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HDFC Bank: IT’s a Matter of Money

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DQI Bureau
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NETWORKING SUCCESS:

SR Balasubramanian

HDFC Bank has made rapid strides in new age banking with its

spectrum of online banking and bill-paying channels. Started in 1995, HDFC bank

selected an architecture that could scale with its business and help it keep

pace with technology changes. The bank opted for a centralized architecture laid

out in the ‘hub-and-spokes’ model that branches out into its 140-odd

branches and networks over 400 ATMs. This has helped the bank roll out several

applications in the areas of retail banking, wholesale banking, credit card

management, cash management, and Internet banking.

Combined with the philosophy of outsourcing the non-core

areas of technology and retaining control over using technology as a strategic

tool has served the bank well. The entire retail banking business rests on iFlex’s

FinWare. The wholesale applications run on MicroBanker and are to be upgraded to

FlexCube soon.

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Says HDFC VP-IT SR Balasubramanian, "Principally, there

are three areas of technology operations: customer service and operations,

application support, and facilities management". Of these, facilities

management is completely outsourced to a third-party. The IT department in turn,

has made service level agreements with the bank for ensuring business uptime.

The data centre is the hub of the operations with a collection of over 200

servers running OSs of every ilk- Tandem, OS/400, Solaris, Windows NT and

Windows 2000 amongst others, running databases on Oracle, Sybase, and SQL Server

and banking applications FinWare and MicroBanker. The entire systems set-up and

the network is system-managed using UnicenterTNG, which helps manage capacity

better, secure the infrastructure and maintain assets centrally. The bank has

integrated its own payment gateway with VISA and MasterCard. Plans are afoot for

setting up a disaster recovery center as well.

E-enabling of processes within the organization has also

helped the organization gain higher productivity. Processes like purchase, the

employee insurance scheme, employee stock option plan, and sales MIS have been

e-enabled.

Sales MIS is particularly powerful – At the end of the

working day, direct sales agents all round the country log in their orders and

the bank is able to get a consolidated view of the transactions during the day.

ENET, the corporate banking Internet interface helps the

banks’ corporate customers view transactions, transfer funds between accounts,

seamlessly integrate with their ERP systems, and achieve closer control of their

banking transactions thus unlocking value from the financial value chain.

Internally, the bank uses a Notes-based system for mailing and workflow

applications to enhance productivity.

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