HDFC Bank to set up digital and enterprise factories to improve digital banking service

In terms of operations, HDFC Bank plans to decrease absolute emissions and energy consumed in from the current level of 315,583 million tonne CO2 emissions, increase rooftop solar capacity in large offices and convert 50 percent of its total sourced electricity to renewable energy.

HDFC Bank on June 22 said that it is setting up a digital factory and an enterprise factory to roll out new digital products and services. The factories, which will help augment the bank’s IT infrastructure, will be pivoted on application programming interfaces (APIs), data and cloud.

The dual approach of building the digital factory along with an enterprise factory is part of HDFC Bank’s technology transformation agenda. The bank plans to strengthen its capabilities by hiring up to 500 people over the next two years, from diverse backgrounds such as data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), design thinking, cloud and DevOps.

The Digital Factory will build new business and new solutions riding on new tech stacks and applications and high resiliency and monitoring capabilities. This will be backed by the ability to support large volume growth and plan for upgrading technologies. The bank is also be developing future-ready IP technologies and moving to a native cloud architecture in collaboration with niche technology companies, fintech and large IT companies. The enterprise factory will upgrade legacy infrastructure, decouple existing systems and build its own capabilities by embracing open-source to build resilience and scale.

“The Digital and Enterprise Factories will help us realise the strategy of ‘running’ the bank, while ‘building’ the bank for the future,” said Parag Rao, Group Head – Payments, Consumer Finance, Digital Banking & IT, HDFC Bank. “We are poised to capitalize on opportunities that higher digital adoption will bring in India,” Rao said.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had barred HDFC Bank in December 2020 from launching new digital platforms and issuing new credit cards as a penalty for repeated outages on its digital banking channels. The embargo is yet to be lifted. HDFC Bank said last week that an external firm has conducted an audit of its IT systems and the report has been submitted to the RBI. The bank is awaiting clarity from the regulator on the matter.