ICICI Pru AMC's Transaction Acceptance Kiosk

The mutual fund industry’s primary business is managing investor money through various products offered. Typically, Asset Management Companies (AMCs) cater to both retail and corporate customers.

Customers submit transaction forms (transactions include fresh purchase of mutual fund units, redemption, query, change in address etc) either directly to the AMC or through financial advisors. These documents have to be time stamped by the company, as there are fixed time frames for accepting transaction forms.

With this fixed time frame set-up generally prevalent among industry players, there was no self-service option available for customers, agents and brokers to submit transaction forms. This prompted ICICI Pru AMC to deploy a Self-Service Transaction Kiosk, which eliminated manual intervention and the time constraint related to form acceptance. The kiosk has been deployed on a pilot basis since January 2009.

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Shopping For A Self-Service Kiosk

A prototype was prepared and the objectives of the solution were defined as:

• Providing a self-service option for transaction submission by customers
• Giving an immediate acknowledgement copy to customers
• Ensuring time stamp on all documents
• Scanning and image capturing option for further processing

The IT team of ICICI Pru AMC conceived various possible solutions jointly with the business owners such as sales, operations and compliance. After a series of internal debates, the final solution was arrived at.

“As this was an industry first, the process of preparing the prototype from ground-up took a long time initially. We were not very sure about the final outcome and commercial viability,” says Kalyan Prasath, head – IT, ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company.

The vendor was asked to study the process of manually accepting transactions onsite. This helped them to come out with the right design in terms of hardware and software and to achieve the end result. The kiosk hardware and software design was completely handled by the vendor while the business logic was designed in-house.

“After several iterations, the first complete kiosk was delivered to our office in about six months,” says Prasath.

Automation of Transaction Acceptance Process

The self-service kiosk provides menu options for customers to select any particular transaction, such as Fresh Purchase, Redemption, Query, etc. Based on the selection, the transactions are accepted by the system, time stamped and scanned.

The kiosk is designed to be operational 24*7 and can accept 200-300 transactions daily. In a manual process, the back office person has to generally accept, time stamp and scan transactions in a step-by-step process. The kiosk performs all these activities in one instance and even provides an acknowledgement copy to the customer. This speeds up the whole process of transaction acceptance.

The kiosk will thus improve the efficiency ICICI Pru AMC and break the office timings barrier. It is an initiative to increase customer service touch points, enhance customer experience, reduce transaction acceptance time and provide query facilities round the clock.

“The above said solution has been deployed on a pilot basis in our office since January 2009 and is working to our satisfaction,” says Prasath.

The kiosk will cater to both new and existing customers wanting to submit either financial or non-financial transactions of the following nature:

• Fresh Purchase
• Additional Purchase
• Redemptions
• Switch Request
• Change in Address
• Change in Bank Mandate
• Query/ Complaints

The project has just been implemented; however, there is a positive response from investors and the RoI will clearly be realised in terms of long-term investor convenience and high service delivery, which will further translate into sustained investor relationships.