IT Gets Fullerton Securities Off The Ground And Beyond

“Barring credit cards, deposits and loans we are into all kinds of financial services business,” says Anoop Handa, CIO, Fullerton Securities & Wealth Advisor s, stressing on how within the short duration of about a year, the financial services player has been able to successfully roll out and gain market share in the Broking and wealth management business in India. The company launched operations in April 2009 and since then the customer count has risen to 20,000. Today Fullerton offers a wide range of financial products and services. The scalable Information Technology architecture has played a critical role in this journey, from the successful launch of Fullerton’s operations to steering the fast pace of its growth and expansion into a suite of financial services.

Driven By Customer Centricity

Explaining the genesis of the IT platform, Handa observes that the platform was basically delivered to launch Fullerton capital markets and wealth management business in India. It was conceptualised and developed from scratch, and aligned to the business vision of launching a green-field financial services distribution/wealth management business in India. Handa, who is a part of the founder management team at the company, has been at the helm of conceptualisation, planning, designing and end-to-end implementation of this integrated, customer-centric & open architecture platform for Wealth Management & Capital Markets.

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With customer centricity at the core, the organization wanted to leverage technology to ensure rich customer experience in the areas of Broking, Financial Services Distribution and Wealth Management arena while enhancing operational productivity. The endeavour was also to provide a 360 degree view of the customer’s portfolio and offering consistent customer experience at all times across all touch points (Internet, Phone, Financial Centres).

Scalability Sustains Expansion

Initially implementing the platform in 2009 to launch the business, the first set of implementation with core processes and core systems went live within a span of six months . Thereon, Fullerton kept adding more features to it in line with the company’s expansion. This includes adding transactional capability on the web, finally culminating all into a customer portal overtime. On day one all the basic processes like back office applications, front end applications for trading and the document scanning system with the call centre were ready. “During the business launch, we wanted capabilities for customers to trade with us, interact with us on call centre supported by a back office system in place along with hub and spoke for scanning solution. We operate from more than 12 locations in India, so we have a central hub in Gurgaon where all account opening forms are delivered,” informs Handa. Subsequently the company added features like trading on the web, mutual fund on the web. Social media was also leveraged for viral marketing. The platform has been designed to be scalable and flexible, allowing plugging-in of additional products with full flexibility while recognising the fact that all customer service channels are in tact and reviewable for a 360 degree view historically and for up selling.

All-On-One

The platform’s architecture has been implemented by selecting the right fit for purpose products. For instance, Fullerton has gone for technology from Oracle implemented by Sierra Atlantic, while Servion has delivered Cisco’s networking platform. “It’s a comprehensive business suite,” is how Handa sums up this IT platform. The overall platform comprises of CRM (which has modules to capture customer demographics), Portfolio Aggregator, Transactional Website, Trading Front-office, Back-office, Call Center, Remote Scanning and a variety of other delivery channels. In front office, there is a trading platform which is both web and offline. Under back-office, there are applications for mutual fund, and also applications for DP, equity back office. “In the back office we have an aggregator, so for example if a customer buys a product from us, his demographics will be captured in the CRM. The transactions will be happening on the back-end and this middleware will have a 360 degree view of the customer along with the transactions carried out with us over a period of time,” explains Handa.

Roadblocks

Being in tune with the business processes holds the key to the architecture’s successful implementation. “The entire architecture is embedded into the way we perform our business whether it’s account opening, sales, mobility, social media, call center, back office, GL process, etc. It’s an integrated architecture embedded into the business processes,” Handa stresses. However, Handa had to overcome a slew of roadblocks to get it right. The launch of Fullerton Securities & Wealth Advisors during economic turmoil meant that there was severe pressure on IT costs and to deploy the envisaged IT blueprint in the most optimal way. Agility, influencing and negotiation skills were essential. Also, being a green-field operation, the business plans were also evolving at the same time, requiring adaptability, flexibility and quickly absorbing the evolving business strategy for successful delivery. “Ability to be a part of the business; appreciation of key business challenges; and then promptly deploying the technology solutions to meet those needs was the true recipe for success,” believes Handa. And, so were collaborative working with business leaders and technology partners. In effect, the key guiding principles of ‘Optimise Costs; Maintain Scalability; Sustain Quality’ helped battling it out.

Impacting Customer Experience

IT has been a key enabler first to launch the business across multiple cities and then to expand and foray into newer market segments. Within a short timeframe, Fullerton Securities now has a product offering and a delivery platform that is comparable to businesses which have taken close to a decade to evolve. Fullerton kick started business operations in India with the securities and broking businesses, however, the IT architecture was designed such that it can accommodate other LOBs too. And, thus Fullerton’s foray into the wealth management and capital markets business in India was not much of an exercise.

Overall, the platform has enabled the business to support a truly differentiated customer experience across Equity Trading (Front-office, Back-office), Wealth Management, Distribution, Financial Planning and Investment Management. This includes one step account opening, efficient and effective paperless processes, relationship based pricing, unique analytics based cross-sell and up-sell, transactions through call center and web, consolidated portfolio statement, online customer portal. So, how does this ultimately impact Fullerton’s customers, because after all it all boils down to the end customer. For one, customers have a seamless access to a centralised call centre, seven days a week. Further, Fullerton is able to offer the highest level of security in equity transaction, as well as an Internet Broking (IBT) capability, with payment gateways to key banks.

For Handa the key value proposition delivered by technology has been the freedom to choose the channel of communication, be it web, branch field staff, call centre. So, phone, web, email, all the channels are available for the customers.

“The future roadmap includes adding the mobile channel for the salesforce and further strengthening it by adding more features,” Handa concludes.