Bangalore: When it comes to technology led business enablement in the banking and financial services sector, probably it’s the HDFC Bank, India’s largest private sector banking organisation that has many firsts to its credits. The bank is known for its technology led business initiatives in the past as well as levering new technologies like Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Deep Learning, Machine Learning (ML) and robotics to align with the fast changing business scenarios.
These new technologies are among the key focus areas for the banking organisation over the next few years, according to Munish Mittal, Group Head – IT & CIO, HDFC Bank Limited.
“From a technology perspective, I think it is very a high focus area for us to ensure that we embed analytics, whether using AI, Machine Learning or Deep Learning in every business process of the bank,” says Mittal.
“We have embedded robotic process engine in 30-40 business processes in the bank. For example the signature verification for clearing the cheques is enabled by Machine Learning in the bank. It’s a first Machine Learning application, we have deployed in the bank,” adds Mittal.
In the next 2-3 years, according to Mittal every possible process across functions such as credit underwriting, customer servicing, next best offers and others, the bank wants to put Machine Learning and stay relevant to its customers and stakeholders. “So that’s a very big priority for us,” he states.
While, the bank wants to use Machine Learning in every possible process function, it is also wants to give equal importance to its applications from the customer centricity perspective. The idea is to run applications on dual active mode, where applications are running on a network of independent processing nodes providing seamless support and access to services.
“We want to run as many applications in active –active across datacentres because the scale and the convenience for the customers are only sustainable when services are able to run all the time,” informs Mittal.
“For millions and millions of transactions which we have to do, it’s very important that we make technology power the customer centricities by ensuring all the services are running. For which we have taken a very big focus on active-active applications enablement across datacentres,” he emphasizes.
Besides new technologies and applications, under Mittal’s vision, the bank is also paying attention in the area of DevOps that would have immense impact on the most of the banking and business functions.
“We have put focus on DevOps from pure technology perspective. When you have to do Machine Learning you need lots of computing power – 300 cores, 30,000 cores and so on. So to some extent what we want to do is create a Machine Learning business use case agnostic API inside our bank’s own datacentre,” explains Mittal.
The idea is to leverage it for various aspects such as risk process, marketing process, credit process, and it’s made available and used as infrastructure under Machine Learning API.
“So there’s a lot of focus on DevOps – containerisation, dockerisation and kubernetes. Build infinite scale – sometimes we may be able to burst into public cloud also but essentially our focus is to create a robust scale cloud architecture, which is using the concept of DevOps,” he adds.
From the business perspective, HDFC Bank is banking high on Conversational banking – a new emerging banking concept that uses mobile apps, chat bots, chat messengers and social media.
In fact, the bank has introduced HDFCBank onChat – a chatbot service for customers inside the inside Facebook Messenger. Also HDFC Bank along three other banks have created the architecture along with Google jointly for Google Tez – a digital payment launched over the UPI platform in India
“And now we are working with another player, which I can’t name, to do an equivalent of Google Tez. Going forward, if the customer is comfortable inside the messenger, then messengers are the new browsers, chatbots are new browsers, so we will offer banking there,” informs Mittal.
“Our big focus in the next 3 months to 3 years is Conversational banking. We will offer it as an independent property focused on the younger customer segment, also embedded inside our main mobile banking app and Payz-app and call-to-actions buttons in a conversation manner on our online banking – netbanking and homepage,” Mittal shares HDFC Bank’s vision on Conversational banking.
Along with those technology and business focus areas, the bank is paying major attention on customer centricity and experience. “Customer centricity is supreme for the entire management and the entire culture is working in one direction – to be more and more customer centric,” states Mittal.
The bank wants to offer not only convenience to its customers, but also to make that experience more entertaining with new offers and services that matches their lifestyle and banking needs.
“Pay, save, borrow, shop, invest –whatever be your need, lifestyle-based banking needs from the customer centricity perspective, we will offer. Our focus is to take it to the next level – the customer should be able to do any type, anyhow, any kind, anywhere, anytime banking. So be it entertainment, fun – make it more interesting that is the primary focus in the next three years if I have to say from our perspective,” concludes Mittal.