Transformation at the core

Transformation at the core

As one of the best, safest and fastest growing banks in India, YES BANK is a company with a vision – to be the finest quality large bank of the world in India by 2020. This vision also incorporates the technology side of the company, with the goal of becoming the most efficient unit of the bank by enabling state-of-the-art technology services and solutions to deliver superior stakeholder experience.

To put it simply, YES BANK wants to “make life simpler for our customers and colleagues”.

Spearheading this vision is Anup Purohit, CIO of YES BANK, and his role is critical in the rolling out of technology initiatives.

“Through my role, I have driven innovation and been developing IT strategy in accordance with the business strategy of the bank,” says Purohit.

“Innovative Technology forms one of the five pillars at YES BANK, along with Platform & Services, Resource Management, Governance and Compliance and a Business Leader.”

YES BANK was founded in 2004 by Mr. Rana Kapoor who has lead the Bank as Managing Director & CEO since inception. As a Full Service Commercial Bank, the company has a number of business lines across India, including Corporate and Institutional Banking, Financial Banking and Wealth Management.

 

Transformative nature

Most recently, Purohit has been leading two major upgrades to the company’s Core Banking System of Flexcube & Flexcube Corporate Platforms as well as a Treasury Application Upgrade of Murex platform.

The need to upgrade the core systems of the company was a prescient one.

“As we are growing at the fastest rate, it is critical for us to plan for our core IT applications upgrades to handle our growing needs efficiently,” he says.

Naturally, with any technological revamp of a core system, challenge is inescapable. With a company the size of YES BANK, the core system is a large scale complex IT program.

“It’s like changing the tyres of a moving heavy duty vehicle,” says Purohit.

Purohit identifies that with a change of this scale, some of the biggest hurdles along the way have been the availability of resources and commitments from critical stakeholder’s groups to be dedicated to the project along with handling their Business As Usuall (BAU) activities simultaneously.

But with all transformation challenges, there will be undoubted success and achievement. In 2015, YES BANK introduced API Banking, a software program that enables a company to automate its Refund Processing System in real-time. YES BANK, ever the trailblazer, was the first bank in Asia to introduce API Banking.

“During the implementation, there were no industry standards to rely on and this was a journey that involved iteratively through consistent learning,” says Purohit.

 

Key driver

Technology is a key driver of the banking and finance industry and YES Bank must respond and stay ahead of the latest trends in order to maintain its market-leading position.

In Asia, non-traditional players such as Fintech companies are increasingly disrupting profitable banking frontiers. More and more banks are focusing on innovation and with that comes a sharpened focus on cyber security and data management.

“The world is witnessing a tectonic shift in business dynamics. With the rapid proliferation of Internet, handheld devices and social media, the focus of business strategy has shifted to innovation—continuous innovations, discontinuous innovations, and the Holy Grail—disruptive innovation,” says Purohit.

Naturally, data is a significant element of the make-up of YES Bank and Purohit ensures that the company recognises the importance of data management and the sensitivity of its nature.

“We are increasingly adopting Big Data Analytics as part of our core strategy. We have already built the Big Data platform on Hadoop technologies and we are looking to use the analytics to help our business by providing us with customer segmentation, fraud detection and prevention, and enhanced compliance,” he says.

Cloud-based storage is playing an ever-increasing important role in Big Data storages. Through cloud platforms YES BANK has been successful in resolving a number of IT issues, be it rising infrastructure costs, the maintenance of IT infrastructure and the need for agility and scalability.

“Cloud services help the bank access technology at the pace and intensity it needs,” says Purohit.

 

The key in collaboration

The technology space is large and no company can do it alone. YES BANK has successfully collaborated with FortyTwo42 Labs, a Global Cyber Security Research Lab setup in India (Vizag and Pune) and Israel (Tel Aviv) as a co-innovation partner for developing next generation Fintech and Cybersecurity Solutions.

Through this collaborative effort, one of the first innovations has been the PI-CONTROL Platform which will be rolled out in the near future. This platform is a solution which has the capability to provide “real time cryptographic digital transaction signing” at a massive scale. “A solution that is the first of its kind,” says Purohit.

Looking to the future, the digital transformation of YES BANK is recognising the focus on a digital economy and the company is following a “DIGICAL” strategy. DIGICAL is a blend of an online and offline forward way of banking.

This will consist of YES Bank continuing to have physical locations where customers can get assistance from human touch points. It will also focus on digital touchpoints, building enterprise mobility solutions and equipping the sales force with these solutions to be ready to conduct “business in motion”.

“This will empower and increase the efficiency of the sales and service staff, thereby contributing significantly to the bank’s productivity,” he says.

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