 "Vsoft To Enable Bankers With New-Age Banking Solutions")
Vsoft, a company formed in 1996, has been developing software in Hyderabad, its core competency being its banking services. The company recently decided to explore the Indian market by offering a set of banking services for Indian bankers.
Murthy Veerghanta, president, Vsoft, spoke to Biztech 2.0 regarding some of the solutions and services that Vsoft is bringing to the table.
What kind of solutions are you offering to Indian bankers?
In India, our primary offerings are cheque truncation, document imaging, and core banking solutions for co-op banks. We plan to offer our customers a SaaS model, through which we can deliver these offerings. In order to enable this, we are about to announce a datacentre, which will be based in Hyderabad. Considering we’ve had a development centre in Hyderabad for some time now, we decided to base our datacentre there as well. However, some banks want the datacentre to be locally placed, in that case we might have more than one datacentre.
We have found that most of our demand is in Maharashtra and Gujarat, so we might have two datacentres in these states in order to cater to this demand.
What kind of value would your cheque truncation solution bring to a banker?
At the end of the day, banks are very pnl (profit-n-loss) focused. They need to make cost savings in terms of manpower, environment, and technology used. Our products are able to provide value added services to customers. We allow for Point of sale capture of cheques, etc, which then becomes an effective revenue generator for banks. The archiving and e-statementing of the images, allow the banks to not only save expenses but also generate revenues by offering services. We also have other products such as Fraud In-Check, which helps to reduce the amount of fraud.
Do you plan to bring your ATM imaging system to India?
No, it’s too expensive right now for the Indian market. It is actually not justified in the US market right now, because of the high costs. There are some banks that have adopted it in the US and some small credit unions using our application. When you have an ATM in a remote location, and if it is not image ready, you have to send a courier to pick up the cheques. Now, if the ATM is image ready, then manual contact is not needed. The image travels and if the cash can be recycled in the ATM, then somebody can go once a week to pick up the physical document. Today in India you don’t really need this technology. Once you have penetration of ATMs into the rural areas, then you will need these solutions.
On the technology side, who are your partners?
In the US, we have a relationship with nearly every hardware vendor and we expect to get to the same point in India.
Vsoft recently acquired Coopman consultancy. Coopman’s products are very specific to the Indian and rural Indian market, considering the company was formed by K R Ranganatha, ex RBI DGM.
What kind of response have you seen in the Indian market for your products?
Although certain banks are still weary of our offerings, we get people who ask us to come over and discuss pricing, functionality, etc. So it is a broad spectrum of mixed responses. Our cheque truncation solution is currently in the pilot stages.
How do you see Vsoft shaping up in the Indian market?
We expect our cheque truncation system to make up 20-25% of the market share, and expect revenues to run into several hundred crores as the investment in hardware and soft ware is considerable. In the core banking market for co-op banks, rural banks, are a big opportunity. There are 4000-5000 such banks with an average of 5 branches. Thus in both these markets we expect our revenue to go into hundreds of crores. The document imaging market is also picking up now and banks are showing active interest and are trying to figure out what model suits them best. We are working through the ASP/in house model.