monthly bills, offers, contextual marketing, experiences, the list can go if we continue to deep dive – all these need to be carved into one strong ecosystem.

Plug in or plug out APIs enable building this ecosystem. Moreover, to strive and run through longer races, we need to build on one another. The power of collaborated systems looks infinite. I feel this model helps us capture the best of the world – imagine if best banking builds on best shopping platform, which builds on best deals that in turn builds on best search engine. This has enormous capacity to tune in to the diverse customer journeys.

We, at DBS, are excited for this digital transformation powered by our strong API model.

Talking to our systems through world’s largest API platform All in, DBS has launched over 160 APIs in the region across more than 20 categories. More categories will be added in response to demand. The APIs allow other brands, corporates, fintechs and software developers to “talk” to the bank to access a breadth of services, including funds transfers and peer-topeer payment services. More than 50 companies in Singapore such as AIG, McDonalds, MSIG, PropertyGuru, Activpass, Food Panda and sgCarMart are already on the API platform. A huge pool of innovators and programmers is already leveraging these APIs. We are making significant efforts to engage with this pool of innovators and programmers to get constant feedback.

Recently, we organized our first “DBS Developers Night” where we introduced some of the new features and got great feedback on how we can improve the developer experience to make our APIs easy and seamless.

Making banking joyful – engineering the future of banking In our quest to making banking joyful, APIs will have a major role to play. They will facilitate infinite imagination fostering strong innovation led by engineers all around. They will help us penetrate deeper into the customer journeys and build a lifestyle oriented banking system. At DBS Asia Hub 2, one of India’s finest workplaces, our engineering force is building many such APIs and building the future of banking. Visit our API portal to explore more.

Digital to be at the centre of SBI General’s business expansion drive

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BI General Insurance has been clocking good numbers since the last two years.

This is the eighth year of operations for the company.

Ambitious plans are in the works for the next two-three years. Digital and the supporting IT infrastructure will be one of the important contributors to achieving the growth targets. A separate vertical has been created inside the company to run the digital business.

A major hardware and software system upgradation programme is underway. The systems were being used since the operations began and they are nearing their end of life / refresh is required or the software version needs to be upgraded.

Correspondingly, “The IT budget this year will be double from the previous year,” informs Amar Chakravarty, CIO & Head of IT, SBI General Insurance.

“A few digital and born in cloud companies launched their businesses last year and they will prove to be a challenge for us,” says Chakravarty. The company has taken a proactive stand of ramping up the business in order to be well on track to participate in the growth story of India. In a way, it will also allow to compete against the new age companies. They are cloud based and have no legacy baggage. The impending challenge is also from companies like Amazon and others. “Tomorrow, if Amazon starts selling Insurance, it will be difficult for us to face the challenge,” says Chakravarty.

APIs critical for creating more partnerships SBI General Insurance has been growing 30-35 percent YoY. The plan is to take a quantum jump and grow the business by more than 3 times. This will be done through expanding the footprint through the bancassurance model especially with SBI. Extending the partnership further with the agency, brokers etc. Digital is the way to go in these scenarios. The crux will be in the ability to link up the company’s systems with that of the partners. For example, at times, the corporate customers want to connect the employee’s personal insurance plans with the general insurance. It requires ERP linkage of the customer’s system with the systems of the general insurance provider. The days of the physical forms are gone. Companies are not interested in taking that route. The role of the API infrastructure is critical here. It allows seamless connection between two systems without any major redevelopment.

Hitherto the challenge was in maintaining multiple partnerships. A change that applies to all the partners had to be done separately in the respective systems of the company however with the advantage of APIs, a change made at one end gets reflected at all the other instances where it can be made applicable. This reduces the burden for general insurance companies and their partners to maintain and run their

business. “As a general insurance provider, a majority of the change has to be made at my end,” so less hassles for the partners.

Toyota, Hyundai, Maruti are some of the OEM partners of SBI General Insurance in the area of motor insurance.

A major change will come by making partnerships with many smaller players.

Motor insurance is a major component of the overall business of SBI General. A partnership with Vahan, an einitiative of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is also being considered. The Vahan app, which is a national registry of registered vehicles across the country. It allows the company to get the vehicle related information by only getting the registration number from the customer.

Empowering employees and customers with Technology tools Providing tabs to the claims processing team has been tested out and they will soon be provided tabs. An initiative is underway for the salesforce to help them track their targets and manage the routine work. “We are also in discussions with General Insurance Council (GIC), who are planning an initiative on Blockchain,” says Chakravarty. There are use cases like co-insurance, which requires data sharing among insurance companies; IRDA, GIC collects data from various companies. How can Blockchain be used to share this data back with all the insurance companies to check whether the policy applicant already has some kind of pending dues with one insurance company before buying a policy from another company. A decision will soon be taken on the use cases.

Chatbots The company has thus far evaluated 27 chatbot vendors and close to 10 of them have been shortlisted and they are running a Closed User Group (CUG) RFP. Most of the vendors had the conventional FAQ model for chatbots, which doesn’t add value to the immense potential that chatbot offers. The shortlisted vendors can link up with the APIs, pull the customer information like their policy details- claims status, renewal due etc and provide support proactively rather than waiting for the customer to raise the query.

“The core platforms available are from IBM, Microsoft and Google however what we built atop will be our call,” The role of the implementation partner will be crucial in how it fits best into the scheme of things.

A cloud based HR tool was launched last year. The agents who doesn’t regularly attend office, can mark attendance from their mobile device based on the geo-location.

The company has created a separate vertical for the digital business and budget will also be allocated accordingly. The digital business comes under the marketing function and IT will provide support to the digital initiatives and also undertake separate initiatives to support the business.

EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

|9

FEATURE

Edelweiss Tokio launches ‘Transcend’: A digital based business transformation project THIS YEAR EDELWEISS TOKIO is expected to grow at 80% YoY and this trend is expected to continue, for the next few years. Project Transcend will create a scalable and flexible platform to cater to the increasing volumes Abhishek Rawal abhishek.rawal@expressindia.com

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ilesh has been with Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance since the last four years.

Edelweiss as a group has an acute hunger for growth. It percolates down to Edelweiss Tokio too. The company launched ‘Transcend’, a digital transformation project to empower the company to change gears and manage the growth that will ensue. The technology landscape is in a constant state of flux, and correspondingly it is also leading to changes in the customer expectations and behaviour. “In this backdrop, we as a company should be ready to not only continue

working successfully in a high growth environment but also match up to the demands of the customers. Technology can prove to be a lever. IT has become a big part of the conversation in the group as a whole. This year the focus is much more though. At Edelweiss Tokio too, the growth will be powered by IT such that the customer experience is superior and there is ease of doing business” says Nilesh Parmar, Chief Operating Officer, Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance.

The company’s CEO and MD, Deepak Mittal, recently quoted on the company’s plans to invest in digital technologies after Edelweiss Tokio got a capital infusion of `670 crore, from Edelweiss Financial Services and Tokio Marine Holdings, “This capital infusion will support our expansion plans, and in particular, the development of our bancassurance channel. We are also significantly enhancing our technology and digital platforms,” says Mittal.

“Our IT budget is currently about 7-10 per cent of the overall expenditure, and a significant part of the budget will be invested in project transcend” states Parmar.

Investments in IT were made only in certain selected areas like actuary, finance, investment etc. However there was no presence of technology in the peripherals (where the customer interactions and processing of the requests happen. The solutions in the periphery request information from the core and get the response back). The company decided to partner with IBM for the business transformation to see the business as a whole and accordingly fit the

technology architecture into the business processes to gear up the company for the high growth path.

The company has taken a call to demise the legacy systems and replace it with a consolidated platform from IBM. The objective was to gallop from point and piecemeal solutions to scalable and advanced platforms, which are enabled with new age technologies.

Digital Project ‘Transcend’ to bring business transformation The existent solution portfolio will not stand the current growth run rate and the growth guidance expected in the future. “This year, Edelweiss Tokio is expected to grow at 80 per cent YoY and this trend is expected to continue, for the next few years,” says Parmar. Project Transcend, the company’s digital project will create a scalable and flexible platform to cater to the increasing volumes and customer demand. It entails multiple technology solutions viz. CRM, workflow, document management, mobility platforms, portals, analytics etc. The business functions will have access to these solutions over the next few months. The first phase involves the new business processes using these solutions in select branches.

As they get stabilised, gradually they will be rolled out in all the branches.

The core solution used by the company is Ingenium. It will not undergo any changes.The core systems will not be touched. Applications like CRM, workflows, which are at times not seamless- when there are solutions created for each

process. These will all be now integrated under a single platform. The document management platform is also more scalable than before. The homegrown portals evolved over the years without any underlying platform will be replaced by a dedicated platform to host new portals and also build portals on the fly.

For tab based services, the solution will allow to run the application across different operating systems. Hitherto, the application was designed by a partner and it was operating only with certain configurations and on specific OS, however, going forward it will be flexible.

Data analytics is being used in different processes, sales, risk management. The newly bought data analytics and data management platform will congregate data from multiple sources. Subsequently data models can be run on the platform. There are multiple algorithms available to conduct experiments, etc.

Working with Fintech As far as adopting new technologies is concerned, Edelweiss Tokio has been doing some exploratory work with the Blockchain Technology, however there are talks going on at the consortium level. Once there is a concrete decision taken by the consortium that the company will see this technology with much more vigour. “Chatbots is also being experimented upon and the company will go live with chatbots soon. RPA has been adopted in two processes,” states Parmar. Bots are used for pulling publicly available data / disclosures from all the life insurance companies in India. This information is being

used for various analytical purposes. Another bot creates a policy bond, which contains the bond itself, the proposal form, medical reports, etc. The bot pulls these documents from different applications and puts it together as one single entity.

From then on, it is despatched to the customer through email.

The company has started using machine learning to identify fraudulent customers at the underwriting stage.

Edelweiss Tokio was the first company to do risk grading at the source. ML nabs the malicious information right at the underwriting stage and prevents fraudulent applications. It helps in risk modelling to give a risk score.

If the risk score is high i.e if propensity of the application to be fraudulent is high, then additional due diligence is carried out and following the results, the applications are either accepted or rejected.

The risk model is ML enabled and as new data is being run, the ML engine recommends the next action based on historical data. The engine is also taught in case if a parameter needs a change.

Wrapping the channel network with tab based selling Formed in 2017, the Direct Sales Agents (DSA) channel was made digital from the beginning. The DSAs are equipped with tabs and all the activities, be it sending emails, lead management is all done on the tab. Even for the Bancassurance channel, close to 80 per cent business is sourced through the tabs.

Earlier, the insurance forms were delivered physically, which took days to be delivered, however now, it happens

TECH INITIATIVES FOR AGENCY BIZ ◗ Agency Portals

Helps the agents to access information on the agent schemes, incentives, commission statement

◗ Tab based application was

60 percent of the business is sourced through tabs on the agent side. This is expected to reach 85-90 percent in the next six months

◗ Need based selling

Apps have been created for agents to learn how do do need based selling. This is separate from a sales app, which guides the salesforce to understand the customer journey

launched in March 2017

As far as adopting new technologies is concerned, Edelweiss Tokio has been doing some exploratory work with the Blockchain Technology, however there are talks going on at the consortium level Nilesh Parmar, Chief Operating Officer, Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance

instantly. Edelweiss Tokio has a bancassurance tieup with Catholic Syrian Bank.

The broker channel also uses tabs for business acquisition, however not all of them use tabs. Moreover, the Edelweiss group companies also partners to sell policies and they use tabs too. “Apart from tab based selling, we also use browser based selling.

They are eKYC enabled.

Aadhaar authentication can be done through them and thus KYC documents are not required. This does come with some caveat with respect to the challenges faced by the citizens

but the Government is trying to solve them. Yet these facilities were not available a few months back,” says Parmar.

For eKYC, the success is more than doing offline KYC registrations.

The linkage of the company with their channels is through APIs, “Our plan is to create an public API platform which will allow us to expose us to as many players as we can,” he adds.

Overall, 70 per cent of the business is acquired on the digital medium however, it’s not purely digital. It’s either digital or assisted digital.

INTERVIEW

HDFC Life is bullish on blockchain, AI and bots GOING AHEAD WITH its third phase of digital strengthening, HDFC Life is committing itself to adoption of emerging technologies. EC’s Abhishek Raval and Mohit Rathod speak with Subrat Mohanty, Senior Executive Vice President, HDFC Life How do you look at the role of technology while strategizing for your business ?

In my role of looking after corporate strategy, technology, digital and operations at HDFC Life, I have seen technology evolve from being a key enabler to business to firmly establishing itself at the front and center of our strategy for the foreseeable future. We see this across three horizons – first is to become a digital insurer, making sure that all the mid-office and back-office functions are automated, straight-through, frictionless, so that the customer journey is seamless. This requires us to make ourselves move to zeropaper, zero-branches – that's what we have been working on for the last three years. This was enabled by a fundamental restructuring and re-architecturing of the technology stack, making sure the middleware is robust and separate from the core system, and the frontend is flexible and customer centric. As a digital insurer, we have taken the entire insurance service and product offerings and made it modular. It is provided as a standalone technology module to the customers – this is very important for our strategy in order to be relevant to our customers. All the aspects such as making APIs accessible, developing progressive web applications are part of this.

This can't be just the responsibility of the technology team, which is why the strategy team has been embedded into this – this is how we run some of our strategic initiatives on a multi-year horizon. For instance we are in our third

year of the Mobility initiative while our STP and frictionless initiative is in its second year.

Also under the first horizon, we have an organization-wide automation platform that has over 50 bots operating with the help of a few vendor partners.

We identified three different stacks of automation solutions based on our needs. One of which was simply around desktop automation; the second was RPA, and the third was cognitive. For all the three stacks, we started pilot projects by late 2015 with different vendors and partners.

For example, earlier we used to have medical reports which would go through a long process. Now after scanning of the reports, we have placed a bot which reads the report and compares them with a reference range. This starts highlighting the cases that are higher or lower than the reference range. It significantly saves time of the underwriter.

Similarly, we have multiple email and chat bots and an NLP based virtual assisstant for all our sales and services staff that can answer every single query of theirs on any our current or past products instantly.

The second horizon is that of platforms and ecosystems that are emerging. We believe that in the next three-five years consumers will owe allegiance to certain ecosystems to meet most of their buying needs. For instance, an e-commerce ecosystem might provide shopping, food delivery, grocery and payments options in a single networked community. We have identified six other such ecosystems that might have relevance to life insurance products and our

focus is to make oursleves the preferred partner for those ecosystems. This requires a very different way of thinking about technology that matches with the pace and demands of such ecosystems. Separately, we believe, similarly, there's an ecosystem which could be orchestrated by an insurer – this could be around retirement, wellness, health, corporate services and more.

We are betting on creating a couple of such ecosystems ourselves as we go forward.

The third horizon is slightly longer term and we are building optionality in trying them out at this stage. This includes adoption of blockchain, thinking of different ways to sell insurance using AI and machine learning tools and parameterized insurance. These won’t have resonance immediately (or might never), but we are keen on learning about them.

Across all of these initiatives, how are you using technology differently than a conventional life insurance company?

In all of these initiatives, the entire methodology is agile.

Open source platforms are employed as much as possible, alongside using cloud in order to manage the infrastructure.

The attempt is to keep ourselves in line with the wants of our B2B partners and consumers. For example, for a few years, we had to do a dedupe with our customer at the frontend and ask for the details, which would be then processed at the backend before providing the results.

Now with new age technologies, we can get this

information in seconds – these are the things that we are already using, ensuring that we don't repeat some of the past errors.

Additionally, we have already been using DevOps and microservices – this is the way forward. A lot of our current partners are completely different than our previous partners. For instance, these partners are building our new underwriting rule engine using some of these principles, rather than the classic monolithic approach.

Also, there’s a way we have seen we can calibrate our strategic initiatives with the fast changing technology options that are available. A good example is our Mobility journey. Our first aim was to ensure that the entire sales journey can be made available on mobile. We created a completely digitized point of sale (PoS) application, which can be used on a mobile or tablet device. We then created a host of specific solutions that we called the 'InstaSuite' which enabled the zero paper, zero branch presence for our Sales staff. This was how Mobility 1.0 got done. Mobility 2.0 was around making these tools as platforms upon which we can create new ways of doing business – like integrating with our Bank/NBFC partners, creating an entire training and certification module on the go or a mobile hiring module among others. Under Mobility 3.0, which is almost getting completed, we have extended these further to include geo based services, hyper personalization and to our services platform. For instance, we have InstaServe,

wherein any of our colleagues can serve our customers on the most frequently transacted services anywhere, anytime on the mobile.

From a bottom line perspective, there are various metrics involving ratios such as combined expense ratio or the settlement ratio. How does the use of advanced technologies affect these ratios?

We are a fairly self-critical management team that’s constantly asking if we are getting the RoI for these investments. It isn’t an easy task to justify the investment otherwise. This is an ongoing exercise where the technology and digital teams are learning and getting better at identifying what metrics are they impacting.

I will cite our performance on a few metrics that we have gotten better at based on some of the examples I have mentioned earlier. One of our strengths is the number of corporate partners that we have (over 150) that has allowed us to scale our group

business significantly. Among other reasons, our technology platform that allows us to onboard, integrate and provide added value to our partners has been quite instrumental in this journey.

The other metric is the improvement in efficiency of the sales funnel. Using the mobility platform, intelligent analysis of data and persoanlization tools, you can streamline the process, thereby increasing productivity. Our growth is largely led by volume increase; we are selling good protection plans at smaller ticket price – this is again possible due to technology.

We have been able to do predictive analysis at the stage of business login itself to prevent frauds. This will help quality of business and over a period of time the experience on claims, persistency and quality parameters (vis-a-vis the assumptions we have made) will start getting in line or lower. This is an important was to improve the embedded value of our business and this is further enabled through good use of data and analytics.

In the company's opinion, how is technology becoming central?

In our board meetings, we have at least one-two topics on technology, mulling on how to get better at partner acquisition, how do we ensure better ability to deliver on our assumptions, and how technology is helping our customers get better advice, a seamless onboarding experience and services on the go. We spend a lot of time talking about reimagning insurance through technology

and data and on platforms and ecosystems during our annual strategy discussions with the Board. We share our experiences, bring in international practitioners and we seek the guidance on our plans. Technology, its likely impact and our plans in the digital space are part of our everyday discussion among the leadership team.

Cyber security is critical for the BFSI sector. Does HDFC Life have an independent director on cyber security?

From a regulatory perspective, we need to have a cyber security policy which is ratified by the board, and a cyber security roadmap. We started this two years ago, proactively. We presented a three-year plan of the cyber security roadmap which gets discussed in every board meeting. The plan is running to its schedule. Every month, we have a review with our cyber security head, wherein big global incidents are discussed and we plan steps to protect the organisation from such incidents. We also did an independent audit and assessment of our cyber security infrastructure, wherein we were scored the best in the insurance space – almost comparable with banks.

What are the company’s plans for the third horizon this year?

Blockchain is definitely one interesting area. Voice technology is another, especially in India. We continue to remain paranoid about being disrupted so we stay humble and we keep our eyes and ears wide open.

EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

10 | FEATURE

Mafatlal Industries reports 30-40% cost savings with SD WAN deployment WITH UNSTABLE NETWORK infrastructure affecting business efficiency, Mafatlal Industries’ adoption of SD WAN solutions has resulted in significant cost savings and increased business efficiency

Mohit Rathod mohit.rathod@indianexpress.com

I

ndian textile major, Mafatlal Industries has marked over 30 per cent of cost savings following the company’s IT infrastructure revamping efforts. Mafatlal Industries’ growth led to the need to expand its IT setup as well. This included implementing an ERP system and centralizing the varied functions across different locations. As all the IT systems and the various functions became centralized, the company felt the need for having a strong and dependable networking

looking at solutions that were already available in the market. However, it was always a pain-point for us that we had to pay to the connectivity provider for a link, which we wouldn’t get until the actual one is affected. The company wasn’t comfortable with this bad equation. The SD WAN concept then kicked in, and we started looking at various other OEMs’ offerings.

However, Citrix combined our MPLS link and internet link together, allowing us to use both the links effectively and optimally. That made us inclined towards Citrix and further look at other offerings it offers,” he informs.

With Citrix NetScaler SD WAN over traditional MPLS link to build redundancy in its network, Mafatlal achieved total cost savings of 30-40 per cent while doubling the bandwidth capacity and maximizing the throughput.

infrastructure in place. As part of its networking infrastructure, the company already had a primary MPLS internet link of 10 mbps in place. However, in order to ensure a reliable network and one that would not get impacted by any downtime to the primary link, it needed to build in redundancy.

Overall, the SD WAN technology met the company’s key criterion of providing a redundant network, reliable connectivity. As part of its vendor evaluation process, Mafatlal shortlisted SD WAN solutions from Citrix and other OEMs. The company started its implementation of Citrix

Netscaler SD WAN in January 2017 and went live by May 2017.

Speaking about the major challenges faced by the company prior to SD WAN implementation, Shibin Chulliparambil, Head – IT, Mafatlal Industries, says, “We didn’t have good connectivity network acrosss locations. It was very weak and we were looking to revamp the network. However, even after the revamping, the connectivity wasn’t stable in remote locations; there were frequent disconnections and drop in packets. We were evaluating a backup link across our locations, and starting looking at solutions

that could address the problem. This is where Citrix SD WAN came into picture.

Earlier, video conferencing were not happening properly, there were also ERP connectivity and application distractions. ERP and SAP was one major issue, because the production halts if the ERP goes down. Human Resource Management System (HRMS) was also impacted across locations, alongside video conferencing and several homegrown applications that we had developed internally.”

SD WAN over secondary MPLS link One option in front of

Mafatlal was to go for a secondary MPLS line.

However, according to the company, this turned out to be a costly proposition as while the secondary MPLS link would cost as much as the primary MPLS link, it would not be utilized as much.

Considering the drawback in going for a secondary MPLS link, the company decided to look for an alternative technology option. “Following the connectivity revamping across locations, the company was looking at backup links and servers – if the primary ones get affected, the secondary ones could take the load. We were

Benefits observed Besides acting as a redundant line, Citrix Netscaler SD WAN has also helped increase the overall internet bandwidth capacity.

As the SD WAN line remains active all the time, its 10 mbps bandwidth gets clubbed with the 10 mbps of the primary MPLS line, to offer a total of 20 mbps bandwidth capacity.

“Our remote locations earlier faced frequent disconnections, but the same continued post Citrix SD WAN deployment too; however, the better part is that no work was being affected due to the MPLS link going down – this was possible because Citric clubbed both MPLS and internet links and made it into a combined pipe. There was a

There are many strategies we are working on; we are a company which has just begun its digital transformation and there are many plans for 2018 as well.

We are doing networking and application upgradation. We will be slowly starting our digital initiatives, alongside expanding our online presence Shibin Chulliparambil, Head – IT, Mafatlal Industries

slight performance degrade due to the bandwidth getting impacted, but there was no business outage and the work continued. This is the major achievement that we have observed,” shares Chulliparambil.

Speaking about the company’s IT strategy for 2018 and ahead, he adds, “There are many strategies we are working on; we are a company which has just begun its digital transformation and there are many plans for 2018 as well. We are doing networking and application upgradation. We will be slowly starting our digital initiatives, alongside expanding our online presence.”

Technology has the power to transform healthcare in India RIDING HIGH ON the rapid stride of digital transformation in the health sector in India, Royal Philips, a Netherlands based healthcare player believes this change will bring strong opportunities for the global player.

The company is looking to bring in a major shift in the way it operates in India so far and make the business processes simpler and seamless Sandhya Michu sandhya.michu@expressindia.com

T

echnology has the power to transform healthcare, both inside and outside the hospital. It’s a huge shift for Philips. “We are 125-year-old Europe’s largest electronics maker with an established connect as a consumer electronics brand, but now we are leveraging this strength in the field of health tech so we could drive better outcomes for patients. If you see most of our products revolve around healthcare, lifestyle, and wellness. Our life-saving health equipment are used in hospitals worldwide,” explains Royal Philips’ Group Chief Information Officer Alpna J Doshi.

Doshi steers the technology initiatives at Royal Philips and manages 17 countries including India. As part of digital initiatives, the company is taking a big step to

implement 'One ERP' platform where India market will be connected to rest of the world.

This step aims to simplify the access to the market for the goods, while the supply chain will be more transparent and robust. Another area for the company is to be part of various Government of India led projects like Digital India, Smart Cities, as consumers and healthcare providers are looking for connected devices.

When asked how she looks at the India's market contribution as compared to other APAC markets, she states, “In APAC, I still think India needs to play a big role and keep the pace up. I am trying to get the foundation done from Philips standpoint and get the infrastructure to be digitally ready. It is one of my low hanging areas to begin with. India is a very complex market and it's not easy to manoeuvre around. The supply chain is not fully automated

and largely offline. The aspects which are sort of mundane in SAP environment, if you are sending the goods, then how do you get automation in terms of notification and invoices?

These things take a lot of time and manpower. We need to work towards changing the dynamics in the broader landscape which means that many people will have to change the way of working. In the whole of Asia Pacific, we see tremendous business opportunities in India.”

Technology is the backbone For Royal Philips, the journey has been around building the digital ecosystem for its health-tech services.

The company is banking high on the Internet of Things (IoT)

and creating connected healthcare experience. On top of that, it is using robotics from its enterprise IT point of view.

“We are putting efforts to automate the business process and applying technologies like blockchain, virtual reality, augmented reality and robotics to build PoC for our healthcare services first and scale up the size later.

Healthcare in remote areas is also our major focus. Despite the connectivity and infrastructure related challenges, we are continuing to invest more in creating solutions, where it has now made rapid strides,” Doshi highlights.

Explaining the company’s approach, she comments, “Healthcare is now based on

Technology will play an enabler's role for us. We have a target of touching three billion lives by 2020. Through our digital initiatives like ‘One ERP’ and e-commerce, we can formulate definite plans for the local market Alpna J Doshi, Global Chief Information Officer, Royal Philips

sick care. We wait for people to get ill and then fix them. That’s not a sustainable model if healthcare is to scale to meet the needs of our growing population. We have to help people before they get sick and we have to treat the illness.”

Philips’ medical devices such as MRI and CT scanner machines are connected to their cloud servers, which contain over 23 petabytes of data, tracking over 250 million patients around the world. “Technology allows a healthcare provider to interrogate that data and do critical diagnostic support at the point of care. It is enabling a lot of new experiences, but my role is to make that technology usable for the users. We use augmented reality for a surgical navigation system.

Another recent project was an ultrasound on-the-go and imaging app, designed for healthcare practitioners serving in remote villages to conduct diagnostic checks via a simple transponder and an Android mobile phone,” says Doshi.

Priorities in India The January 2018 kick-off for Royal Philips is all about driving digital health services and introducing common and harmonized processes for the India market that are seamless for the rest of the world. It intends to leverage the competency and talent pool of India much more than before.

“Technology will play an enabler's role for us. We have a target of touching three billion lives by 2020. Through our digital initiatives like 'One ERP'

and e-commerce, we can formulate definite plans for the local market,” Doshi asserts.

One of the milestones the company is achieving in 2018 is bringing 50-60 kinds of ERPs together in order to come to one seamless environment. So far countries like North America, Africa, Central and Eastern European Countries are connected and now it is going towards completing the rest of the world this year.

The company had a number of ERPs like SAP and Oracle and others. But now it has consolidated its vision to have one SAP environment. The strategy is in the architecture of going from so many to maybe a half a dozen in the beginning and further come down to single ERP. “We will connect 17 markets from health systems business be it diagnostics, imaging or connected healthcare products. We are going live in this March in India. We are launching one common ERP worldwide in March 2018 and the same ERP to be used by India. It's a big transformation as it will change the way as our personal health business users work. Where they can ship the goods directly, there is no need to have intermediaries, they can have the automation done from notification, invoices standpoint, you can order the product and change the order.

Like Fedex and Amazon kind of experience. The breakthroughs have been both in change management and technology: come up with one common technology rather than a plethora of technologies that exist,” Doshi concludes.

EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

| 11

OPINION Nandkishore Purohit Head – Digital Business, Strategy, HDFC Securities

Digitization: Transition not seamless, yet essential

D

igital is not a futuristic word anymore, rather it has gone deep into the very fabric of organizations who are eager to use intelligence from customer’s behavioural pattern to serve them better. ‘Being digital’ today is a business necessity, a much required industry adoption required to expand reach and provide quality service. With the backdrop of expecting quick and effective integration of technology, the digital journey has its own roadblocks – especially understanding customer habits. The difficulty in living up to customers’ and employees’ expectations is the main challenge often faced by

companies where very few have evolved fully as a digital player and are apparently performing markedly better.

The real journey for digital transformation starts from the mind – rather than figuring out how to be digital, we need to answer elemental questions like what is digital and why we should be adopting it. The industry has witnessed a lot of failed digital ecosystems just because the adoption pace has overtaken the business objectivity.

Digital transition is not seamless and it will continue to be so unless companies realize that it’s not a threat, rather an opportunity waiting to be explored. Employees unwilling

to move from a status quo stance are problematic, which along with corporate politics and insecurity, form a formidable barrier for digital transition. Overcoming the legacy systems and the comfort which people enjoy around it become difficult as they have been using them for a long time. Instead of attempting to push innovation and completely overhauling the legacy systems (as a few of them are mission-critical and much required to ensure business continuity), businesses should work out the best approach for innovating today and optimizing for tomorrow. Digital innovation should be undertaken while

keeping the business purposes and the current digital maturity level in mind.

Businesses should work in partnership with experts in digital innovation and transformation to deploy agile delivery techniques and spend the IT budget intelligently.

Customer experience is a top driver of digital innovation where organizations should map their processes to the customer journey. Many innovations today fail because they miss out on this crucial element. Today’s connected customers differ in fundamental ways from customers of the past.

Therefore, businesses must drive innovation combined

with artificial intelligence, including machine learning, predictive and prescriptive analytics.

One of the key deterrents to a complete digital transformation is the fear of failing. While being cautious is not a bad idea because of the investments involved, one cannot have the rebuke of failure cloud the greater purpose of ‘digitization’. This is where the senior leadership’s role becomes instrumental to make the apparent cultural change easy and non-threatening. The elemental mistake would be to change and expect to change too quickly, thereby opening quite a few avenues for conflict. A digital transition and transformation plan needs to be implemented in phases with in-house employees advocating the benefits of being digital. Hence, the success of internal drivers for digital change is much higher than a management mandate.

This is particularly the reason why one would notice a lot of young (tech savvy) talent at the mid management level driving the digital agenda.

An environment conducive for innovation is required in organizations to nurture a digital vision. Unfortunately, resources are devoted to dayto-day business so that few remain for innovative prospects. This is a particular point of concern because it forms the ground for losing out

on competitive advantage.

Progressive industry players become market champions only because they are willing to spend the time and resources behind cementing a digital road. Managers need to identify the future potential of new ideas rather than discount them by factoring current challenges for implementation.

Focus on short-term results drives out ideas that take longer to mature – which in turn might be extremely beneficial for the company.

Hence managers should consciously stay away from looking for flaws immediately in new innovative ideas.

From the financial sector perspective, we can see a very vibrant partnership between institutions and fintechs. As a result of these partnerships, low-income customers who are left out or poorly served by the financial sector will have greater access to higher quality, more convenient, and less expensive products and services. However, to reach this scale, organizations will have to mentally upgrade themselves to operate digitally.

Will it be seamless – probably not: will it be worth it – definitely yes!

We must understand that if we strategize around our products and not our customers, we are travelling on a sinking ship. With each day, our customers are evolving and are trying out different channels of

communication and transaction. If we do not expand our horizon to provide a truly omni-channel experience to our customers, we will have to bear the burden of seeing them leave for other service providers. With the advent of blockchain, public cloud and artificial intelligence, we believe we can understand our customers better and give them very specific offerings according to their appetite and likings – across channels.

The beauty of the digital world lies in the fact that there is always room to do more, to think more. It is synonymous to an artist’s widespread canvas where the possibilities are as rich as one’s imagination.

Digital is the evolutionary phase of customer service, presenting a great opportunity to unlock their orientation.

With many miles of unchartered digital territory, there is scope for all sized players, a fact which should encourage organizations to become fundamentally digital.

Focusing on what customers need and at what comfort levels are at the epicentre of digital strategy and innovation today. There is an untapped market for digital penetrationespecially rural India where smartphone users are poised to rise substantially by 2020.

Businesses will need to be digital to scale the geographical wall and reach out to masses.

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EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2018

12 | OPINION Shyam Sundar Banik, General Manager, (Alternate Delivery Channels), Bank of India

Invisible banking for all

G

iant leaps in technology enabled the banks to embrace internet banking and the age of glass introduced the mobile phone, which has become the form factor for managing our busy lifestyles.

Now, we are entering the age of invisible banking where the bank of the future will integrate seamlessly into customers’ everyday lives Most banks claim to be on the digital transformation journey. However, winning innovation awards, agile training certificates for thousands of staff and photographs featuring senior managers with hackathon winners does not equate to a digital bank.

Indeed, most are simply adding more complexity on top of already strained systems and staff. This will ultimately increase cost, reduce agility and weaken competitive positioning.

Time may already be running out for banks that have not already figured this out. The good news for them is that they too can achieve the feat of invisibility by simply disappearing altogether.

Invisible banking is about consistent and frequent interaction. Invisible banking enabled by the development of AI, allows the interaction to be bespoke, meaningful and hands free.

The evolutionary history of banking has paved the way for invisible banking from its inception with brick and mortar, where the customer

visits the bank approximately four times per year to the age of mobile banking where the bank comes to the customer.

Provides transparency Invisible banking is transparent, with simple terms and conditions. It engenders trust, supports the consumers’ lifestyle by providing insight into their finances whilst giving them value added services to help them achieve their goals through financial freedom.

Invisible banking enabled by the development of AI, allows the interaction to be bespoke, meaningful and hands free Pushes the limits of innovation through collaboration Innovation in invisible banking relies on finding the right ecosystem of partners and building seamless banking solutions to meet the desires and needs of the consumer – and this is where the age of invisible banking is truly making a difference in the banking ecosystem.

How does invisible banking differ from the traditional bank?

The introduction of fintech

challengers has not only disrupted the traditional banking model, putting pressure on banks and financial institutions to digitally transform themselves, but it has also significantly shifted the focus of consumers’ expectations.

Consumers expect more from their banks and this is clearly evident while comparing statistics between “traditional” and “invisible banking” in five key areas: ◗ Onboarding - The process for a bank to board a customer traditionally took 10 days, whereas, today onboarding can take place on the same day or in as little as four minutes for both personal and business banking account setups. This is largely due to the next generation of KYC processes and the immediate issuing of virtual cards, whilst the consumer waits for the plastic version to arrive. ◗ Interactions - Fintech banks such as Monzo have realized the importance of customer interactions in building relationships, and are now proactively reaching out to create online communities around their services, and in some cases ‘interacting’ with their customers on average eight times per day. Traditionally, customer driven interactions by banks were limited to three times per week. For example, Revolut has a sophisticated

Key functions of the invisible bank Analytics

Treasury Liquidity management ●

Balance sheet optimization

Solutions

Key functions of the invisible bank

Data services ●

Credit risk

Operations Management of outsourced ‘process’ layer

‘Product’ design ●

Interactions with platforms/distribution app that provides general spend and FX data all in one, with real-time notification of FX rates and in-app chat for support. ◗ Giving customers controlCutting edge features provided by fintechs are giving customers’ high visibility and control over their financial data in the palm of their hand.

This control will increase with the upcoming implementation of PSD2 and GDPR that are giving control back to the customers.

◗ Notifications by leveraging social media and in-app communications- The fintech banks can react realtime to customer activity to provide advice to improve financial wellbeing, acting like an invisible financial advisor.

Currently, customers receive notifications two times per day in comparison to the traditional one notification per week by banks. The likes of Loot and Pockit offer realtime notifications of spend, cash back earned, daily budget updates or pin change

notification, all before the card is lifted from the terminal or returned from the ATM. ◗ Speed of Innovation- Speed and agility are the keys for the successful implementation of fintech solutions powering invisible banking. Traditional banks can take up to 18 months to develop new technologies whereas fintech banks and their partners are delivering projects to market in three months!

Traditional banks have

inherited from old legacy frameworks, which have limited their capabilities to innovate fast and keep up with the rapid changing pace of the current banking landscape.

To be able to continue to compete and remain relevant to their customers, they will need to accelerate their innovation speed in the age of invisible banking, where the fintech approach is ‘fail quick and evolve’. So, “Will traditional banks embrace the age of invisible banking or disappear?”