Digital transformation in banking and the use of the cloud help banks enhance their products and solutions, and customer experience. Customers can easily access their banking accounts and perform transactions from anywhere, using devices such as smartphones or computers. Cloud-based digital banking also allows for more efficient and cost-effective management of banking systems and data.
Indian banks are future-proofing their businesses by embracing a cloud-based digital ecosystem to improve their products and services and enhance customer experience.
At Axis Bank, India’s third largest private sector bank, digital leadership and technological-driven transformation are key pillars of their growth, profitability, and sustainability (GPS) strategy. In an exclusive interview with IANS, Sameer Shetty, President and Head of Digital Business and Transformation at Axis Bank, spoke about the bank’s relentless focus on making Axis digital.
Shetty noted that the bank continually invests in technological capabilities to deliver on its transformation plans and foster a culture of innovation.
For example, Axis Bank is kicking off a two-day hackathon titled “Bankathon 2.0 – Open to Possibilities”, on January 20 in Mumbai in partnership with Amazon Web Services to give builders a platform to develop and demonstrate the working prototype of their transformational ideas, which have the potential to disrupt the banking industry.
“Purpose of this hackathon is to identify the talent and engage with them to co-learn and co-create technology and business applications in a collaborative and fun way. We have identified themes such as Super App, Lending, Introduce & scale new digital customer-facing propositions, new age technologies, Fraud Management, etc.,” said Shetty.
“We leverage mechanisms like Amazon’s Working Backwards’ approach in our Bankathons to focus on the customer while leveraging digital technology to build solutions.”
According to Shetty, some highly innovative solutions emerged in the previous edition of this two-day mega event which was also conducted in partnership with AWS. For instance, ‘My Money-Personal Finance Manager’, the first version designed by Axis Bank’s in-house design team, is already live on their mobile app.
“Such services are helping us derive valuable insights and guide our customers in better managing and analyzing their investments and spends, credit score-dropping or improving, etc.,” said Shetty
Axis is working on more than 30 initiatives to execute its digital strategy.
“The OPEN philosophy underpins everything we do,” said Shetty
“O: 0-based redesign; customer centric, design led and 0-operations; P: Proprietary in-house capabilities; E: Ecosystems capable; built for all Axis and partner channels & N: Numbers (impact led and metrics driven).”
With digital lending being pegged as a $1.3 trillion market opportunity by 2030 in India, Axis’s vision is to underwrite every Indian: whether known to bank customers or new to bank customers.
“If any citizen of India comes to us, we should be able make an offer. Some may not have a good credit score. We are building an alternate scoring model. For Digital Lending you can think of purpose specific lending where you need new age Loan Management System to handle Small ticket, small tenor, limit/loan, multiple interest rate/fee structures, 100 per cent digital journeys — no manual intervention,” said Shetty.
When it comes to the bank’s new age loan management systems, buy now pay later (BNPL) products, underwriting capabilities and onboarding facilities such as KYC vital for seamless customer acquisition, Axis leverage the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing arm to build, scale and innovate.
“AWS is one of our preferred cloud providers to help us build digital products & services, and reimagine customer experience. We started our journey with AWS in January 2020. It’s a partnership which has benefitted us immensely. AWS has also partnered with us on training and skilling initiatives and collaborated with us on bankathons”, said Shetty
“We believe in a cloud-first approach. Earlier we used to ask ourselves: why cloud? Today, for all new initiatives, we say: why not the Cloud?”.
‘Jarvis’, Axis Bank’s in-house, cloud-native and API-oriented lending platform, has been built on AWS.
According to Shetty, Axis’s Buy Now Pay Later product, built on AWS, clearly demonstrates its OPEN principles. The instant onboarding, decisioning & activation — all in 3 steps in less than 3 minutes is also available for new-to-Bank customers. The BNPL product was launched on the Bank’s proprietary Jarvis loan management platform built in partnership with Freecharge (it can be plugged into other platforms too).
“We have 1 million daily active Credit Card users. The Credit Card application is handling 90-95 million API requests at the peak. Nearly 65 per cent of services are digitally serviceable which are all hosted on AWS,” said Shetty.
Source: IANS
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