Scaling up with digital platforms, analytics, cloud & more
ICICI Bank is strengthening its digital platforms to offer a seamless experience for its corporate customers:
ICICI Bank’s business banking and SME portfolios grew by 53.4% and 42.8% year-on-year respectively. Sandeep Bakhshi, MD & CEO, of the bank, said at a recent analysts’ call that business banking and SME franchises of the bank continue to grow on the back of digital offerings and platforms like InstaBIZ and Trade Online. The business banking portfolio grew by 6.3% sequentially and the SME portfolio saw a marginal sequential decline, he adds.
InstaBIZ offers various services such as instant overdraft facility, payment of GST, foreign exchange deal booking, business l oans based on revenues reported in GST returns, automatic bank reconciliations and inward and outward remittances. The bank’s supply chain platform Trade Online enables corporates to seamlessly manage their supply chain financing and payments, collection and reconciliation requirements of their dealers and vendors in a convenient and paperless manner. InstaBIZ and Trade Online have grown steadily in the past few quarters. Bakhshi elaborated: “The value of financial transactions through InstaBIZ more than doubled year-on-year in Q1 of 2022. The value of transactions through supply chain platforms grew by more than 8 times yoy in June 2021.”
IMOBILE PAY ADOPTION UP
Bakhshi said the bank’s open architecture based digital platforms provide endto-end seamless digital journeys and personalized solutions to customers and enable more effective data-driven crosssell and up-sell. These platforms also enable the bank to reach out to nonICICI Bank account holders. “We have seen significant increase in adoption of our mobile banking app, iMobile Pay, with over 2.5 million activations by nonICICI Bank account holders since its
launch 6 months ago. The transactions by non-ICICI Bank account holders in terms of value and volume have grown by 8 times and 7 times, respectively, in June 2021 compared to March 2021.”
CREDIT: END-TO-END DIGITAL
The proportion of end-to-end digital sanctions and disbursements across various products of the bank has been increasing steadily. About 34% of its total mortgage sanctions by volume were endto-end digital in Q1 of 2022, compared to 19% FY2021, said Bakhshi pointing out: “We have taken a number of initiatives to offer a convenient and frictionless experience to customers by digitizing the credit underwriting process, with instant loan approvals.”
RICH BASE FOR ANALYTICS
There has been an increasing adoption of the bank’s digital platforms and growth in the value and volume of transactions. This supports growth in CASA deposits and provides a rich base for analytics and cross-sell, says Bakhshi, adding, about 95,000 customers were onboarded using video KYC in June 2021 and of the total asset and liability accounts opened as well as third party products sold during June, about 40% was end-to-end digital.
P2P, P2M OF UPI
The bank continues to strengthen its position in the digital payments ecosystem by building seamless user journeys, facilitating higher transaction throughputs and driving repeat transactions. Bakhshi explained: “Our strategy is to participate both directly through our own platforms and partner with third party players in the P2P and P2M space of the UPI ecosystem.”
The bank is seeing high customer engagement through repeat usage of features like Pay to Contact, Scan to Pay and bill payments on iMobile Pay. The volume of transactions through ‘Pay to Contact’ has grown by over 5 times in Q1 of 2022 over Q4 of 2021. The value of UPI P2M transactions more than doubled yoy.
MERCHANT STACK, ICICI STACK
The bank has recently launched a digital platform called Merchant Stack, offering an array of banking and value-added services to retailers, online businesses and large e-commerce firms such as digital current account opening, instant overdraft facilities based on point-ofsale transactions and instant settlement of point-of-sale transactions, among others. The value of the bank’s merchant acquiring transactions through UPI has
more than doubled yoy and grew by 32% sequentially in Q1-2022.
The bank has also introduced ICICI Stack, which is a comprehensive set of digital banking solutions for corporates and their entire ecosystem of promoters, employees, dealers and vendors. Bakhshi said these solutions enable corporates to seamlessly meet all banking requirements of their ecosystems in a frictionless manner.
2025 TECH STRATEGY
The bank continues to invest in technology to enhance its offerings to customers as well as to ensure scalability, flexibility and resilience of its technology architecture. “We actively monitor and improve our technology infrastructure to minimize disruptions in services to our customers. As a part of our 2025 technology strategy, we are creating an enterprise architecture framework spanning digital platforms, data and analytics, micro services-based architecture, cloud computing and other
emerging technologies,” Bakhshi concluded.