Asset Sweating Leads To Innovation

ICICI bank is one of the premiere private banks in India. The ICICI Group has around fifty five thousand employees and renders services to about thirty two million customers. Pravir Vohra, Group CTO, ICICI, in an interview with Biztech2.0 speaks about his role as a synergiser of technology across the company.

What are the recent IT initiatives taken at ICICI bank?

ICICI bank is involved in a number of initiatives in the rural and inclusive banking space. We are trying to figure out ways in which can extend our reach using non-traditional channels like smart cards and business correspondence. We also want to provide business services to places where banks don’t have branches, in addition to initiatives revolving around payment systems. For this, we are working on a model that will allow our customers to remit money to a person who does not necessarily have a bank account.

Could you please talk about the iMobile Initiative of the bank?

iMobile allows customers to do various kinds of banking using a customised user interface on mobiles. ICICI Prudential Life has also introduced the ability to service insurance policies on the mobile device, using the same platform.

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What steps has the bank taken to retain and attract new talent?

There are two perspectives to this. In order to retain talent, we ensure that our administrative staff and other employees of the company work in collaboration. This helps in encouraging talent, getting feedback, motivation and training. As far as new talent is concerned, we are always trying to hire laterally. We need people who have knowledge of financial services, banking and products.

What is your take on asset sweating leading to re-invention?

Asset sweating or more intensive use of the same systems, I believe will really lead to innovation. From a technology point of view a lot of components that we might have are actually reusable. So the architecture we have built at the ICICI group is some thing that we leverage to deliver all new products and all new services.

This is an architecture that allows us to loosely couple our various systems and come up with new front ends and new products, with stitching together what we already have. This is not to say we never need to make new investments but we have a huge focus within the group in sweating existing assets and reusing them not only to protect investment but also training and skill sets.

How do you ensure that the enterprise architecture always remains agile and flexible?

We have defined a technology stack, which we expect all new applications to comply with. We would like them to be based on the Java enterprise architecture, in the event of was wanting to launch services. So this is a hygiene stack that actually allows us to achieve agility using our architecture.