RBL Bank to offer next-gen banking services: Sankarson Banerjee

RBL Bank announced recently that they have selected Accenture to transform and enhance the future readiness of the bank’s information technology (IT) systems and accelerate its digital transformation journey. The engagement will enable RBL Bank to offer next-generation banking services, enhance the resilience and scalability of its systems and business processes, and improve its operational efficiency.

Here, Sankarson Banerjee, RBL Bank’s CIO, tells us more about their digital journey. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How is digital transformation handled today? What have been your goals and journey throughout the process?

Sankarson Banerjee: Digital transformation, earlier, would mean converting the manual journeys into digital journeys. Today, it is about re-imagining journeys altogether into what is most convenient and of highest value in a world where customers are already highly digital.

We, at RBL Bank, have two key goals in the process:

a) Increased value to the end customer – offering more features, better convenience and improved experience.

b) Improved process efficiency – shorter processes, better turnarounds, lowered error rates.

DQ: How is Accenture helping you ride the digital engagement wave to enhance the bank’s future readiness?

Sankarson Banerjee: RBL Bank’s engagement with Accenture is designed to achieve strategic outcomes that support our vision of being a futuristic, digital bank. In collaboration with Accenture, we aim to create an even more agile organization with a robust culture of innovation.

Accenture is helping in a few different ways:

* For Run-The-Bank, they are helping to bring in improved analytics, SOPs and tools that help us improve process outcomes and turnarounds

* For Change-The-Bank, Accenture is introducing agile work practices, consolidating teams and implementing a DevOps toolchain to shorten time-to-live for change requests.

In addition, Accenture will be helping us with reimagining the digital journeys of different verticals of the bank for future readiness, global competitiveness and improved product offerings.

DQ: How is RBL Bank looking to transform banking into a digital-native offering and develop a flexible IT backbone to scale up in line with business requirements?

Sankarson Banerjee: We are looking to change our core into a digital-native core. We are working closely with Finacle on this and expect to achieve this in the next 18-24 months.

Our IT backbone is transitioning to a fully flexible, cloudlike backbone using Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) and cloud. We are already 40-50% there; we aim to have a flexible private backbone that can flex into and out of AWS or another cloud as and when needed.

DQ: How is RBL Bank is looking to enhance its customer relationships? What is the role of analytics and ML in predicting and identifying customer needs, and upselling/cross selling?

Sankarson Banerjee: We make extensive use of analytics and customer modelling using traditional as well as AI/ML models for identifying upsell/cross-sell needs.

Our focus this year is to both deepen these efforts, as well as to make them more real time. We are moving towards streaming analytics and real-time recommendations across our channels.

Customer relationships have also been enhanced in these Covid-19 times with the extensive use of chatbots and WhatsApp Banking (which rely quite heavily on AI/ML).