Biswabrata Chakravorty, Chief Information Officer, IndusInd Bank

The Indus Valley Civilization is an important landmark in the history of mankind. At its peak, the Indus people had developed, and perfected, global trading, modern city planning, and a thriving economy. Driving inspiration from the Indus, IndusInd Bank has strived to build a culture of innovation, care, and growth. A pioneer in digital innovations, IndusInd prides in Alexa Voice Banking—an industry first. It is also the first bank to launch a Video Branch and the first to allow customers to choose their account number and their choice of currency in ATMs. If these do not prove the bank’s acumen, then maybe this will—IndusInd is the first bank to introduce the Duo card that combines a debit and a credit card. It also introduced NEXXT Card, India’s first interactive credit card with buttons. The bank’s proficiency is further amplified by the fact that these innovative schemes have stood the test of time and has an ever-growing customer base. What makes IndusInd stand out from its peers is the visionary skills of its top management. These resourceful team of experts have ensured the launch of a slew of innovative and best-in-class solutions that consistently strives to improve the experience of its customers through safe, convenient and reliable digital platforms. Presiding as the bank’s Chief Information Officer is Biswabrata Chakravorty.

Entering by Chance, Staying by Choice

Biswabrata has quite the experience working in the financial service sector, bringing to the table more than 2 decades worth of knowledge and skill in the Banking and Insurance (both life and general/health) sectors. “I did not mean to end up in the BFSI field. I wanted to join a firm in Mumbai, but as I look back now, I am only happy that I stumbled upon the BFSI domain. The financial services sector has been instrumental in shaping my career and practically taught me the basics of project management, product management, supplier management to enterprise technology stacks like CRM, core banking, and switching. Over the last several years I have been able to leverage mobility, Cloud and analytics through various initiatives aimed at bringing in digital transformation and improving client experience. My association with IndusInd Bank started in 2018 as a CTO, moving on to be the CIO, and has continued to evolve most progressively, wherein I have been able to work closely to weave the business strategy with an underpinning of modern tech stack.”

IndusInd Bank, which commenced operations in 1994, caters to the needs of both consumer and corporate customers and has an avant-garde technology platform that supports multi-channel delivery capabilities. “With the rise in Fintech, Bigtech and the Neo Banks, all incumbent banks are facing disruptions in their retail account, account-to-account lending, digital payment, and remittance processes. Hence incumbents need to understand the market segment and define their digital strategy. IndusInd Bank stands tall today as one of the reputed banking brands in the country. As the Bank’s CIO, I am responsible for architecting the solutions for clients using digital capabilities like automated onboarding, KYC, STP for account management, Omni-channel client experience using CRM,” Biswabrata informs.

Addressing the pandemic situation, Biswabrata says that the Financial services, being the fulcrum of the economy through which investments and consumption flows, has been affected, as evidenced by India’s GDP numbers. With health and safety being the primary concern in the absence of a vaccine, there has been a decline in contact heavy services, including brick and mortar retail, banking via branches and urban transportation. More transactions are now online, with people opting for virtual ways of engagement and working. “For 26 years, IndusInd Bank Limited has been staying true to its mantra of ‘Customer Responsiveness’. Over the years, the bank has been a forerunner in digital innovations that has truly helped the customers enjoy a smooth transition to the online banking environment. However, we also know that while going completely digital, it is also imperative to keep different client segments in mind. As a bank, we have identified paperless/straight-through digital processes with segments of customers who are not financially savvy – in an assisted model. This helps us have an efficient, yet simple, convenient and trusted model of operation. It is reassuring to see that all our efforts are making the desired change, as just the previous year, IDC FIIA 2019 Financial Insights Innovation Awards, named IndusInd Bank Limited as Asia’s Leading Partner Bank. We were also awarded the Times Now India Digital Awards 2019 for their Most Innovative Money Transfer Product/ Service,” he comments.

Digital Brilliance in Action

So how does IndusInd do it? Biswabrata explains that to meet the massive growth demands of the bank (in business and data), it was proposed to build a platform which will support the growing demands. To achieve this aim, an enterprise data warehouse was built on Cloud (Azure) that integrates more than 50 banking systems, generates business dashboards and reports in a matter of few hours while dealing with terabytes of data. Furthermore, the “on demand” infrastructure ensures cost regulation. “IndusInd Bank is using the right data and the right analytics to make the difference between customer growth and customer attrition. IndusInd is using various data analytics solutions and analysing aspects such as customer spending patterns, customer segmentation and profiling, product crossselling, fraud management and prevention, risk assessment, compliance and reporting, customer feedback analysis and application, and automated dashboards release, where the data processing and reports generation is fully automated. Hence, the reports are released in a very fast fashion before business hours with little human intervention.”

As an ending note, Biswabrata opines that banking will go on to be more conversational, connected, convenient and contactless. He expects to see more of digital onboarding using Aadhaar-based, centralized and unique identity management, which enables a contactless, virtual identity authentication. “With changing client behaviour, there has been a steady spike in digital payments-increasing at 100% plus CAGR YOY, big tech companies will keep further expanding, influencing digital transactions on apps through integration with the UPI open ecosystem of payments on the India stack.”

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