LOLC Technologies’ Diversification into Fintech
LOLC Technologies Ltd is a fully-owned subsidiary of LOLC Holdings PLC and functions as the Group technology service provider since inception. The brilliance of LOLC Tech shines through in its commitment to innovation to drive greater efficiency. Its commitment to long-term strategic thinking, prioritizing data-driven decisionmaking, and embracing automation in the push for group-encompassing adoption is admirable.
LOLC Tech has been a pioneer in adopting new and groundbreaking technologies that usher in business value. LOLC Tech pioneered the first X86 virtualisation implementation in 2009 and transformed the existing virtualized infrastructure to a Software-defined Datacentre in 2011, enabling itself to operate as a ‘cloud services provider’. It became one of the first IT companies to obtain many standards including ISO 270001, ISO 9001 and ISO 20000. Further, aligning with its digital footprint, LOLC Tech achieved PCI DSS certification last year. The Fusion Financial Solution Suite is the core banking solution of LOLC Group, which has been developed and perfected to become an awardwinning enterprise application in Sri Lanka and overseas. LOLC Tech comprises of a highly competent and dedicated team of professionals to provide bestin-class support and consultancy services.
Today, LOLC Tech has expanded its services beyond Sri Lankan borders, with technical resources of over 350+ traditional IT services to invest in disruptive technology companies and solutions. One of its maiden investments was in Digital Mobility Solutions Ltd., popularly known as Pickme, as a seed investor, and in the virtual patient consultation services company, odoc Private Limited.
In the world of digital, where digital-only banks or Neobanks are becoming the go-to for many customers, the investments were focused on three distinct pillars: the front-end of a neobank, which facilitates through ipay platform, and core of a neobank or digitalonly bank driven by full stack through Fusionx digital platform, while entering into the niche market of fintech in the salary loan and salary advance space with OYES.
Global Financial Super app
ipay is a global financial services super app that goes beyond simple payment and is an award-winning application. ipay is a revolutionary digital merchant platform “extending beyond payments” with its online, real-time cash handling and omnichannel payment facilitation. ipay is a robust solution built on a highly scalable architecture using state-of-the-art technology, which allows various kinds and sizes of merchants, from pavement hawkers to corner stores, coffee shops to super markets and super stores to department stores, to offer ipay services. The cost of joining the ecosystem is considerably low, as anyone with a bank account, computer or smartphone and an internet connection can experience frictionless transactions via ipay.
Own Your Earned Salary
OYES is a fintech solution to own and to unlock earned salaries utilizing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies. This contributes to elevate the financial requirements of the nation’s workforce whenever they aspire. OYES functions as a facilitator in drawing salary advances digitally, by offering easy access with the help of a kiosk or through the ipay mobile app.
FUSION X
As technology evolves, organizations need to stay ahead of the curve. Fusionx is the next generation core banking solution conceptualized with the vision of delivering business agility to financial institutes that operate in constantly changing markets through technology. The traditional monolithic and modular legacy core banking systems have limited the potential of most banks and financial institutions for new product developments and integration with multiple systems by industry experts. The ideology of Fusionx is to be a catalyst to develop businesses. As a result, Fusionx was designed on composable architecture to enable the banks and financial institutions to be agile and adopt a fast go-tomarket approach in a heavily competitive industry.
Fusionx is designed with Digital First, Cloud Native, Data Driven design with Mobile first approach. Performance and scalability was provided by nature as auto scale up/scale down capabilities enabled with micro services architecture and next generation streaming services as well. Due to its composable architecture, deployment agility enables minimal deployment time. By nature, Fusionx platform is database agnostic, where any flavour of database can be configured, with automating database tasks; presently it is armed with autonomous database capabilities. Further, the platform is designed to open banking standards with API first concept integration abilities freely available for B2B partnerships.
Most importantly, Fusionx is engineered with first principles of design while keeping information security requirements from the very beginning. Development practices are shifted from traditional Devops to Devsecops, where information security is part of the product itself.
Prasanna Siriwardena Deputy Chief Executive Officer, LOLC Technologies says, “Our vision is to create an operating system for the banking and financial services industry. The fundamental design principle of Fusionx is ‘Simplification to all stakeholders’, which includes customers, employees, agents, managers and banking partners. We bring the customer to the centre of the core of the design which revolves around three main principles: facilitate store of value, facilitate transfer of value and facilitate access to value.”
Its platform-driven approach delivers solutions built on a stateof-the-art digital and omni channel experience. It is highly scalable as its applications are built to scale with increase in usage. Some of its existing implementations have scaled up to approximately a million customers.
Parakum Pathirana, Chief Operating Officer of LOLC Technologies says, “Fusionx has embedded security standards as part of the design. It is based on first principles of design thinking for banking technology and is geared to facilitate easy adoption of open banking.
Fusionx is based on cloudbased mobile native architecture, completely developed on micro services, which provides the agility, expandability and manoeuvrability in the long run to bring down costs for users.”
Business users can manage and customize applications with ease in Fusionx and new features too can be introduced with help of an intuitive user admin interface. This is facilitated via a low code/ no code platform. Each user journey is created as a modular and independent micro app by using Micro Services to support different channels. Fusionx has a future ready architecture and its Micro-api based architecture design enables modular and re-usable apps across the enterprise. It also delivers omnichannel capabilities and inbuilt security controls and integration capabilities with third party eco systems.
Fusionx is presently deployed in multiple countries by LOLC including Zambia, Malawi and Kenya, and is expected to expand to all the remaining countries where the Group has its presence. LOLC Technologies will continue to invest in advanced digital technology platforms that help to optimize the operations of the global LOLC Group.