Indiabulls Group explores RPA for operations, credit, collection and sales

The Indiabulls Group, a diversified financial services group with interests in housing finance, consumer finance and personal wealth, has been at a forefront of technology adoption. Today, the company is integrating all its group companies through technology and is foraying into new areas like insurance, rural housing and retail.

For Indiabulls, the digital journey began in the last three years and the company has made its products and services mobile and cloud ready for its customers. Moving forward, the company aims to migrate from technology driven to FinTech in next 2-3 years.

Amongst its leading companies, the group’s flagship company, Indiabulls Housing Finance and Indiabulls Consumer Finance (ICF) were the pioneers in going digital. The company has developed Disha and Dhani as end-to-end personal and housing loan fulfillment applications. It provides quick, convenient and competitively-priced home and personal loans disbursal instantly using a smartphone. ICF has become the first entity to have an end-to-end solution for customers’ financing requirements through Dhani.

Talking about the slew of digital initiatives taken, Nafees Ahmed, CIO, Indiabulls Group, shares, “With the growing competition from startups, digital payments and growing FinTech companies, Indiabulls’ management has realised that adoption of technology is not only for the growth, but is also about survival. The first digital project was undertaken by the company in home loan, in 2016. We built our mobile application over digital platform provided by the Government of India like KYC, Aadhaar, e-Sign online. With the mobile app named Disha, there is no need for physical interactions with the company. Customers can submit and sign documents digitally. Later, we integrated it with our legacy systems at the back-end.”

After converting housing loan service digitally for customers, the next move that Indiabulls Group took was converting consumer finance business online. It launched customer loan service as Dhani mobile app for personal loan. Using the digital platform from the government, it was able to disburse the loan at the end of the application completion. Within three minutes, now customer can avail the loan amount in bank account. Earlier, it used to be 5-9 working days. Now, our customers can get loans 24×7, 365 days.

“With the help of technology, we can source data from third parties about customer’s credit worth, intent to repay loan, customers behaviour, and customers experience online. We are targeting to disburse at least one million loans in a month, in FY 2019-20. Currently it’s around 300,000 loans in a month,” he says.

The success of Dhani can be measured by the fact that Indiabulls’ personal loan business has grown 20 times in FY 2018-19. Moreover, with Dhani, the company is adding 200 physical branches in additions to 150 for meeting the target.

What does digital mean to Indiabulls
Ahmed says that digitisation of documentation is not about digital. Underwriting is the most critical part to assess the customer’s profile. Today, it is getting bank account statements, ITR and other details of the customers with the help of AI enabled credit engine, that is doing underwriting. In the digital world, AI and analytics are a must tools. For Ahmed, integrating the entire group’s processes, product and services under one technology platform is a big challenge.

“We are using SAS for analytics and soon we will deploy it across the group. As we are generating structured and unstructured data, we may soon build data lakes and big data. Three years ago, when we started the digital journey, whatever storage capacity planning we did for five years, it all got exhausted within two years,” comments Ahmed.

RPA – a big focus
On the security front, Indiabulls has team of 20-25 security professionals and a dedicated chief information security officer. As the company has integrated, both internal and external stakeholders on its seamless technology platforms, security has become paramount to the group. On the cloud front, it has put most of its non critical applications, using Vmware and Microsoft Dynamics and Office 365 already. With the surge in new customers, the next logical move for Indiabulls is to increase the efficiency of sales, collection, credits and partners team by reducing the TAT and increase customer services.

“We have done AI and analytics. Now, we are exploring RPA to automate our operations, credits, collections and sales for better customer experience and swift services roll outs in this year,” he concludes.