In February 2021, Magma Fincorp renamed itself Poonawalla Fincorp. But a new brand name wasn’t the only thing that changed. The company began its journey of reinvention from the day it was renamed.
“When this merger happened, we started to understand the landscape of Magma Fincorp. We understood that tons of applications running were in-house systems and that the brand’s network infrastructure needed to be overhauled. So we put in place a strategy to have a complete SaaS model, we were experienced in implementing SaaS applications, so a simple design was executed to make the transition smoother. we implemented the new solutions and then introduced the strategy to integrate legacy data into the new systems,” said Kandarp Kant, CTO, Poonawalla Fincorp.
So, with that goal in mind, the idea was to first ensure business continuity on the best platforms, and then deal with the gradual disconnection of legacy applications one by one. The initial call to action was to change the major lending processors implemented by Nucleus.
Kant said, “We were able to bring Lists of Values (LOVs) very quickly, and within three months we launched all five Lists of Values (LOVs) on a new platform. After that, we slowly started taking the fringe application and moved from legacy application to SaaS cloud application for HRMS. Now we are surrounded by the most modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. We are in discussion with a new space – Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) where we will start plugging in fringe applications. So that’s how it’s planned.
Accelerate change
Additionally, the company has transformed Poonawalla Fincorp’s office suite. With this implementation, the user experience of employees using mailboxes is completely transformed. They also enabled a robust collaboration platform, which ensured better connectivity between people, teams and departments. Through this collaboration platform, nearly 5,000 users were trained online as they transitioned from their old lending applications to new lending systems.
“Apart from that, we have implemented several bots using the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform. Thanks to this automation, many hours of work have been saved. The released staff are now redeployed to other functions. Further automation at the application level has ensured that manual activities are now performed automatically by machines. This resulted in a significant reduction in TATs and led to an increase in productivity,” he added.
Finally, with the implementation of the Business Rules Engine, complete automation of the subscription process for certain LOBs has been achieved. Underwriting subjectivity has been removed, while minimizing human error or oversight in applying credit policy to loan applications.
The crack
Showing results in 8-9 months with technical team regression activity, Poonawalla Fincorp was able to stabilize the process without any complaints with the off-the-shelf product strategy as it speeds up the implementation process.
“The smart thing we did was that instead of writing everything from scratch and building in-house apps, we took stable platforms — enterprise risk management (ERM) platforms — and in addition, we wrote some automation. This hybrid approach allows you to meet deadlines in such a short time,” Kant explained.
Another thing that worked for them was to keep it simple to allow the reception of anyone residing in rural or urban areas to use the operations easily.
“We have branches in remote areas like Chhattisgarh, UP and inland Tamil Nadu. There you have to think about the person to enter this application. So we focused entirely on simplification, and that helped us. We built a lot of backend automation, for example, instead of waiting for someone to click a button, we thought the system could figure it out on its own. Now the application is ready for the next step, which is automated, and the box system takes care of executing the next step,” he said.
Choose the right partner
With several top players currently available in the market, to select the right partner, they looked at domain specialties and compared the space with other top companies.
Kant explained, “One of the challenges was that a well-known entry service provider and the solution we used is also used by the largest private sector banks and the top 2 or 3 banks in India. . My team and I have already done a pre-implementation in our previous organizations. So we have understood the strengths and weaknesses of this application. We compared it with the challenger app. The second aspect we considered was the depth of the side of the domain. There is a lot of intellectual property, domain and banking understanding that goes into creating this software. This company we relied on had depth on the domain side.
On your mind
Initiated transformation on a larger scale, thanks to the automation, simplicity and stability of the application, March 2022 was the best month recorded in the history of the organization. Keep bringing innovative technologies. The company is then focusing on expanding into the fintech space. To answer this, Poonawalla Fincorp is looking to take people on their journey who understand technology.
“The next phase is to write our own APIs and scale them. We are increasing our numbers in the structure and size of the team. We are looking at increasing the size of the teams perhaps in the multiples of 2 to 3 times compared to what it is now,” Kant commented.
In addition, they also invested in RPA and onboarded the technology partner while recruiting an internal team for RPA development. They are also in talks with integrated partners for their AI/ML intimation.
“The other thing we’re focusing on is AI/ML intimation. We’re going to be talking to some of the top vendors right now about which is huge and experimenting with those processes. Finally, we’re also looking at building our mobile app for customer engagement, so those are the next initiatives we are planning,” Kant added.