UPGRADING TECHNOLOGY

Technology upgrade has been a continuous exercise. During the year, we made technology upgrades to meet customer satisfaction and improve our services using newer technologies. Compliance and accuracy have been a big thrust recently, and in this area, we have integrated valuation reports with our core lending system and made those report fully electronic with digital signatures. With this, we have brought correct collateral valuation.

In addition, we have also added digital property search reports to get the property documents in a digital format right reducing the chances of them being tampered. Our technology infrastructure has been upgraded and done tech consolidation on a single hardware platform. To cater to increasing cyber threats, the end point protection with XDR has been implemented.

We have digitised our process of fees payment and made it completely online reducing paper and longer processing time. Customer service has taken a big boost by augmenting few services on customer service portal, the services included Re KYC, online prepayment, automated rewriting on customer request without any manual intervention.

SHIFT FROM TRADITIONAL TO DIGITAL

Over a period of last few years, company has invested in technology comprehensively. Our focus has been to implement technology solution which can enhance the employee productivity and making it easier for our customers by making the journey digital as much as possible. We have integrated various 3rd party fintech solution from customer verification to collateral verification.

We have also invested in digitising our customer documents so that the same can be accessible without having to move actual papers. While the traditional approach was on improving infrastructure, our IT spend focusses on solutions and processes. In this regard, company has been open to various models like Op-ex, cloud offering which can reduce the go to market time. The focus has been to ensure that the solution should be secure, faster and easy to implement.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WITH PROJECT RED

We are working towards the ultimate objective of organising and automating every facet of customer interaction. Through Project Red, we are improving customer journeys, reducing TAT and enhancing productivity. Our aim is to digitally provide all the services in the coming days to reduce TAT and physical movement. Deposits Module, one of the early implementations under Project RED, is showing results with reduction in overall deposit creation and settlement on maturity.

Customer Interactions have improved with multiple channels like whatsapp to digital bots. The self-service models on whatsapp allows service delivery at all the time. Process automation has further enhanced with entire payout structure to our Marketing intermediaries is automated. In addition, our core lending application has been enhanced to handle document workflow seamlessly from originating offices to processing offices for faster credit decisioning on these digitised documents.

We have also effectively integrated e-KYC using Digi locker, bank statement analysis. This has not only reduced the time taken for these processes but has also standardised the same across all operating branches ensuring improved credit assessment.

DIGITISED FRAMEWORK OF OPERATION

We have taken a strategic approach to integrate various technology solution to enhance efficiency and productivity. The solutions working in silos may not yield desired results despite having advanced technologies. The focus of the automation was primarily to provide user-friendly interfaces to enhance customer experience and deploy tools for faster, easier loan processes.

We have aligned few aspects like:

These aspects have helped in reducing the cost of operation, manual intervention and improving accuracy. We have also taken data-driven approach to identify iterative processes and automate the using process automation. The process like rewriting, bank reconciliation etc. have been automated.

In addition, the company has taken API-based approach and integrated various solutions within their own ecosystem and also partner ecosystem like banks, intermediaries etc., where the data sharing is based on API.

This has helped in real time integration, reduced time and standardise the process. The important aspect of the digital framework was to realign business practices and modify various operating procedures and process to align with various technological tools. Extensive training was another aspect for workforce transformation to improve their skill in handling these new system adoptions.

THE HOMY APP

The HOMY app has been serving as a customer onboarding app for home loan customers and deposit customers. We have been able to almost double our share of home loans business origination through HOMY over the last year (from 2.81% in 2023-24 to 5.75% in 2024-25). In addition, there is substantial increase self-service option like repayment certificate through our customer self-service portal in HOMY.

In order to reduce TAT and offer our customers faster services, our digital app HOMY has been enhanced and we have added a lead management solution to effectively manage leads from various channels and reach out to the customers to evaluate their home loan needs.