 "Edelweiss Capital: Thrust To Be On Consolidation")
“Broadly speaking, our culture of execution, our diversified business model, our research driven approach and consistent ability to capitalise on emerging market trends, continuous investment in upgrading technology and constant investment in building new businesses in adjacent spaces has enabled us to stay ahead of the competition,” said Himanshu Kaji, CFO & Group COO - Edelweiss Capital, in one of his recent media interactions. To take a thread out of the above quote, Biztech2.0 focuses on how Edelweiss Capital has stepped up its technology to differentiate itself from the competition.
“For every business expansion (including launch of new business), we have approached technology, along with business planning in a very structured way and that’s our differentiating factor,” said Kalpana Maniar, Head Business Solutions & IT - BSG & Tech, Edelweiss Securities.
The BFSI player is a premier, end-to-end financial services house, operating in the securities, trading and distribution products space. It offers a plethora of financial products and services, including Investment Banking, Asset Management, Wealth Management, Retail Broking and Treasury Operations. Like any other financial services player, the diverse lines of businesses have grown steadily and thus the IT infrastructure and applications have also grown in silos. “This is similar to all our industry peers,” said Maniar.
However, Edelweiss believes in a proactive approach, where the top management is actively involved in the business technology alignment for future business initiatives.
IT is a part of the deliberation process with the top management that precedes the launch of any new line of business. “The technology enablement of every new business that we launch is well thought-out, therefore there are no major inconsistencies in technology and business process alignment,” said Maniar. The BFSI player is fairly automation-oriented with good business process engineering capabilities. Hence, it has been able to increase volumes and maintain a good presence in each line of business.
The IT Strategy
“Basically, we have a right mix of in-sourced and outsourced applications. In case of core applications or those that are commoditised, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. However, we build applications around core solutions to meet necessary automation requirements,” explains Maniar. For example, the core solution of the lending business, takes care of the accounting aspect, whereas all workflow that includes the pre and post disbursal, including managing operations risk is done by the in-house team.
Some mid-office solutions have also been developed in-house. These give a more granular view of exchange-based and non exchange-based asset classes.
As a part of its strategy, Edelweiss Capital believes that ‘understanding the customer’ is crucial to target the right mix of products and thus is in the process of consolidating IT.
The Recent Thrust On Consolidation
Most BFSI players are grappling with consolidation because every line of business has its individual stack of applications, making the application inventory fragmented and creating duplicated data environments. The need is to consolidate, optimise and build efficiencies in IT deployment.
The same applies to the customer end. In financial services, the customer can be a wealth management, AMC, lending and/or broking customer. Currently there is a segmented view of that customer. There is a need to have a 360 degree view of the customer so that the offerings are stitched around his needs. From a service perspective, there is also a need to provide the customer a unified experience, pre-trade and post-trade.
“What we are trying to do currently, is very strategically, consolidate the IT applications and infrastructure inventory to build a logical, transactional and operational service stack. And this is a very conscious effort,” said Maniar.
Edelweiss Capital has recently automated Key Result Areas (KRAs) for every line of business, which is broken down into achievable targets. “Now we are able to get a comparative picture of targets versus the actual performance for all businesses, both from a financial and functional angle,” said Maniar.
The company is also in the process of creating infrastructure across verticals, like a common repository for clients, in addition to wealth, retail and institutional segments. It is also designing unified lateral service such as a portal, contact centre, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, Document Management System (DMS), across homogenous set of users.
On the IT infrastructure side, server and storage virtualisation is underway while infrastructure monitoring is on the way to adopt a pre-emptive approach.