“Starting the data warehousing and analytics journey in 2001, we are perhaps the earliest adopters of BI/DWH in the country”

ICICI Securities is a wholly owned subsidiary of ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank. As the largest integrated securities firm in the country, ICICI Securities covers the needs of corporate and retail customers through investment banking, institutional and retail broking, private wealth management, and financial product distribution businesses.

Headquartered in Mumbai, ICICI Securities is a Securities & Exchange Board of India (SEBI) registered merchant banker and amongst the leaders in the Indian capital market space across institutional and retail businesses.

ICICI Securities serves over 2.2 mn customers online through its pioneering website Icicidirect.com and offline through over 240 ICICI Direct stores across over 90 cities. ICICI Securities has also created a platform for active traders that supports a 900 strong sub-broker network, across 400 cities. ICICI Direct has been a pioneer in the online share-trading business since SEBI permitted internet based trading in 2000. ICICI Securities is the largest online broking and investment services provider in India, and the undisputed market leader.

Explaining more about the changing face of technology in the sector to VOICE&DATA is Joydeep Dutta, CTO, ICICI Securities. Excerpts—

CTO, ICICI Securities

What are the major ICT challenges faced by the BFSI sector and the key technological trends?

The challenges facing today’s IT departments are unprecedented in scale and scope. BFSI organizations, in particular, are heavily dependent on technology to run their businesses, which runs on a very complex ICT infrastructure. In addition to the traditional branch touch point, almost all products and services need to be offered through multiple electronic channels (internet, IVR, call center, mobile, kiosk, etc). For us, having 24x7 systems uptime, scalability, high availability, and systems redundancy are of prime importance.

Within the financial services sector, the stock broking business, which is our core business, is even more time sensitive, where a millisecond delay can be a cause for customer to lose a market opportunity, and therefore, technology can prove to be the differentiator among equals. Poor internet connectivity in semi-urban and rural locations has been a challenge.