Finacle Whiteboard

In order to achieve a compelling strategic advantage and adequate penetration into markets like these, these banks will need to focus on aspects like customer-centricity and an enterprise-wide view of operation. The bank’s business strategy has to reflect the needs of this segment and should have the ability to handle the challenges of social and development banking. This, however, is easier said than done. RRBs today continue to traverse an increasingly rocky path, facing significant economic, infrastructural and business hurdles that heighten in complexity with every passing year. There is a lack of automation, large dependence on manual operations, dynamic market conditions and most importantly, lack of adequate infrastructure which translates to high project preparation costs, and risk aversion amongst sponsor entities.

The RBI’s diktat is for RRBs to achieve automation before the dawn of 2011. Automation is a mandate and rightly so! A robust technology solution can enable RRBs to confront several current market and business challenges. From empowering RRBs to define products through a flexible product definition capability to parameterization of product features to enable re-use of components; from configuration of consumer banking offerings to managing subsidized offerings by effectively supporting both principal and interest subsidy products - The right technology behind the regional rural banks can meet challenges of managing change, competition, compliance and customer demands effectively.

Today, functionally-rich modules are essential in order to provide RRBs with a varied choice of features to continuously innovate on their product and service offerings. Simultaneously, in order to enhance operational efficiency and facilitate ease of use, banks must look at the technology that can be easily integrated with industry standard-based framework and provide secure and scalable reporting infrastructure to meet various reporting needs.