Fullerton India adopts Cloud for DR & infrastructure
Fullerton India is a well recognized financial solutions firm with over 354 branches across India. They have also adopted IBM‘s Cloud software to ensure more dynamic business.
April 02, 2013 / 15:58 IST
Fullerton India is a well recognized financial solutions firm with over 354 branches across India. They have also adopted IBM’s Cloud software to ensure more dynamic business. Their CIO, Mr. Anoop Handa speaks with moneycontrol.com on the various facets of the cloud computing and how its is impacting their business
Q: In your organization and from your industry context, what are the expectations from your users & customers?
A: The expectations from users as well as customers within Financial Services industry can be broadly classified as below:
- User Convenience: Availability of Multiple Delivery Channels to interact & transact - branches, web, call center, handhelds & self-service customer portals.
- Agility: Faster Turn Around Time (TAT’s) in meeting customer requirements.
- Price: Affordable, Competitive and Value-for-money.
- Customer Service: Superior & Empathetic
- Security & Safety: Risk ManagementQ: What are the dynamics shaping your Industry?
A: Within Financial Service industry and specifically within NBFC’s, cost of transaction is very critical. Significant focus on costs is forcing all to have a relook at the efficiency, effectiveness and relevance of each and every operational process. Various initiatives are being undertaken to automate operational processes to achieve scalability, enhance operational efficiency, strengthen business controls and achieve customer delight through superior service and innovative product offering most cost effectively.Q: What are your real IT headaches? And what your peers in the Industry confronted with?
A: The real IT challenge in current environment has been ‘To do more with less’. The economic downturn has put significant thrust on costs and ROI. And most of the IT Leaders are being confronted to achieve a fine balance between ‘Running Efficient IT Operations (Lights ON)’ and ‘Changing/Enabling Business through Innovation’. There is a continuous expectation for CIO’s to continue to reduce their IT Operational Costs through vendor negotiation, cutting of flab and being a lean function whilst ensuring that IT Enables business through adoption of new emerging technologies. Also, with increasing adoption of web technologies, IT Risk Management is yet another area whereby IT Leaders are required to be proactive and be able to address the increasing IT Security threats by plugging the gaps and ensure continuity of services and ensuring no business interruptions.Q: Out of these IT Headaches, which are really acute and how do you plan to address them in short term & near term (< 12 months) & how have you addressed them so far?
A: Effective IT Cost Management, Enhanced IT Risk Management, Streamlining Operational Efficiencies and Adoption of Most relevant emerging technologies for enabling business are the key challenges for today’s IT Leaders. At Fullerton India, we have been on a journey to overcome these key challenges. It’s important for me as a CIO’s to have complete view of business plans, business pain areas so that Technology led business enablement can happen in close collaboration with business leaders. Various initiatives have been identified and we have a strategic technology roadmap that’s fully aligned with business objectives. IT investments are assessed thoroughly from ROI perspective and strategic initiatives undertaken that would benefit business at least in one of the following way:
- Increase revenue
- Enhance efficiency
- Improve customer service
- Strengthen controls
- Lower Risks
Currently several initiatives are in progress and many delivered that would help address these key challenges. Q: We constantly hear about IT Operations being shaped by cloud, social, mobile & Analytics. In your operations, which of these are in order of priority for your organization and why?
A: SMAC (Social Media; Mobility; Analytics; Cloud) will continue to be the real game changers and will be the focus areas for companies. At Fullerton, the focus has been on Mobility, Cloud & Analytics. Fullerton India Credit Company Limited is one of the country’s leading non-banking finance companies (NBFC) with over 350 branches across India. Fullerton India, started commercial operations in 2007, offers a range of financial services, including, working capital & business loans for SMEs, business loans to small & micro enterprises, home finance & mortgage loans, two-wheeler and commercial vehicle finance and personal loans for a variety of needs, among others. The company operates in 300 towns and cities and over 12500 villages across urban and rural India and has nearly one million customers. Mobility has been in use at Fullerton for last 2 years. The impact of the straight through processing of weekly collections data using a biometric enabled handheld smart device has been in productivity improvement, efficient controls and cost savings. Analytics immensely helps in our credit underwriting and in assessing customer behavior. And cloud adoption for our DR (Disaster Recovery) set up has provided us cost effective resilience. Q: How is Cloud shaping or is expected to shape your operations and your industry?
A: Fullerton has recently adopted IBM cloud for DR (Disaster Recovery). The flexibility of Cloud has provided resilience to our infrastructure in a cost effective way while reducing recovery time and seamlessly protecting our data at an alternate site. The next possible area for adoption of cloud would be the test environments and also storage over a medium to long term.Q: What are pressing factors that prompts organizations to look at Cloud?
A: Cloud offers a flexible, cost effective, ‘pay per use’ operating model whereby one can avoid huge capital investments and still take advantage of world-class infrastructure in an opex model. Cloud has also increased the affordability of world-class business applications and a resilient IT infrastructure for SME’s and start-ups, which would otherwise not had an appetite for significant investments in building up their IT Infrastructure and who didn’t have capacity to leverage the power of proven industry software applications for their business. Cloud adoption by companies also provide them with a single point of contact/ single partner for managing hardware, software, licensing and support rather than having these skills with multiple partners or in-house teams. Also cloud providers help in meeting the business peak loads by providing flexible provisioning of ‘IT as a Service’ rather than organization spending weeks and months in capacity planning and impending additional capacity to meet intermittent pea paek loads.Q: Where in your IT Operations does Cloud play a role?
A: At Fullerton, we have adopted Cloud for our Disaster Recovery set up and further shall be exploring options to use Cloud for Test Environment and also for Storage requirements. Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!
