YES Bank Hopes To Conquer Retail With FinnOne

A couple of years back, when one of India’s youngest banking institutions, YES Bank decided to venture in the ever so competitive world of retail banking, it knew it had its work cut out. In order to compete with the big boys and carve out a niche for itself in the retail banking arena, the bank figured that it had to arm itself with technology and make optimum use of IT.

Keeping in tune with this philosophy, the bank recently implemented FinnOne CAS, Loan Management and Collections Suite to manage its loan lending and collection activities. The specially designed solution from Nucleus Software has already gone live at several YES Bank branches.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

Aiming for the retail pie

The bank has always been keen on retail banking. It began its retail initiative by offering personal loans and advances against existing real estate. Later on, the bank expanded its retail loan portfolio by offering housing loans. To widen its horizons even further, the bank opened up several branches in different parts of the country.

“We always had ambitious plans for the retail segment. The booming Indian economy and emergence of retail lending market was just too tempting an opportunity to pass up,” said Umesh Jain, CIO, YES Bank. “So when we decided to take the plunge, we knew that we’d require robust technology to efficiently support the initiative. Acquiring new customers, managing loan lending and collection, and other related activities is by no means an easy task especially when it comes to multi-location operations. It is for this reason we felt that we needed to empower our employees with technology that worked.”

But the bank’s retail aspirations don’t end here. In fact, it’s just the beginning.

According to Jain, the bank is planning to go for full scale retail banking during the current fiscal year and make it one of the three divisions along with small and medium enterprises and corporate institutional banking. YES bank expects that in the next 3-4 years its retail banking practice will account for 30-35% of its total business.

FinnOne provides 360 degree view

Nucleus Software’s FinnOne Customer Acquisition System, Loans Management System and Collections system matched YES bank’s requirements and because the bank didn’t practice retail lending before, it didn’t face any legacy issues during the implementation process. A joint team comprising of Nucleus software representatives and personnel from the bank worked on the deployment.

The solution implemented at the bank is said to be capable of managing the entire lending and collection process right from acquiring the customer, disbursing the loan followed by collecting the EMIs for repayment of the loan. In the addition to this, the solution also allows for culling of customers data to assist bank’s sales force to identify opportunities of cross-selling some of the other banking products.

The solution is running on Oracle 10g application server and talks to Oracle 10g database. The operating systems being used for the solution are Windows and Solaris.

“FinnOne provides our staff with a complete 360 degree view of the customer. It provides them with the customers’ complete transaction history which essentially enables our staff to respond to their queries/ problems in an extremely efficient manner,” informed Jain.

At present seven of the bank’s branches have gone live with the rest being mapped out. The connectivity is supported via leased lines, internet and VPN.

Jain did not disclose the cost YES bank incurred for the exercise.