Finacle - Customers | Case Studies

IDBI Bank Technology Enabled Agile Banking

Bank Profile

Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI), a leading development and financial institution of India, promoted IDBI Bank to mark the formal foray of IDBI into commercial Banking. This initiative has blossomed into a success story with IDBI Bank achieving a front ranking position in the Indian Banking Industry. IDBI Bank has been rated as the fastest growing company in the country by Business World, India. The bank which began with an equity capital base of Rs.1000 million (20 M USD) in November 1995, today has 155 branches and over 350 ATM's spread across 95 cities.

Key Business Drivers

In January 2001, following a change in the top management of the bank, the strategy of the bank was redrawn. The bank felt a strong need to upgrade the technology platform, which would enable the bank to transform itself to meet the challenges of the future.

Renewed thrust on Retail Banking Initiatives

IDBI Bank had started operations as a bank catering primarily to corporate clientele. This strategy was redrawn in early 2001 to focus on the exciting arena of Retail Banking. Seen in this light, 53 branches and 79 ATM's (Automated Teller Machines) nationwide just didn't seem enough. The need of the hour was to have a technology platform that would seamlessly scale up and at the same time enable IDBI Bank to reach out to its customers through multiple delivery channels. Scalability was important because of the expected explosion in transaction volumes, customer accounts, etc. that accompany consumer banking business and seamless offering of delivery channels was important because customers need and demand not just access but also unified view of their interactions with the bank through multiple delivery channels. In short the need was to have a completely integrated solution, which would cater to consumer banking requirements while providing comprehensive business banking functionalities to cater to the bank's corporate customers.

Legacy systems

IDBI Bank was earlier using a centralized system from Kindle. However, to meet its new strategic initiatives and specific thrust on retail banking, this core banking system needed to be replaced.

Business Agility and Time-to-market

IDBI Bank wanted to have a solution that would not only be quick and easy to deploy but also provide the bank the flexibility to launch new products and services easily. Being fully aware that typical core banking implementations lasted 12-18 months, the bank was keen to choose a solution that gave it a time-to-market advantage. They needed to choose a technology partner who had a track record of deploying core banking solutions significantly faster. Furthermore, along with the speed of implementation, an extremely robust solution was required. Achieving technology driven business agility was one of the key drivers for the bank.

Solution Overview

After a detailed and rigorous evaluation, Finacle was deployed at IDBI Bank to power its retail and corporate banking, trade finance, as well as consumer and business e-banking operations. The core banking solution runs on high availability Unix based servers from Sun Microsystems and interfaces seamlessly with the bank’s other applications such as ATM's, Telebanking solution, internet banking, etc.

Another feather in Infosys cap was to deploy Finacle core banking solution in a record time frame of 5½ months across the entire bank. In fact the core banking roll out at the branches started on 2 May, 2001 and was completed on 18 June, 2001, without a single extension to the agreed project time lines.

Going live with Finacle in record time has gained IDBI Bank critical time-to market advantage and the ability to roll-out products much faster than ever before. For example, IDBI Bank introduced the concept of “Welcome Kit” in Indian Banking, consisting of all the deliverables customer expects on day one like cheque book, Internet and Phone banking access details etc. This has enabled IDBI Bank to open accounts on the fly unlike other banks where the customer needs to wait for a week or more to get these.

View From the Top

"One of the key differentiators that IDBI Bank found in Finacle universal banking solution was its new generation technology and its use of the web paradigm. With features like Straight-Through-Processing, 24x7 banking, e-Xtensibility tool kit, Finacle has indeed proved to be the right choice. With Finacle powering our core banking operations, we have been able to bring down our End of Day processing time by more than 80%."

Sanjay Sharma,
Vice President & Head- Product Development Group, IDBI Bank

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