Digital Transformation
Collection systems are increasingly getting digitized and various approaches by financial services institutions make them more and more efficient:
Karnataka Bank has set up ‘Digital Centre of Excellence’ in its quest for focus on improvement in technology, digitization and building values:
Karnataka Bank has deployed the most modern IT tools to deliver products and services for customers’ benefit with an aim to develop effective long-term relationship with them. Mahabaleshwara M S, MD & CEO, lists the several digital initiatives in this regard:
Mehul Dani: What are the various tie-ups Karnataka Bank has entered into and the perspectives of such partnering? What are the steps taken towards digitization through such tie-ups?
Mahabaleshwara M S: We had embarked on a strategic transformation journey, namely ‘ KBL Vikaas’ in 2017, complete with a vision, milestones, roadmap revolving around digitization and customer centricity. In the last 2 years, we have tied up with fintech companies for digital banking products, like Fin Wizard Technologies (FISDOM) for mutual funds platform, with IIFL Securities for demat and trading facilities for our bank customers and Corpository for sourcing corporate leads and business.
We have also tied up with companies like Karza Service, Perfios, Jocato, NSDL, Experian, Hunter, etc. to strengthen, automate and digitize the j ourneys, which include processes like onboarding of customers, recovery automation, data analytics and risk assessment, lending automation, etc.
In all tie-ups, customer is in the center as we all are moving towards ‘paperless, cashless, faceless’ Digital India economy. I am of the view that tie-ups with service platforms facilitates delivery, ease of access of the bank’s products to customers, whereas sales platforms are for customer onboarding, engagements, sales and retentions.
Our KBL Mobile Plus App is well loaded with features that varies from payment of utility bills, credit card payments, UPI, scan & pay, mutual funds, insurance solutions and our aim is to bring complete banking at the fingertips of our customers.
We are witnessing digital adoption and customer delight through customer engagements. We will continue to focus end-to-end digital solutions for almost all banking activities so as to take customer engagement to a new high.
One more very strategic initiative and a milestone for us has been establishing non-financial, fully owned subsidiary of the bank, KBL Services, which is a big step for us in realigning business strategies with the objectives of improving efficiency, results and valuation in the long run for the bank.
What new initiatives the bank has undertaken in the last 2 years to augment business, like for example, lead generation, business sourcing, crossselling and profitability? How do you view cross-selling of third-party products?
Banks are increasingly becoming intermediary marketplace sin the digital era, and each prospective event in the customer journey presents a new opportunity. We already have our own infrastructure, resources and networking, para-banking tie-ups and activities, including bancassurance, depository service, insurance, MFs, credit cards, etc, that have helped increase the reach of the bank and bring a vast customer segment into the fold of varied financial services.
Our branches are supported by our lead management system (LMS) and analytical leads from the system facilitate identifying, engagement with prospective customers and help us offer additional banking services. This actually helps to build value to our relationships.
In retail asset segment, we have tied up with various builders for preapproved housing projects that not only help customers in their decision making for house purchase, but reduces the loan processing turnaround time in the bank.
Similarly in motor insurance segment, we have entered into corporate arrangements with Tata Motors and Maruti Suzuki, wherein interested car buyers can avail finance from the bank through our ‘ Xpress Digital Car Loan’ process. Our branches and loan processing units now have a strong retail marketing and sales force that facilitates end to end journey for customers.
Cross selling of products is undertaken as per RBI’s master directions on para banking or financial services as issued from time to time. It is in the nature of corporate agency, distribution, referral tie-ups etc. In the para banking segment, we have been offering various third-party
products, which provide one stop financial solutions to the needy customers.
In life insurance we function as a corporate agency of PNB MetLife India Insurance, LIC of India and Bharti Axa Life Insurance. For general insurance products we have tied up with Universal Sompo General Insurance and Bajaj Allianz General Insurance.
Our other arrangements with BFSIs include tie-ups with Way 2 Wealth Brokers and IIFL Securities for equity trading and co-branded credit card facility for our customers through SBI Card. We have partnered with FISDOM, an online platform for sale and management of mutual funds, which digitally enables our customers to invest and track mutual fund investments on KBL Mobile Plus App at their convenience.
The collaboration for third party products helps to improve revenue in the non-core income segment and there also exists a positive correlation to ROA in the longer run. In collaboration lies success.
How has the process of onboarding of customers changed in the last 2 years in terms of ease for customers?
We have set up an inhouse ‘Digital Centre of Excellence (DCOE)’, in our quest for reimagining customer journey and continuous focus on improvement in technology, di g i t i z a t i o n a nd bui l di ng values. For example, digital loan underwriting products such as KBL Xpress Car Loan, Express Home Loans, Xpress Ghar Nivesh, Xpress Home Top Up, Xpress Easy Ride, Xpress Cash Loan, Xpress MSME etc, have been successfully launched and implemented by our bank in the last 1 year.
We have tied up with appropriate fintech players for these purposes. The application helps us to speed up account opening and approval of loan application by real-time data extraction and ID verification.
These new age applications automate many manual tasks to increase accuracy and hence, efficiency with automatic data entry. It is noteworthy that we have already achieved the retail digital loan process adoption and 75% of the total/ number of retail loans have been sanctioned in such a way as on date.
Another tech product is ‘ Tab Banking’, which is flexible and reliable and empowers our field agents to initiate the on-boarding process on-the-fly. They can capture customer information on their tablet devices and initiate the e-KYC process to validate it and then upload this information to the core banking system in real-time. Using this solution, we can ensure the agile processing of savings bank applications and opening of accounts.
These customized banking applications have enabled us to provide better customer experience by delivering flexibility and convenience of the essential banking operations right at the customer’s doorstep.
What steps have you taken in popularising and marketing of digital products and what is the visible impact?
Creating a robust digital platform and integrating all customer touch points across all channels is what we have ambitiously set into. We believe API integration is critical to business and so also our collaboration with newer and non-traditional players are to open up their APIs in order to remain competitive and witness growth. We are continuously engaged with the customers through social media marketing, mobile marketing, email marketing etc. to stay connected, build relationships, value and brand.
We also have contact center tie- up for providing tele marketing services and also popularising our digi-products and solutions. At the branch level, digital adoption campaigns are held to popularise and hand hold the customers for digital adoption.
As a part of indirect endorsement of the bank, you will find our bank’s products promoted in various blogging sites, bookmarking sites and classified sites such as Quora, Tumblr, etc. Customer experience, reviews and recommendations are found here, which affirms our customer centricity.
Also, the covid pandemic has accelerated digital adoptions and we have witnessed this, as our alternate delivery channel penetration crossed 90% this year. Such channel transactions have also increased 3.5-fold and today 90% of overall banking transactions are taking place through alternate delivery channels. We may say, that branch banking has shifted to mobile banking. This is enabling us, as there is a rationale to downsize 25-40% area in the branches, to reduce expenses on rentals, maintenance and other recurring costs.
We feel, we are on a right path to strengthen our technology and digital culture at all levels including business, managing of risk, compliance and governance, and is ambitiously poised to become the digital bank of future.
When it comes to collection efficiency for MSMEs, a situational, 360-degree approach is the most effective. For example, U GRO Capital, being a sector-specific lender, is focusing on leveraging knowledge and experience to understand the cash flows of the entire ecosystem in which a business operates and of the customer’s business as well at a granular level. In situations involving temporary cash flow issues, the company’s approach is to intensify the collection process. For varied situations, it utilizes other tailored solutions.
According to Anuj Pandey, Chief Operating Officer, in the collection process it is crucial to define clearly each milestone and ensure close monitoring of the required actions that need to be taken when such individual milestones are met or missed.
On its part, Fincare Small Finance Bank has built loan collection tools that not only enhance the customer experience but also lower the cost of operations, thus impacting the bottom line. The bank follows a hybrid analytics-driven collection approach, where extensive benchmarking is done and these are validated at the field level through pilots at select markets.
“Post evaluation of the pilot results, suitable collection models are launched across all markets,” says Soham Shukla, Chief Operating Officer - Rural Banking at the bank, adding: “In a nutshell, the combination of expertise and experience has helped us fine-tune our collection strategy - leading to best-in-class collection efficiency, despite the disruption caused by the pandemic.”
Clix Capital has adopted both efficiency and a top-down vs. bottom-up approach to work in tandem to improve collection efficiency. Vishal Jain, Head – Collections, explains: “First is mind and later is the body and the 2 must work in a synchronized way to function effectively and efficiently.”
He adds: “A top-down approach defines the basic ground rules and direction to a bottom-up approach to ensure MIMO (Minimum Input and Maximum Output) and the bottom-up approach gives the feedback to a top-down approach to fine-tune the basic ground rules and direction to make it realistic and feasible to implement. Our adoption of both the approaches has helped us to segment the portfolio in a sharper and realistic manner to improve our collection efficiency as it was backed by field flavour.”
COLLABORATION WITH OTHER DEPARTMENTS
Clix Capital’s collection team is in touch with borrowers throughout the loan tenor - in EWS, bounce and delinquency management activities. This structure feedbacks have been infused in all the key decision-making processes like defining the souring scorecard, loss prediction of the portfolio and in refining the organizational structure with right reward and recognition program to manage the portfolio quality. Says Vishal: “Even in the current challenging environment where the regulator had declared various relief packages like restructuring, ECLGS, etc to the borrowers to come out from the difficult situation, collections learning has played a key role to identify the right customer segment to offer these packages to manage the portfolio in short and long terms.”
The appropriate collaborations between varied departments are critical to ensure high collection efficiency. Especially, teams from underwriting, collections and risk-analytics departments must work in tandem over the long term to ensure sustainable portfolio management. Anuj of U GRO Capital explains this feature: “At U GRO Capital, these departments work very closely. This collaboration is particularly instrumental in identifying portfolio and collection triggers at an early stage, post data analysis. The cooperation further extends to sales and product teams, which are key elements in the feedback loop, helping and refining the product proposition.”
Soham states that Fincare Small Finance
Bank is in the business of ‘collecting money, not giving loans.’ There is a strong alignment between business, support, and control functions for ensuring robust growth and portfolio quality, he says, adding the risk team helps highlight the operating and credit risks, the audit team ensures strong adherence to processes and support teams provide the required manpower, training, technology, back-office support to help the business teams fulfil their goals.
He also shares an example where the risk team put together concentration risk analysis and loss estimation modelling that helped the business teams navigate the way forward in a smarter way.
Speridian Intelligent Collection System provides a holistic view of the scenario about collections. It helps collate the results from various departments such as HR, risk, finance, etc. utilizing the capability of EWS, analytics, AI/ML, etc. Vinod mentions that with the impact of the pandemic, there has been a drastic change in the approach where digitization got a major thrust and the digital adoption has been swift to everybody’s surprise. “Here comes the real benefit of collaboration,” he says, adding: “Our Beacon collection solution synthesizes the data from various channels, analyses, and provides valuable insights to the collection team, dashboards to the managers such that they can approach their customers proactively as well as be more informed.”
He also maintains that this has provided good results to the company’s financial services customers. “The alerts, reminders, collection team dashboards, etc provide updated information so that these companies can take productive action. Also, the manager’s dashboards and escalations provide help to take proactive steps and improve the results.”
FINAL RATING/SCORE
U GRO Capital has a distinctive scorecardbased underwriting model, for which the company has filed a patent as well. The model takes into consideration the historical loan delinquency patterns and cash flow within each focused business segment. In this approach, the application score, generated at the sourcing stage, and the behaviour score, reflecting the customer repayment behaviour, are critical. Says Anuj: “Both scores are used as inputs in the collection strategy and process. These scores are dynamic and vary with time and circumstances. This process then dictates our collection strategy, to resonate with the posed situation, to achieve the best possible collection efficiency.”
Fincare Bank conducts Portfolio Quality Review (PQR) periodically by synthesizing internal and external data of each customer to understand the risk and evaluate future repayment behaviour. Basis this analysis, the bank creates customer segmentation and applies appropriate collection methodologies to reduce leakages.
Over a period, collection has also moved from the conventional way of bucket-based treatment to risk-based treatment, hence score plays an important role in defining the risk in the early MOB (Month on Book). As the MOB increases, the borrower’s internal and external behaviours gain higher influence in defining the risk score. Vishal explains this: “Even recent risk score helps to identify the improvement or deterioration in the portfolio, compared to souring score and to take corrective measure in new souring as well as the future loss prediction.”
According to Vinod, while NACH and e-NACH are extremely popular, other channels are getting more and more traction. Financial institutions are eager to utilize such ever-evolving facilities to reach out to customers, he says, pointing out that previously there were limited options for a customer to pay such as cash or cheque.
But, more than the underlying technology, it is the convenience and acceptability of the end customers which is driving the adoption of systems.
CUSTOMER BEHAVIOUR ANALYSIS
Fincare Small Finance Bank recently launched a collection application that enables the loan office to update customer ratings at the time of collection. By gathering this data continually, the bank aims to create Early Warning Signals (EWS) for its field force and help them define bespoke collection strategy.
Customer behaviour score holds high importance in devising a collection strategy, believes Anuj of U GRO Capital. He says this is particularly essential to gauge the risk associated. Customer behaviour, being dynamic, impacts the score as well. “It is essential to appropriately analyze the behaviour to generate the most effective scores, to ensure efficient collection,” says he.
Collection has evolved in the past few years and the borrowers’ behaviour parameters are being used for the risk scorecard, which in turn helps to define the key input metrics like collection channel, collection intensity, engagement scripts and review mechanism for the institutions to improve collection. Vishal concludes the discussion: “Collection can be improved if we reach to the customer at the right time through the right channel with right communication script and all can be defined with the help of customer behaviour analysis.”
Shivalik Small Finance Bank is the first small finance bank to have transitioned from an urban cooperative bank. It was first registered as a cooperative society in 1997 and was granted a banking license by the Reserve Bank of India to operate from Saharanpur district. The bank has Suveer Kumar Gupta as its MD & CEO, who is an engineer by qualification and has experience in computing and related activities with Tata Consultancy Services. He joined the bank in 1998 an he has been responsible for the allround growth of the bank, which is the first and largest multi-state urban cooperative bank in Uttar Pradesh. With his deep focus on technology, he has brought in automation and technology drive services in the bank.
1000 TOUCHPOINTS
With a strong technology infrastructure and a solid customer base, developed over 23 years, the bank today has 340 customer touch points, which includes 31 branches, 57 ATMs and 250 banking agents spread across western Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow and Madhya Pradesh.
Suveer has ambitious plans for the future: “We plan to add 40 customer touchpoints in FY 2021-22. In the next 5 years, we also aim to INCREASE the touch points to 1000. The aim is to expand through physical and digital channels and we are therefore looking at various skills including branch banking, digital sales, information technology, information security, compliance, risk management.”
DIGITAL ADOPTION DOUBLED
Shivalik Small Finance Bank has made significant efforts in technology induction in the last 3 years to enable it to scale up rapidly. It completed a major technology transformation in 2017. And the pandemic accelerated digital adoption by the customers. Suveer says digital adoption more than doubled and the number of digital transactions crossed 3.5 million. There was 20% rise in mobile banking adoption. There was a 150% yoy growth in mobile and internet banking transactions. More than 40% of the eligible customers already has debit cards and this segment is transacting using micro-ATMs or handheld devices. And 25% of the eligible customer base is on mobile and internet banking.”
LOAN ORIGINATION PLATFORM
The total business of the bank has grown by 10% in FY 2020-21 to `20 billion, with deposits at `12.45 billion and advances at `8.05 billion. This is despite extraordinary situation caused by the pandemic. The bank offers instant sanctioning of loans on digital channels.
It has a unique 2-wheeler insurance plan offered through BQR code, which is offered with the support of Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Co. The customer can just scan a QR code and enter the registration number of the vehicle. Details get populated and the premium amount is displayed. Customers can just pay the amount at the press of button and the policy is also issued instantly.
DIGITAL ONBOARDING: E-KYC
The bank has introduced paperless account opening using e-KYC for savings bank accounts. Says Suveer: “95% of all savings accounts in our bank are opened digitally. We have plans to enable new account opening via website to drive customer acquisition digitally.”
The bank also offers business correspondent banking. In FY 2020/21, it introduced an app for employees, distributors, agents and BCs to onboard customers digitally and enable payment services. “We are currently working on video KYC and an integration sandbox for third parties to partner with us,” says Suveer
PAYMENTS & CLOUD
Technology has been a key focus area of the bank. Digital channels offered by the bank include mobile banking on both iOS and Android, internet banking, micro-ATMs for doorstep banking and Aadhaar-enabled payments. Says Suveer: “We are live on all retail payment platforms including UPI, IMPS, NEFT and RTGS and we are a direct member of the National Financial Switch. While 80% of all transactions in the bank are happening via digital channels, all our branches are equipped with cash recyclers, which perform the dual role of ATMs and cash deposit machines.”
Shivalik Small Finance Bank has been a pioneer in the adoption of cloud way back in 2013, even while it was a UCB. “We were the first bank in India to host the Infosys Finacle solutions on the cloud using a hybrid cloud architecture. The cloud-based architecture provides the bank with unmatched agility to cost effectively manage scale and power its growth,” says Suveer.
TECH VENDORS
The bank has a number of established
technology vendors. The CBS is Finacle from Infosys and it has a digital banking suite including internet and mobile banking. The data is hosted at CtrlS data centers which are classified as tier-4 data centers. Other technology partners include FIS Global for Payments and Switching Services, FSS for UPI payments and Bharti Airtel for networking solutions. The bank is about to go live on Oracle’s Middleware and API Gateway solutions both of which also utilize Oracle Cloud Services.
CAPEX, OPEX, TEAM SIZE
The IT capital expenditure of the bank as a proportion of the total income has on an average been 5.1% over the last 5 years, which is higher than the industry standard of 2-3%. It touched a peak of about 16% in FY 19-20, when the bank completed a large digital transformation project. IT opex represented 8.5% of all operating expenses in FY 20-21. IT opex (excluding staff expenses) have increased by 42% yoy on average over the last 5 years especially because the bank’s IT infrastructure is hosted on a cloud-based model. The size of the bank’s IT team continues to grow and is about 10% of the total workforce, ie around 50 people.
CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Shivalik Small Finance Bank has been using customer behavior analysis to offer products and solutions to existing customers and drive digital adoption. This is done via an assisted digital approach whereby contact center teams of the bank are in touch with customers. The bank has been able to increase mobile banking adoption through dedicated calling to customers where the teams guide the customers on how to onboard on the bank’s app.
The bank is also present on all major social media platforms including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. “We will continue investing in latest technology to keep pace with the changing nature of digital banking with a key focus on our extended target customer segment,” says Suveer.
DIGITAL FIRST VISION
With over 450,000 customers, the bank has been leveraging technology to extend its reach into the last mile and offer financial services for the masses and MSMEs. “If the year 2020 has taught us anything,” says Suveer, “it is that technology and digitization is the only way to progress. Our vision is to be a new age bank being digital first in its mindset and provide best in class banking services to the underserved and underbanked sections of the population, which they may be unable to get from other larger banks. The focus is on doing this through a combination of personalized, respectful customer service and superior technology offering for our target customers.”
SECURITY ENHANCEMENT
Shivalik Small Finance Bank has migrated to a new enterprise fraud risk management (EFRM) solution to monitor high risk transactions. “We have implemented Dynamic Key Exchange (DKE) as a security enhancement measure for payment systems. Any investments in technology have to be accompanied by investments into cyber and information security initiatives and fraud prevention tools,” says Suveer
HELP FROM FINTECH
Suveer believes in having a clear vision to create a brick and click bank. The bank has API enabled architecture, which will allow partnerships with fintechs and other players. It currently has partnerships in place with India Gold, a fintech which offers doorstep delivery of gold loans; it has arrangements with Airtel Payments Bank and Atyati Technologies for retail and microfinance loans. It is actively engaged in discussions with multiple fintech partners to reach newer customer segments like entrepreneurial and underbanked women, kirana stores, millennials in need of neobanking services and individuals looking for gold loans.
In the next 12 months, the bank aims to offer online fixed deposits, customized savings accounts for millennials, digital loans against fixed deposits and insurance policies, l oans against e-warehouse receipts, etc. Says Suveer: “With a razorsharp focus on small businesses, we plan to grow our current loan book of `8.05 billion and deposits of `12.45 billion by 50% over next 12 months. Backed by significant investments made in building a robust digital interface to complement its physical touch points, our new entity aims to grow the business by `10 billion and significantly expand its current base of 450,000 customers in the next 12 months.”
TECHNOLOGY ROADMAP
The pandemic has certainly accelerated digital adoption at a much faster pace than would have been organically possible. Suveer expects the trend of transacting through digital channels to continue and cross 90% from present 80% in the coming years. “Almost 65% of our customer base is using digital channels. We plan to push this up further by another 10-15 percentage points. We also plan to invest in building capabilities around digital sales, especially on customer on-boarding and insurance, integration capabilities to partner with the external eco-system including fintechs, data analytics to assist customer acquisition and business process automation to ensure that customer journeys can be simplified and time to service any requests are reduced. These are an integral part of our technology roadmap,” he says.
City Union Bank has been a pioneer in implementing IT enabled solutions for the benefit of customers who could avail banking products and services at their convenience anytime, anywhere. One of the most innovative technology products of the bank is ‘CUB All in One Mobile App’.
Sankaran G., General Manager, Computer Systems Department, describes the solution: “This is a multilingual voice enabled interactive chat bot launched by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The bot can converse in Tamil, English, Hindi and Telugu. We were the first bank to launch such a product in the Indian banking industry. Customers can converse with this bot for their general banking needs, including transactions like balance enquiry, mini statement, fund transfer over voice/text instructions, wealth management services, utility payments etc.”
‘CUB Lakshmi’ is the bank’s banking robot. It leverages AI techniques and is integrated with the core banking solution. It provides information on accounts, answer generic banking queries, last 5 transactions, 15G submission, cheque book request, etc.
AI BASED LOAN PROCESSING
The bank is also planning some key digital initiatives during the current financial year. One of them is an AI-based loan processing solution, which will digitally accept KYC document, documents like IT returns, balance sheet, salary slips, GST returns etc and facilitate approval and sanction of the loans digitally. Says Sankaran: “The project is expected to go live by September 2021. It significantly enhances user experience by reducing TAT as application processing is done in 2 working days instead of the current 5-7 working days.”
OPEN BANKING PLATFORM
The bank has set out on a digital transformation journey to adopt open banking and partnerships. Sankaran says it is building an enterprise-wide middleware platform that would help third party systems and fintechs to connect with the core banking / internal legacy systems. This would enable them to distribute the banks products to potential customers and build products on top of it. “We expect to go live by July 2021 and will open up banking for fintechs to partner with us,” he adds.
SAVING FORMS, DOCUMENTS
The bank is also implementing a lowcode content document management and workflow automation platform allowing the bank to create, share and save forms and inter-office documents quickly without building them from scratch and allow for digital execution. The project is expected to go live in 2 months by August 2021.
The platform is expected to help the bank in reducing manual processes and time delays. Also, it will help in going digital without paper. Says Sankaran: “In all the above cases, the vendors were selected basis due diligence on product capability, lower cost, company profile, feedback from peer banks and faster time to market as the metrics.”
AI BASED UNDERWRITING
The bank has engaged a data analytics partner to make use of big data available with the bank on transactions, demographics and financials of the borrowers to deliver risk-based pricing on gold loans and SME loans. This is expected to help creditworthy borrowers to get credit at a lower rate / discount compared to ordinary borrowers. It will also identify potential NPAs and reduce the risk exposure of such accounts for the bank. This project is also expected to go live in 2 months.
AUTOMATING CHEQUE PASSING
Usually, cheque clearing at the 3 CTS grids is done after verifying the customer’s signature and payment details. Sankaran says the bank is proposing to automate the comparison process of verifying the signatures in the cheques and those in the bank’s records. “The passing of cheques is done during the night. The staff doing the comparison at night are bound to make mistakes due to fatigue. Hence, we have started procedure for procuring a solution for system-based comparison of signature, which will speed up the clearing process,” says Sankaran.
CONNECTING BANKING WITH ERP
To provide better customer service to its corporate clients, the bank is developing an API service that will facilitate integration with the ERP system of the clients so that payables can be managed more efficiently. “With this
service, customers can transact with their linked accounts on their ERP platform. Customers can also manage their cash management services with this API. The project will be live soon,” says Sankaran.
TAB BANKING, VIDEO KYC
City Union Bank has a number of new projects with their existing vendors. It has already implemented eKYC for opening of accounts with Aadhaar based identification of customers. It has also rolled out tab banking through which the bank’s staff meet customers at their places and using the eKYC process, open the accounts. The bank has also introduced video KYC process through which customer identification is done. Customers can open their accounts through the bank’s mobile banking application from their places. They can book a slot for video KYC and the staff will initiate a video call and verify KYC documents and signatures. Once this is done the account is opened and the customer can do all transactions. “Nearly 90% of our accounts are now opened digitally via eKYC or video KYC,” says Sankaran.
TRADE FINANCE AUTOMATION
As of now, the bank’s trade finance application is a static and transactionoriented solution. The bank proposes to implement an AI based solution for trade finance. Sankaran says that the proposed solution will be capable of reading the documents submitted by customers online and automate the process of generating recommendations of LC/guarantee opening, bill payments, retiring of LCs etc.
CARD-LESS CASH WITHDRAWAL
The bank has launched inter-operable cardless cash withdrawal enabling customers to withdraw cash in all its NCR ATMs by using the UPI QR code. Sankaran claims the bank is the first bank in India to launch this facility and once other banks launch this facility, customers of all banks can use this card-less withdrawal from any bank’s ATMs.