‘Connected ecosystem banking to emerge soon’

How IndusInd Bank has leveraged technology to deliver value to businesses?

We started the digital journey long before the pandemic hit. While the year and a half has been tough, it has accelerated the focus and pace of innovation along with digitization. We started with automating manual processes by leveraging technologies such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), robotics and more. Then, we focused on building the right digital architecture by adopting a hybrid cloud approach. This has enabled us to rapidly scale, provision and build multiple application infrastructures in a very short amount of time. We can monetize the infrastructure for application design and ensure fast delivery of customer experience.

Data lakes are another area we focused on. We have a data lake which enables us to swallow large amounts of data rapidly. We use cloud capabilities to analyze the data, and open source to mine the data and generate statistical models. Our efforts are focused on creating a different customer experience through APIs.

We have created an unassisted or do-it-yourself customer journey for practically every product. Technology platforms are helping us to deliver these journeys to our customers, which are completely paperless and seamless without any human intervention. For example, we have aggregated the entire loan journey with about 40 APIs; They are running in a planned manner.

What are the pillars of the bank’s digital strategy?

There are three areas that will underline how we have prepared ourselves for the digital strategy. First, we’d like to take an overview of the end-to-end customer experience. Our ultimate aim is to remove friction, optimize processes and create impact on the customer journey. We are also mindful of the fact that no technology stack will function smoothly to deliver a customer experience if it does not have a basic API management framework to support it. Therefore, the second strategy to provide better customer experience is a robust layer which is enabled through APIs. To deliver a good customer experience, you need a robust API framework. And we’ve been able to do this because we have a robust API platform to support digital customer experiences.

With our hybrid cloud approach, we have built a technology infrastructure that is scalable and flexible. This ensures that all customer services are delivered in a reliable manner. Second, we have made significant investments in data warehousing and analytical capabilities. We want our analytical units, like the campaign management team, to be able to use data and drive campaigns in a targeted manner. The third pillar is the organization and governance structure. Having the right operating procedures and the right governance structure to deliver the technology helps.

How are you maintaining flexibility in operations and ensuring that there is no gap in digital engagement with customers?

The inertia lies in how we structure our infrastructure and how we scale the private and hybrid cloud. We have kept redundancy with the design and physical deployment architecture. Furthermore, we are not using the cloud to optimize our costs but for better reliability.

How will banking services develop in the near future?

Every industry got disrupted due to the pandemic. So was the banking sector. Customer experience rules the roost and there will be a huge demand for all the technologies which will help in creating a unique customer experience. We will also see the emergence of the connected ecosystem banking – a sector that will witness a lot of innovation.

The regulatory and compliance landscape will play an important role in determining the future of banking.