Utkarsh is a premier micro-finance institution in India with operations across 10 states. It wanted to leverage its expertise and create a customer centric bank to provide financial and non-financial support to the under privileged segments of society and impart self-employment skills to its members. It applied for a license to set up a Small Finance Bank (SFB) and was one of the 10 chosen players to receive an in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India

Requirement

With an aggressive plan to rapidly on-board customers, Utkarsh was looking for a robust solution that could scale up on demand and help achieve its vision of acquiring more than 6 million customers by 2021. One of the key requirements was to have a Joint Liability Group (JLG) solution which would enable the bank to provide group loans to service its microfinance business. This was critical to reach out to the unbanked population in rural areas who cannot afford individual loans or have little or no collateral to provide.

Product / Solution provided

The bank needed a complete IT solution provider to ease the transition from a micro-finance to a small finance bank. After a careful study and analysis, the bank found Intellect Core Banking System to be the best fit. The entire solution along with the newly developed JLG module was implemented in just 10 months and the bank went live in January, 2016. The following are the modules successfully implemented and running at Utkarsh Bank.

  • Core Banking
  • Internet and Mobile Banking
  • Tablet Banking
  • Anti-Money Laundering
  • Trade Finance
  • Treasury
  • Asset-Liability Management (ALM)
  • Fixed Asset Management Solution(FAMS)
  • Intellect ODS
Key Achievements
  • Tablet Banking for financial inclusion of un-banked and under-banked: Integrated online-Real time system with Bio-metric Enabled Quick Customer On-boarding. The Bank’s field agents have been equipped with tablet and bio-metric technology for quick customer onboarding with e-kyc (linked to AADHAR/UID). These brought heavy traction in customer growth because the field officers can now quickly onboard customers and perform transactions even from remote locations. Real time posting also increased the amount of collections through field agents.
  • Swift and Smooth transition of the bank from Microfinance to SFB: Intellect has partnered with the bank at every step of the transformation. ADF Technology along with Intellect’s AML and ALM modules have been implemented for RBI regulatory reporting. The bank’s treasury operations are carried out through Intellect Treasury. Today the bank is able to provide better service through Intellect’s core banking system integrated with Internet and Mobile banking applications.
  • End-to-End Implementation of Hardware, Software, Cloud Hosting , Network services and Hand-held devices: Intellect partnered with the bank not just as a solution provider but as a system integrator. Customized End-to-End Digitization and Infrastructure overhaul provided by Intellect is helping the bank to cope with its new role and improve performance.
  • Go-Live in less than 10 Months: The bank earned its in-principle license with a condition by regulator that they have to launch operations by March 2017. That meant Intellect had less than a year for implementation. Intellect adopted AIM (Accelerated Implementation Methodology), which combines the best of conventional and Agile models. This helped to Go-live in less than 10 months. This is a huge achievement taking into account the huge volume of Data Migration, Hosting on Cloud and Integration with a host of 3rd party systems.
Business Impact

The following are the Growth indicators since the bank went live on Intellect Digital Core 6 months ago.

  • 30 New branches
  • 7.8% customer growth and 15% growth in accounts
  • 33% increase in the average daily transaction volumes
  • 152 new field agents added by the bank an increase from 1903.
  • Customer onboarding time has been reduced significantly using e-kyc (AADHAAR) and Bio-metric handheld devices.
  • Quick launch of products using Intellect product configurator. JLG was a unique module developed for Utkarsh in Agile mode.