Intro: Finnoviti 2014 and Technoviti 2014, organized by Banking Frontiers at IBEX 2015 in Mumbai, showcased the technology innovations by banks and financial services institutions in their product and service offerings and in the way technology is being used, and by technology companies that offer banking and financial services specifit products and services to the BFSI sector. At these two events, the innovators behind these innovations were recognized and honoured and their respective innovations explained to the audience. Here are the details of the innovations that won accolades at these two events:
Winners – Finnoviti
1. ICICI Bank Pockets by ICICI Bank
2. ICICI Bank Tap-n- Pay
3. ICICI Bank Insta Banking
4. Kotak Mahindra Bank Kay Pay
5. Kotak Mahindra Bank Insta Balance
6. Citibank My Citi Rewards – Facebook App
7. Citibank CitiDirect Banking Evolution
8. State Bank of India Analytics at SBI
9. State Bank of India Performance Planning & Budgeting
10. Federal Bank Scan N Pay
11. IndusInd Bank Face to Face Banking through Video Branch
12. NPCI National Unified USSD Platform
13. IndiaFirst Life Insurance Co IndiaFirst CSC Shubhlabh Plan
14. Kotak Securities Smart Order Routing
15. ICICI Lombard General Insurance Business Assurance
16. Canara Bank Canara e-infobook
17. YES Bank Incentivizing Customers through discount coupons
18. Janalaksmi Financial Services Jana Jeevan Card
19. Reliance Capital Mobile Pre-Inspection System
20. HDFC Life My Mix
21. Union Bank of India Tabulous Banking
22. HDFC Bank Exadata Upgrade
23. Balaj Allianz General Insurance Digitized Policy Servicing Module
24. RBL Bank Best ESB Deployment
25. SBI Life Insurance Digitization of Sales Process
ICICI Bank is judged as the top winner with highest number of nominations
ICICI Bank
Innovation: Pockets
‘Pockets’ is a banking app on Facebook. It is mainly targeted at the young, tech-savvy, digitally-oriented customer segment and performs the dual functionality of servicing and engaging young users through social media channels and enabling them to perform regular banking activities. It has logged over 20,000 users – the highest number for any ‘Facebook banking app’ globally.
Innovation: Tap-n- Pay
‘Tap-n-Pay’ transforms a mobile phone into a wallet. It is a product, which is part of the bank’s Mobile Money. There are no cash payments but there is an inbuilt NFC facility which enables over-the-counter payments. It can be used for payments at campuses, for transport as well as at toll booths. As a pilot project, Tap-n-pay enrolled around 8,000 employees across major towers pan India.
Innovation: Insta Banking
‘Insta Banking’ is a self-service kiosk installed along with ‘May I Help You’ desk within a branch to provide superior banking experience to customers. The objective is faster transaction processing, reduced wait time, freedom from filling physical forms, and improved productivity of branch employees. The bank has deployed some 250 Insta Banking kiosks at major branches across 37 cities, some 2 million transactions have happened since launch.
Kotak Mahindra Bank
Innovation: Kay Pay
Kay Pay is a payments platform, which is described as seamless and frictionless and as easy as cash but does not require cash. It eliminates the requirement of beneficiary registration and visits to bank branches for registration for net banking or mobile banking or funds transfer, ensures total security and facilitates attachment of a message to the recipient along with the fund transfer. The service allows funds transfer with the ecosystem of 28 banks offering NPCI’s IMPS P2M pull service and enables more than 250 million customers of these 28 supporting bank to transfer money to any of their Facebook friends without knowing their bank account details.
Innovation: Insta Balance
The bank has developed Insta Balance to facilitate customers get their account balance without agent assistance or login to any channel. A customer has to call a toll-free number from his registered mobile number the system will greet the customer and confirm that he will receive SMS for his request shortly. The call is disconnected (this process takes 5 seconds). Instantly, the system identifies all account linked to the mobile number and fetches balance of the accounts and sends the same to the customer as SMS/s. (this usually takes less than 30 seconds). Up to 10 accounts can be serviced for a mobile number.
Citibank
Innovation: My Citi Rewards
My Citi Rewards is a Facebook app to enable customers of the bank to interact with the bank and redeem rewards points with ease and basis their convenience. It has proved to be an engaging platform for the bank to self-promote the benefits of its credit cards. There are various links within the app which will direct the prospects to an instant decision form for a card of their choice. The app also enables the bank to directly interact with its customers on social platforms and provide them with customized solutions basis their social behaviors.
Innovation: CitiDirect BE
CitiDirect Banking Evolution is a next generation online banking platform providing a single point of entry into a complete suite of corporate banking and cash management services. With a single log-on to CitiDirect BE, clients are able to access numerous treasury and trade products and solutions to address both their local and global banking needs in the areas of receivables, trade, liquidity and investments, as well as payments (cross-border and domestic) and reporting. This portal provides seamless access to new analytic applications such as trend analytics scorecards, self-service tools and interactive business intelligence functionality.
State Bank of India
Innovation: Analytics at SBI
There are two initatives. The first one is analytics on foreign inward remittances, under which payments data from payment hub and SWIFT is analyzed along with the corresponding NEFT outward transactions going to other banks. Payments data pertaining to Global Link Services products along with corresponding beneficiary data, is also analyzed to determine transactions going to other banks. A centralized repository is made for storing historical transactions of all remittance products which are maintained by different specialized departments and system is made for collating remittance files from each country in once place. The second initiative is ATM analytics solution with cash optimization under which cash forecasting models are built using analytics tools, based on historical data for all the ATMs and parameters like withdrawal amount / cash refill, day of the week / week of the month and major events / geography wise festivals /holidays & weekends.
Innovation: Automation of Budgeting Process
The Dynamic Budget Application and TM1 Application, is an in-house developed web based centralized solution, which enables a top-down/bottom-up flow of structured budget, dynamic user interface with maker–checker provisions, single page console for data entry, status monitoring, up-linked with TM1 application to make available controllers, extensive use of derived fields and cross page derived fields to minimize data entry efforts and serving as source data for the performance-reporting, application, creating a complete cycle.
Federal Bank
Innovation: Scan N Pay
Scan N Pay is a mobile application, first of its kind in the industry, for interbank fund transfer using the IMPS (24×7) facility. It is developed in-house. The required information for transaction is scanned from a QR code exhibited by mobile in case of an individual customer or display connected to the POS terminal of the merchant. The merchant (recipient) can key in the amount and bill No into the app to generate a QR Code and the customer (payer) can scan the QR code and initiate payment simply by inputting the MPIN. The transactions then happen real time and payment confirmation is received by both recipient and payer instantaneously.
Indusind Bank
Innovation: Face-to-Face Banking through Video Branch
The bank created a dedicated 24X7 Video Branch Centre to cater to the customers’ banking needs with 30 minute service assurance for select transactions. Customers can do Video Banking with RMs or branch managers at pre-defined time. Customers can also visit Video Branch through the website without the need to download the app. It is virtually meet the bank manager from where the customer desires and through whatever device he or she has.
NPCI
Innovation: National Unified USSD Platform
NUUP is an NPCI initiative to bring banking closer to the common man. It is supported by DFS, IBA and TRAI and has banks as well as telecom service providers as the members. Customers can access the service by dialling *99# through its telecom service providers (GSM service). The platform is intended to provide round-the-clock, real-time, access to banking services, facilitate the process of financial inclusion and contribute towards the process of electronification of retail payment systems. It works across all handsets/GSM service providers, the service is available while roaming, with no additional charges and there is no need of GPRS connectivity or additional app download. The service is currently available in 11 languages offers real time fund transfer.
IndiaFirst Life Insurance Co
Innovation: IndiaFirst CSC Shubhlabh Plan
Shubhlabh is a mass market insurance plan exclusively available through the Common Service Centres (CSC) set up by the government of India. The insurance plan is formulated, finalized and issued on the spot and the customer is handed a Policy Information Sheet by the Village Level Entrepreneur, responsible for each CSC outlet. The process is a paperless and is a simplified application process. All the policy servicing requirements have been enabled through the portal, so the customer can have all requests addressed at the CSC outlet itself. The KYC is done through Aadhar with biometric authentication.
Kotak Securities
Innovation: Smart Order routing
Smart Order Routing, or SOR, is a facility that gets the best price for a trader’s buy/sell orders on available exchanges. The system automatically compares the price of stock across the available exchanges and helps the customer get the best price instantly. There is no need to manually search for a better price while placing an order. The system does it in a matter of seconds. SOR can be used to get the best price for Buy as well as Sell orders. The service is offered free of charge.
ICICI Lombard General Insurance
Innovation: Business Assurance
Cashless claim process has challenges like technology and business remained in silos, technology uptime and SLA cound not guarantee business process SLA, there were technology TAT and business TAT alignment issues and lack of communication with business on outages. The company undertook a study and mapping of business procss flow and validation by business, identification of all technology components involved in business process, modelling of business process, measure and take action on utilization, uptime, top incident cateogories and top polluters, incident and problem management and pattern-based analysis and infra agility. The result was business process view with predictability and pattern based analysis helped understand transaction pattern and take proactive actions than reactive.
Canara Bank
Innovation: Canara e-infobook
Canara e-InfoBook is an electronic passbook facility available on mobile handsets. The app supports multiple operating systems, is network agnostic, and can be used on all variety of handsets supporting internet facility and specified operating systems. The services available to customers through Canara e-InfoBook are electronic pass sheet of accounts (last 10 transactions, last 15 days transactions and last 30 days transactions), statement of accounts to e-mail IDs, tracking of transactions date wise, balance enquiry, accounts summary, cheque status, ATM locator, branch locator, products information and what’s new in Canara Bank.
YES Bank
Innovation: Incentivizing Customers by offering Discount Coupons
This is a unique rewards mechanism for using the bank’s ATMs. To avail this offer, one has to simply walk into any YES Bank ATM across the country, withdraw cash or transfer funds and choose offers across categories such as books, entertainment, clothing, food and beverages, gifting, kids, lifestyle and online shopping. This reward scheme is available for Yes Bank customers and also those who make use of the bank’s ATMs. The discount coupon is offered during the cash withdrawal transaction with the choice of coupon displayed on the ATM screen.
Janalakshmi Financial Services
Innovation: Jana Jeevan Card
Jana Jeevan Card is a pre-paid card facility to the urban poor, launched in association with DCB Bank. The solution can be used both for savings collections as well as merchant acquiring. The company launched two products on the prepaid platform – first a loan disbursal program for the small batch customers and second a commitment savings program for individual loan customers. Using the system, the company has completely eliminated cash disbursement.
Reliance Capital
Innovation: Mobile Pre-Inspection System
The primary objective of Mobile Pre-Inspection System was to equip the sales force team with an application that facilitates pre-inspection of break-in-cases and issue policy to customer on the spot against old process of capturing vehicle photos, then visiting office to upload document and then issue policy. The second objective was to minimize fraud happening in break-in-cases like uploading vehicle photographs when it was in good condition it might be damaged in current scenario. The third objective was to increase in-house pre-inspection of vehicles which will ultimately reduce pre-inspection cost by third party vendor.
HDFC Life
Innovation: MyMix
MyMix personalizes client presentations through comprehensive illustrations, visual representation of benefits as per the customer’s needs and goals, thus enabling easy comprehension of otherwise complex insurance product, and creating pre-designed solutions with goal-based product bundling catering to specific customer needs. It also enriches the product portfolio by fulfilling product gaps and catering to current market needs; it affords a tool for designing tailor made solutions for customer’s needs.
Union Bank of India
Innovation: Tabulous Banking
Tabulous Banking facilitates opening of a bank account effortlessly from the confines of one’s home or work place. A bank officer visits the customer and captures the required KYC documents and photograph of the customer along with the required customer information in the tablet, equipped with mobile 2G/3G connectivity, and the information is uploaded to the bank’s server and the customer gets an auto SMS alert informing him/her about the account number. It is a pioneering green banking Initiative.
HDFC Bank
Innovation: Exadata Upgrade
The bank has succeefully migrated its database servers to Basel2RCR and Oracle EBiz on Exadata Quarter Rack. Earlier, the database server was Oracle 11.2.0.2 on AIX 6.1 platform with the database size as 3.6 TB. Over the years, the transaction volume had increased to 55% and database growth to 500 GB on yearly basis.
The bank upgraded existing Oracle Quarter Rack X2-2 to another Quarter Rack X3-2 to make it as Half Rack. Databases of both applications are migrated to upgraded Quarter Rack X3-2 on Oracle 11.2.0.4. Besides, databases were deployed on two nodes of Exadata that provides DB redundancy and high availability to application.
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance
Innovation: Digitized Policy Servicing Modules
The company felt that its customers were facing difficulties or delays with respect to policy services at three major touch points: important information like names or address are either incorrect or incomplete and such issues took around 8-10 working days to be resolved; at times, the customer did not receive the policy copy despite being dispatched by the company. To overcome these hurdles, the company introduced online policy copy issuance, online endorsement system and Insta Pre Policy.
RBL Bank
Innovation: Best ESB Deployment
The bank introduced an ESB framework layer to ensure that all point-to-point connections are eliminated, the existing system functionalities are exposed and organized into an efficient, unified, standards-based architecture, agile business tactics are practised, new partner offerings and pricing structures are rolled out quickly into their ordering system and a non-destructive incremental migration path from their legacy stack to lightweight service-oriented architecture is planned. The bank has also standardized that information exchanges internally between systems will be through a common layer and ESB has provided the platform for the same.
SBI Life Insurance
Innovation: Digitization of Sales Process
The company conceived Connect Life, which is an end-to-end digitization of the entire sales process – generating the benefit illustration, filling of proposal form, completion of payment process and document upload in a totally paperless approach. It is a totally in-house development. The company first initiated a pilot with 25 select insurance advisors who were hand held and supported in the use of the application. Post the successful launch of the pilot, Connect Life was institutionalized with1258 advisors given tablets with Connect Life installed and top performing unit managers (who manage the advisors) were given tablets. BYOD was also encouraged.
Winners – Technoviti
1. LeoPrime Payment Solutions Star Series
2. DSK Digital Technologies DSK Mobiliz
3. Cisco FirePower Services for ASA
4. Data Card CE870- Instant Issuance of Debit/Credit Card Printer
5. DSK Digital Technologies myFI
6. Intellect – Polaris Octopus
7. Global Solutions Veracious OASIS
8. Authentify Authentify xFA
9. Grupo HDI Solutions STARC – Automated Testing System with code reuse
10. SunTec Business Solutions Xelerate
11. Mistral Mobile My Mobility Suite
12. C S Infocomm CSI – Unified Interaction Suite
13. Zumigo Zumingo Assure
14. Money on Mobile Money on Mobile
15. Minacs TradeFree
16. JusPay JUSPAY Safe
17. Teckinfo Solutions InterDialog Unified Contact Center Suite
LeoPrime Payment Solutions
Innovation: Star Series
This is a next-gen ATM, which has a 15.6″ screen, encrypted with Pin Pad and FDK keys and compliant with PCI standards. It communicates via USB, Bluetooth, TCP/IP, 2G/3G, wi ifi and biometrics. It can operate on Windows 7 and 8.1. The ATM can he kept on a desk or hung from a wall. It can work on non-conentional power sources and does not require security guards. The concept ensures lower capex. It has alert system and in-built security features and is capable of sending automated SMS, email, and photo captures to a designated persons.
DSK Digital Technologies
Innovation: DSK Mobiliz
This is a mobile laptop with features such as internet connectivity, open office productivity software and multimedia computing. Powered with an OMAP 3503 ARM Cortex A-8 @ 600Mhz CPU, it has a 512 MB of mobile DDR RAM coupled with a 4 GB eMMC inbuilt storage. The ultra low weight (approx 900gms), unique design and LCD display are its specialities. The device utilizes green computing standards and the components have been chosen with a focus on low power consumption with no compromise on performance.
Cisco
Innovation: FirePower Services for ASA
This is the first adaptive, threat-focused next-generation firewall, delivering an integrated threat defense to manage an entire attack continuum. It provides highly effective threat prevention and full contextual awareness of users, infrastructure, applications and content to detect multi-vector threats and automate defense response. It is centrally managed by Cisco FireSIGHT Management Center. The system ensures reduced capital and operating costs and administrative complexity. It smoothly integrates with the existing IT environment, work stream and network fabric. Critical security activities such as policy tuning are automated, saving time and effort, while protections and countermeasures are maintained in an optimal state.
Entrust Datacard
Innovation: CE870- Instant Issuance of Debit/Credit Card Printer
The CE870TM is an instant issuance system, integrated with Datacard’s Card Wizard issuance software. The system promises instant issuance of debit and credit cards. The system offers features such as standard embossing, indent printing and magnetic stripe encoding, EMV compliant smart card personalization, six-compartment input hopper, direct-to-card printing and a touch-screen interface and full-color. The device works as a competitive differentiator, improves portfolio performance, which is realized via operational cost savings and improved metrics.
DSK Digital Technologies
Innovation: myFI
myFI2 is a hand-held device meant as a technology solution in financial inclusion efforts. The solution enables highly secured intra-banking services such as off-line and online account opening and authentication through a smart card, centralized authentication through biometric, and e-KYC across the nation. Off-line solution is offered as per IDRBT standards and online solution is as per Micro ATM 1.5.1 standards. This solution is equipped with multi lingual GUI voice & print capabilities. The device has a 7″ TFT display that gives sizable room to view entire enrollment forms category wise and also has a capability to be laid flat or angled for better viewing. The solution provides device management, BC management and various MIS tasks related to operations and technical teams.
Intellect Design Arena (Polaris)
Innovation: Octopus
This is a functional enterprise social network (ESN). The tool understands the basic needs of connect, communication and collaboration within an enterprise. It has helped in progressive transformation of the enterprise by way of replacing internal e-mails with interactive conversations and thereby engaging employees with a people friendly culture. Octopus helps an organization to keep its work force engaged by making them visible, motivated, empowered and well connected. All communication among employees is handled by this functionality cluster. It can also manage all project deliveries, customer interactions, knowledge-sharing, online collaboration and employee engagements across the business.
Global Solutions
Innovation: Veracious OASIS
This is an application development framework that allows users to create enterprise class content based business process automation from the ground up in half the time normally required and execute change requests with ease in days. It fosters collaboration within and amongst departments, complex work flows enabled with case management, flexible deployment models and accessible across devices, resulting in a quicker and well informed decision making. Since it uses HTML 5, the application is web responsive that allows the user to engage with the application environment needing only the browser across devices, irrespective of the operating platform.
Authentify
Innovation: Authentify xFA
Authentify xFA application helps banks and enterprises to capitalize on the promise of mobile-based solutions while protecting customers and employees from the dangers of working in a ‘hostile environment’. It is a cloud based multi-factor authentication solution that offers the capabilities of digital certifications, coupled with a voice biometric tool. The ensuing customer experience is enriching, since it is delivered in an elegantly simple mobile application. By eliminating the need to type passwords it prevents many modes of online and digital attacks.
Grupo HDI Solutions
Innovation: STARC – Automated Testing System with code reuse
This is an automated testing system with code reuse. It is fully integrated with all of the best software testing tools available in the market and provides user interface for requirements and test modeling. It generates all required artifacts for test execution, documentation and has dashboards and productivity reports. It is fully compliant with quality standards and norms such as SOX, CMMI, TMM, ISO etc. It helps IT teams to focus on business rather than test preparation and execution.
SunTec Business Solutions
Innovation: Xelerate
Xelerate is a next generation revenue management and business assurance product which empowers financial services firms to create personalized offerings for their customers in real-time. It enables banks to combine large volumes of customer and product performance data, including live profitability views, to make real-time decisions that enrich customer experience. It also helps instant delivery of flexible, personalized offerings and bundles and reduces the time to market for new services.
Mistral Mobile
Innovation: Money Mobility Suite
Money Mobility Suite enables mobile banking, agent banking, mobile money and mobile POS solutions to reach the next billion consumers in the growth markets. It provides mobile financial services front-end platform which works on any phone, network and anywhere, allowing banks to reach and serve more customers, faster and more cost-effectively than ever before. Various solutions – m-banking solution, m-agent, m-POS and m-Money solution – can be built on top of the suite for different customer needs.
C S Infocomm
Innovation: CSI – Unified Interaction Suite
The Unified Interaction Suite integrates traditional voice, mobile, SMS, instant messaging and social media to offer a seamless experience to the customer. The customer experiences the same work-flow on all media. The self service with simple and meaningful algorithms or process flows result in less dependency on the IVR. In case the customer interaction disrupts during the course of self service interaction, the system picks up the thread from that point on to other media channel. Some of the additional features within the suite are availability of a text chat module, co-browsing, data-sharing, and click-through voice and video calls directly from the web.
Zumigo
Innovation: Zumingo Assure
Zumigo Assure offers a suite of security focused solutions that leverage mobile data to solve some of the industry’s toughest challenges. It uses mobile devices to securely locate consumers at the time of transactions. This data can be used to verify presence at a merchant for a financial transaction or proximity to a PC for secure login. This passive second factor verification is simple for consumers to adopt and for enterprises to implement. It also offers multi-factor authentication for mobile devices. The use of the app would enable banks to reduce customer dissonance and thwart fake transactions.
Money on Mobile
Innovation: Money on Mobile
MoneyOnMobile application is an android app which offers convenience to customers for making easy payments to their financial transactions such as utility bills, recharges, DTH etc. A customer can either download the MoneyOnMobile app from their website or via the Google Play store. The application is India’s first multilingual application that supports ten languages and is designed to be quick and easy to use for consumers across all geographies in India. Over 500,000 m-Wallet consumers are currently using this service. Retailers can utilize the application to make payments on behalf of the consumers. Payments are made in real time hence there are no delays for retail consumers.
Minacs
Innovation: TradeFree
This is a trade finance application solution that can be used on a pay-as-you-go basis. There is nothing to install on computer. It fulfills all the business needs of a bank and its corporate clientèle. It supports imports, exports, bank guarantee, remittances and export credit refinancing (pre-shipment and post shipment) needs. A bank’s end customers can have complete access to the application 24×7 enabling them to send requests, inquire status, generate/view reports, and more. TradeFree is available in on-premise and mobile versions. It is powered with a high-speed Internet connection and users can access their data from any device via the browser.
Juspay Technologies
Innovation: Juspay Safe
Juspay Safe is a payments-focused mobile browser specially designed for banking websites with a clear focus on improving security and user experience. The browser is safer and is easy to use. It follows minimalistic design principles that streamline the cards and net banking payment process with innovative features like OTP helpers, password keyboard and 2G network optimization. This reduces the transaction time to less than a minute even on slow networks. Customer benefit from easy navigation, visually appealing user-interface and capability to choose a relevant keyboard for mobile devices depending on input type.
Teckinfo Solutions
Innovation: InterDialog Unified Contact Center Suite
InterDialog is a unified contact center suite consisting of intelligent dialing engine (Predictive Dialer) which connects live customer calls to the telecaller. There is a configurable retry mechanism, which helps to keep on retrying the non contactable numbers as defined thus ensuring to connect with the customer. There is a provision to assign/un-assign set of leads to a set of agents, based on skillsets etc without hampering the general operations. In built scheduler ensure that all the call back/ follow up cases gets addressed on the scheduled date/time. A supervisor console gives live status of all telecallers of his/her group. Built in voice logger not only ensures a high quality voice recording of all calls, but tags the record file with additional parameters of business importance, complimented with a utility to easily trace the record at any given time.
mohan@bankingfrontiers.com