Conference Highlights
Anand Sharma, CTO, Asirvad
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 hasSecure Digital Transformation - An NBFC perspective
Suresh Shan, Praveen Jaykumar, Dominic Vijay Kumar, Anand Sharma, Arjun Bhaskaran, Rajiv R
G and Balaji Natrajan deliberating on ‘Securing Digital Transformation’