ICICI Bank adopts new technology

ICICI Bank is country’s largest private sector bank and in adopting latest technology, bank is in the forefront in banking sector in India. Even in business aptitude also currently bank has a long journey with 12 million terabyte of data. The reason for ICICI bank spending so much on technology is mainly because of two reasons- firstly, customer expectations and change in behavior in India and second, the diversified customer base in India.

ICICI group have so many business units like banking, mutual funds and insurance and it is very important for the group to flawlessly incorporate these units because there is an overlap of the customer base among these business units.

Therefore it is very important for the group to have one fundamental group unit having made all acquiescence with different laws and regulations. Retail banking has continuously developed over last two decades. Earlier in 1990s, the banking operation was high cost and people intensive with low scalability and inevitability of customer behavior. But after 10 years, at the start of this new millennium, there has been efficiency in banking operations with lower cost, higher scale and more predictability but lag in differentiation or customized product offerings.

Currently many banks have crossed all hurdles and are offering many personalized products and services. "Efficiencies, effectiveness and adaptability are three pillars of necessities in improving the banking business", says Pravin Vohra, Group Chief Technology Officer of ICICI Bank. A bank requires Enterprise Intelligence capability to process more and more data. And to gain such capabilities, banks are required to have right technology, culture and processes in place.

In case of ICICI Bank, it has taken up a number of proposals like score card, business intelligence for sales and marketing, customer acquisition and linking different accounts of the same customer. According to Mr Vohra the next use of enterprise intelligence will be used in new areas like corporate performance management, master data management, web analytics and enterprise fraud management. It can also be used for budgeting, planning, forecasting and the profitability optimization in the area of corporate performance management.

At the same time, data from different channels can be used by the same customer can be integrated to create master data. But the real gain from the analytics tools can be obtained only if it is properly used. "For any business intelligence tool to be successful, the senior management should believe and own it. At the end of the day, business intelligence is a tool and requires human intelligence to reap maximum benefit out of it", emphasises Mr Vohra.