Reliance Money Leverages Mobile Platform For Customer Convenience

Mobile phones have paved the way for new commercial relationships and organisations are exploring this medium to the fullest to reach out to more and more customers with innovative services. G N Nagaraj, SVP and CTO, Reliance Money, in a tete-a-tete with Biztech2.0, speaks about Reliance Money’s latest initiative – its mobile trading portal, the mobile business scenario in India and more.

What is the scenario in India related to mobile business?

The mobile business primarily started with voice mails and later came SMS. Presently, in terms of cell phone applications, the most popular one is ringtones, where the business has been really good for service providers. However, for most businesses it is important to use this medium for customers to transact and make it like a self-service for them. It reduces cost for the businesses and customers can experience the product or the service at their own leisure. However, this particular segment of the market will take time to evolve as there are a few challenges.

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Firstly, cell phone being a personal device comes with certain limitations like size and keypad. The way the keypad is structured and the sort of dexterity required to use it limits its usage. That is where creativity will be needed to come down to products and adapt to the form factor of these devices. Cell phone symbolises various things, it ranges from being a utility instrument to a status sign, so the types of phones being used also differ widely though they may be from the same vendor. With every model, new features come into the market; this has completely killed standardisation. For example, browsers which exist on the Nokia cell phone have 30 variants, each following different standards. A couple of them interact with firewall in the same manner as virus interacts with them. Thus, they tend to get blocked. But on the other model, the same browser could work well. There is no standard for interaction set for these browsers.

To counter the problem of standardisation, most developers are writing the client, which gets installed on the cell phone, so that they do not have to deal with the nuances of browsers. Each approach has a flip side. These are some of the key challenges, looking at the way the cell phone industry has evolved and the way service providers have been pushing databases.

What are the applications and technology being used at the back end for Reliance Money’s portal?

When we decided to make our presence felt on the cell phone, we had a few guiding principles. We needed to be independent of the underlying operator and the operator’s technology, for example, the underlying technology could be either GSM or CDMA, it need not make a difference to us. We aimed at making our solution work on both. Also, the handset being independent of the device itself and the nuances of the device, we decided to have an application platform, which had a repository of all the devices and the nuances of the form factors of all devices as attributes in the database. Any information that the company wishes to communicate should pass this database and depending on the form factor of the device, reach an appropriate display.

As we are device independent and there are multiple operating systems, it is going to be a logistic nightmare to have a client application and manage so many versions. That is the precise reason we decided to go with the WAP model. It is also closer to the Internet model. The way people are used to browsing on the Internet, this model would give them a similar experience, wherein you have to give an http address to type in a URL and then the page comes up and one can start accessing it. After a lot of research and help from Gartner, we froze on Volantis as our mobile application delivery platform, which suited all our needs.

How have you made the front end light to ensure that it will work on a slow Internet connection?

One of the reasons for choosing Volantis as the platform was that we could bring the user interface to the cell phone. In trading, for every trade that you put in, there are validations which need to happen on the data that is keyed in. Then there is risk management involved following which, the trade data is dispatched to the stock exchange. The heavier part is processing.

We do it as a part of our trading system. We have taken the user interface which is just the look and feel, and we have created a very simplistic look and feel minus most of the graphics, and we pass this through the Volantis platform. It is just the screens, which have been developed. The entire logic of trading is there in the normal trading back end. The Volantis platform can call on the APIs, which are there on the Reliance trading system. Thus, all the processing happens at the back end. The reason these pages are light is that we have painted a light screen and published it on the Volantis platform for access via cell phones.

With the GPRS connection not being stable, how do you keep up the real-time functioning of the portal?

GPRS connections have improved considerably. Some areas where there is network congestion and even voice calls drop still remain. However, we have operators now, who have implemented 2G and some are in the partial roll out of 2G and talking of 3G, so we saw this as the right time to get into mobile business. There will be a lot of improvement in the quality of service for both GPRS and CDMA networks for access in the days to come.

Which kind of database are you using and how?

We have not created any separate database. We have a trading engine, which the traders use, connecting to us through the Internet from their laptop or PC. We have integrated that into Volantis as a platform. The trading engine is delivered by Religare Technova. We have been using that for almost two years now. The engine is completely based on Microsoft platforms. It is a .NET architecture on the front side and it uses Microsoft SQL database. There is no separate database for the mobile trading application. We have integrated it with the existing trading engine.