Sunil Kapoor, CEO, Siemens Financial Services, shares how the company uses a balanced approach using technology and human intervention to arrive at a favorable result:
Manoj Agrawal: What is the company’s geographical spread in India, and expansion plans?
Sunil Kapoor: Siemens Financial Services (SFS) has been operating in India since 2011 and is a subsidiary of Siemens AG. Headquartered in Mumbai, SFS is present throughout the country with 21 offices across India, catering to over 4500 customers in 35 cities. We recently opened a new branch in Indore, Madhya Pradesh and constantly look forward to expanding in markets with good opportunities.
What are the top 3 products and what is their contribution to the overall business?
SFS works with vendor partners and end-customers to offer a suite of financing solutions. Loans hold a majority share in our portfolio, followed by Leasing and Deferred Payment Solutions.
Leasing is one of the unique solutions only offered by specialist financiers like SFS. It’s a unique opportunity for businesses looking to invest in new technologies but still wanting to conserve cash flow. Leasing offers several key benefits: customers do not tie up their capital, flexible length of leases, customization based on cash flow needs, inclusion of costs related to installation, service and maintenance as well as their guaranteed payment rates, better tax management, easy and affordable technology upgrades or digital transformation, quicker investment decisions, to name a few.
What new products had the company introduced in last 12 month – for which customer segments?
With a growing demand across various customer segments, SFS has introduced the below products over the past 12 months:
a. Technology Finance – which is aimed at providing financing solutions for technology (hardware and software) to the corporate and mid-corporate segment.
b. Financing for Sustainability – these are financing solutions for companies of all sizes to gain access to equipment and technology solutions which will make them more sustainable.
c. Financing for Infrastructure – a special focus on leasing for cranes, earth moving equipment, and road construction equipment.
As a specialist financier SFS has a deep understanding of sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, IT, Energy, Packaging, and Food & Beverages. SFS is well positioned to provide completely customized financing arrangements for specific business requirements.
In what ways has the company improved its credit evaluation system?
At SFS, our credit evaluation system is a critical part of our risk management strategy. We use a balanced approach with the use of technology and human intervention to arrive at a result which is most favourable for our customers and for us.
Recently we have improved our credit evaluation systems with the help of technology, we have automated most of the credit evaluation processes like Financial Spread, Bank Statement Analysis, consolidated information of all publicly available data, and we have customized score cards for each of our focus industry segments. This ensures that there is little-to-no manual error and hence reduced the turnaround time for our customers.
Who are the key partners among banks, fintechs and IT companies?
We are a niche business-to-business financier, and work independently, and don’t have any fintech partners.
A brief description of the IT team, the applications developed in house and the applications sourced externally.
We have an in-house IT team who is constantly scanning and exploring the marketplace for solutions which can enable us to increase efficiency via process automation, by adding on to our robust infrastructure which is currently in place.
Some of our applications developed in house have been done with the use of Low Code Platforms, Robotic Process Automations, and Business Intelligence. Our team is constantly exploring and using these and other new trends and technologies that can be leveraged for operational efficiencies and productivity improvements.
For specific product & technology developments, we pick and choose vendors as per our requirements and global guidelines.
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