Enabling Financial Inclusion Key Priority: HDFC Bank CIO

Anil Jaggia, CIO– HDFC Bank, presenting at the recently concluded BFTF summit in Mumbai unveiled the bank’s top six tech priorities. No wonder, financial inclusion topped the list due to the push given by RBI and also the latent opportunity in the rural areas with high disposable incomes. Given the recent string of hacking incidents, security alertness at banks has heightened. HDFC Bank being one of the top lenders in the space will also have security among the top on their priority list. Analytics, Big data, Private cloud, SOA are some other technologies that figures in Jaggia’s plan.

Financial Inclusion

The bank is committed to play its part in the mission to achieve financial inclusion. The objective is how to make it a win-win for the banks and the customer. Currently the margins on providing services to the rural masses do not look so attractive. The kind of service offerings to the rural customer should be need-based coupled with a reasonable price – striking a balance here will be decisive to the success of bank’s financial inclusion agenda and technology will play a crucial role to enable banks for their reach out programmes in a cost effective manner.

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Security

Security will be another area of focus for HDFC Bank, especially after the recent string of breach-ins. Citibank, RSA, Sony and few other corporations have experienced serious intrusion events in the recent past including massive amounts of customer data being exposed to hackers.

Analytics

There will be increased focus on analytics for targeted offerings. Additionally, analytics will be used aggressively for fraud detection, money laundering events, etc. The bank is also looking forward to refresh their Datawarehouse infrastructure.

Big Data

According to Wikipedia, Big data involves datasets that grow so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand database management tools. HDFC bank considers using Big data for video analytics where they would like to invest into with tons of video data getting accumulated through various sources. This can also be applied to analyse botnets, a major information threat tool. Currently the intelligence of the botnets and virus programmes has rendered the anti-virus, botnet solutions blunt.

Private Cloud

The bank, over the period of last 14-15 months, has worked extensively on designing their private cloud infrastructure. The team has planned the base of the building blocks of the private cloud based on certain pre-conditions. The implementation will be done on the bank’s X86 world machines and AIX UNIX servers with an objective to extract the best out of the current IT infrastructure- thus making it more agile to provision and de-provision hardware and software resources, resulting in considerable cost savings.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

We are not too far away from times where banking services would be targeted to customers based on their individual profile. The number of services in the bank’s service catalogue would prove critical to achieve this. HDFC bank has about 1000 services in their service catalogue and an enhanced focus will be exercised to ramp up the amount of services. This would power the bank to respond in real time to a specific customer request. Appropriate changes in the architecture engine are being made to bring this into effect.

Banks in India are going through a challenging phase with constant increase in interest rates, high inflation and other challenges. And, these tough times mean stepping up their product and service offerings through reliance on now technologies and re-invention of existing ones. HDFC Bank will be looking forward to implement these technologies to further rationalise operational efficiencies to overcome the impending issues.