Secure Digital Transformation - An NBFC perspective
An and S harm a, CT O, As irv ad Microfinance
Our country is mainly divided into 2 parts - India and Bharat. Nearly 30% of the population lives in India and 70% in Bharat. Our country has 22 official languages and 728 dialects and 40% of the population communicates only in regional languages, but they cannot read and write. In Bharat, exchange of money or marriage requires the trust and guarantee of the people before making the decision. Digital transformation is very good. ‘Digital India’ is fantastic, but ‘digital Bharat’ has a long way to go. Currently we are working on the language constraints and it is the biggest priority for us. The customer learning program should be added to the CSR activities of the companies.
There are 380 million smartphone users and 50 million feature phone users in India. There are 1.7 billion CASA account holders and 340 million Jan Dhan account holders. Nearly 48% of the latter accounts have not seen any transaction in the last few years. And 190 million adult population of India doesn’t have bank accounts. Technology has helped us in reducing the operational cost of the transactions.
Dr Suresh A Shan, Head - Business Information & Technology, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services
The business team decides the targets and the IT team provides support to achieve those targets. Business team focuses on month-end and closing business on time. The regulator and RBI are on one side for us and customers are on the other side. Intermediaries like dealers and agents run the business for us.
Companies are focusing on corporate digital and not on the customer digital. They should create a technology for customer engagement. Customers are the custodians of the data. NBFCs in India should focus on reach and speed, the reach is mainly depending upon the connectivity. Nearly 80% of our applications run on offline channels. Electricity is still the biggest challenge in rural India; we have locations where there is electricity only for 3 hours a day. eBusiness in rural India involves less electronics and more emotions.
We have introduced Made in India PoS machine with 2GB memory, which is used for loan purposes. We get live weather updates from our field executives and we share that data with Mahindra Motors and it target customers. On a rainy day, the company pitches tractors and in the summer, it tries to sell pick-up vehicles.
We have started using local languages to understand the need of the customers. A customer in rural area is available between 5.45 am and 8 am, they sleep for some time in the afternoon and they come out between 3 pm and 7 pm – so it is difficult to target the rural customers in the normal banking hours.
Rajiv RG, Vice President - Process Excellence, Madura Microfinance
Our company focuses on complete digitization. Every loan officer carries a tablet and every proposal is submitted online. We are focusing on digitization of cash collection process and we are introducing a banking aspect into it. We are focusing on the change management aspects and change will happen from top to bottom. We use data for the geographic expansion in selecting the target market. We are working on how to segment the customer. Data helps us in better reach, customer segmentation and decision making. We use Amazon technologies for our data warehouse and other multiple tools for visualization and multiple reporting.
Dominic Vijay Kumar, DVP & Head IT, ART Housing Finance
ART Housing Finance provides tablets to its FOS team and the tablet is connected with the lending system. Our mobile app helps in complete filling of the application form by the customers and CIBIL, NSDL and PAN card verifications are also done using the app. The document process time has been reduced from a week to just 3-4 hours, a milestone we achieved in 2016. We have digitized our processes right from customer acquisition to loan disbursement. However, 100% digitization is not possible because there are often changes made in regulations – for example, Aadhaar-based eKYC process has been stopped.
We used to face IT-related problems during the month-end and hence we have introduced an offline OTP solution to overcome it. We cannot convert a housing finance company into a fintech organization.
Blockchain technology is still not matured for the industry. We want to use it to access loan documents of our customers. We have set up virtual branches where the resident manager handles the customer acquisition process too. Currently, we have 47 branches, including 15 virtual branches and we generate good business from virtual branches.
Balaji Natarajan, Technology Consultant, Banking Minds
With loan processing having been digitized, the loan approval time has reduced from 10 days to 2 hours. Digitization has
helped in reducing the cost of operation and it has increased our reach. Technology has evolved and has helped companies to capture customer data. Technology can solve problems, but we need to leverage it with products and services. BFSI companies do not need to have branches - there should be an aggregator for all the banks to provide services to the customers. Customer utility bill payments data helps us in scoring the customers.
Praveen Jayakumar, Sr Solutions Architect, AWS
We provide multiple voice solutions to our customers; we mainly use English language. Our solutions are also available in Hindi and supporting other Indian regional languages is a challenge for us. Policybazar uses our ‘Poly’ service to handle its customers. Poly is a voice-based messenger service. There is less human intervention and Poly is also useful in doing sentiment analysis of the customers.
Since 2012 we have been operational in India and we have deployed physical data center in 2016.