"Dhanlaxmi: Banking on IT"

Dhanlaxmi Bank has a strong footprint in Kerala with 121 branches, but is now expanding its retail base in India. The banks story of jumping on to the IT bandwagon is rather unique. The move was the result of the bank wanting to beat acquisitions threats, and at the same time keep its customers happy.

The Key

The entire workflow was digitized, allowing scanned images of documents to be easily shared among the various departments, and negating the use of paper.Today the customer can demand if he wants an account to be opened in 1-2 hours while earlier he had to wait to receive his deliverables, the entire cycle has been reduced from 10-15 days to 24-48 hours. There is a paradigm shift in the process due to technology, says Jaya Janardanan, executive vice president, Dhanlaxmi Bank.

Technology has brought down the Turn Around Time (TAT) for a customer request wherein on exceeding the defined TAT, the matter gets escalated ensuring that everyone is brought into managing customer expectations.

During the rollout of new technologies, it is crucial that the implementor is convinced before you convince others. The adaptability to use technology, and get people to use it as an organization is a challenge. Every bank has faced this challenge but for banks like us, the challenge for us is trying to leapfrog the span of 10 years in 3 years, informs Janardanan.

Dhanlaxmi Bank has also formulated another unique projectWar on Waste (WOW), under which all processes are put together, and then deciding on which projects can be deleted or moved from the manual phase into the automated phase. This ensures a complete uninterrupted flow of processes, which will be efficient to manage the risk management functions.

Future Plans

Dhanlaxmi Bank has been one of the first pilot banks, that has made use of the technology in relation to the cheque truncation system in Chennai. This project is ready for implementation, and is awaiting the nod from NPCI. Another key to the success of the bank is that it has seamlessly blended the objectives of technology, customer service, and operations. All the projects thus have teams pooled from all the 3 verticals. At Dhanlaxmi bank all these 3 functions converge to the president of Ops, and information and technology.

Dhanlaxmi Bank is a perfect example of the fact that size does not matter, but dreams do.

As told to Shilpa Shanbhag
shilpas@cybermedia.co.in