Strong networks can be compared to backbones. And just as backbones keep our bodies healthy, networks enable businesses to succeed in today’s connected world. Financial services provider and gold loan leader Muthoot Group recently undertook one if its most significant networking implementations with Juniper Networks.
Spanning 16 diverse fields, serving millions of customers across the nation, and serving an assortment of industries, Muthoot Group’s network is spread across 21 states and four Union territories. To maintain its leading position in the market, the group required a mission-critical, robust and scalable network.
Having an urgent need for a robust and scalable network, the company began the arduous process of searching for a suitable vendor. Apart from Juniper Networks, Muthoot evaluated other vendors like HP and Cisco. Mentions Nair of Muthoot, “The organization gave weightage to installation base and the availability especially for client-base running to 7,000 branches, with around 40-50,000 users. Thus, it was very vital for us that the solution gave very good performance and should be easily scalable.”
The organization did a POC (Proof of Concept) with the help of network and equipment provider and found that Juniper gave best performance in their environment. It took six months to properly connect all branches and Muthoot went live with the solution in June 2012. Muthoot has deployed Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways and EX Series Ethernet Switches at its data centers and branch offices across India. Muthoot migrated the data into new systems, and every week they would convert around 200 branches. The group has a Level 3 co-located data center in Bangalore at Trimax. All of Muthoot’s branches connect through this data center through MPLS broadband connectivity or single VPN.
Counting benefits
The tangible benefits after the implementation immediately started pouring in. Mentions Nair, “One of the major benefits we have had from the implementation is that we now have centralized control. Transactions are being carried out on a real-time online basis. Earlier, in a distributed system we had to believe that everything was all right. Everything now is centrally controlled, so there is no facility at the end-users to change anything.” Also, day-to-day monitoring of customers for repayment etc. is possible today. The new network enables Muthoot Group to guarantee its customers that their loan applications will be processed in a matter of minutes now.
Muthoot does not believe in following the crowd, so it tread on a different path from the standard network linked from the branch level. Normally, financial organizations go for MPLS lease-line or ISDN lease-line as the connectivity lease with the branch level. In their case, the organization wanted cost effectiveness. Thus, they fine tuned their applications, all of which are developed in-house, to work in a normal broadband connection.
The main advantage has been that many of its rural branches can work smoothly using these connectivity options. Having already provided functionality to the branches, now the organization will be utilizing the same platform for offering other channels also. Customers can use normal internet for managing their account and transacting on it. Muthoot has also joined the mobile race by providing a mobile interface, so that customers can access the system anytime anywhere on mobile devices.
Giving advice on what organizations should not miss while proceeding for similar deployments, Nair says, “Organizations should do a POC very early. They should make sure that it meets all the required parameters of response time, scalability, etc. That is essential before deciding the partner, vendor and the system. Also, the solution should be implemented in a phased manner.” Muthoot itself took around nine months to migrate from a decentralized to a centralized system, which included data migration, training people, setting up the system, etc.
The future plan for Muthoot involves analytics as well. At present, the company is developing MIS tools for analytics. Talking about other future plans, Nair says, “Maybe in future we will apply for a banking license; after that we will upgrade our applications.”
jasmine.desai@expressindia.com