The BFSI is the single largest vertical in terms of IT adoption in India. The nature of business makes IT the spine of operations at banks.

HDFC, a big player in the space recently entered into a partnership with Symantec for IT governance. The bank's IT team has a set of functions to perform in order to enhance the overall customer experience. C.N.Ram, Head - IT, HDFC Bank and Vishal Dhupar, MD, Symantec discuss the evolving role of IT at banks.

The HDFC Way to Improve Customer Experience

Commenting on HDFC's efforts to enhance customer experience through IT, C.N.Ram said, "We have found that 70% of the customer transactions are done without visiting the bank, either through phone banking, ATM or online. It becomes very critical for the IT department to construct the data and service it so that it can be processed to exercise the above transactions. Availability of data is also of equal importance to make sure that the transactions can be made round the clock. Tthe bank is trying to offer a suite of products like MFs, equity trading, etc and built channels for the banking customers to exercise the products. We want HDFC Bank to become a one-stop finance shop for customers."

Giving a vendor perspective on what has changed in companies wanting to enhance customer experience, Vishal Dhupar said, “What we have found over a period of time is that companies want to have a single transactional backbone that is protected while it is resident in the company or is moving." Availability of data is also important. As companies are coming up with more suite of products, integration of various services enhances customer experience.

Challenges In The Way

"The challenge lies in coming up with various software for the new banking products and integrating them," said Ram. Since the volume of transactions is increasing with new services, the amount of computing power is also surging and as a result, the number of information assets with the company are getting wider in scale. The security and processing of the data becomes a challenge as a result.

"The challenge gives us an opportunity to use BI solutions that facilitate customer profiling," opines Ram.

As businesses are growing in size, the complexity of operations is also increasing. Thus the IT alignment with the business processes is very important. Companies are looking for cost optimisation to enhance customer operations. "Data centres can be an agent of transformation in this process," said Dhupar. IT governance can play a decisive role in charting out universal processes for the organisation.

Top Three Banking Trends in 2008

According to Ram, the top three trends to watch out for this year will be the Internet, mobile based transactions and financial inclusion. Internet will be the channel that the customers will more often use for banking transactions equal to what it is used for social networking. Mobile based transactions will also go up and finally as the rural population is also becoming a part of the economic prosperity, financial inclusion is a major opportunity and trend, banks should watch out for.