Genius I is the banking solution that makes one of the
oldest cooperative banks in
India
tick. But what's so great about a core banking solution that it's been
chosen as the best SMB project of the lot? Every other bank is doing it today.
The difference lies in the fact that SVC has completely developed it in house,
instead of treading the usual path of choosing a commercial banking solution,
and then running behind a partner to implement it. This path would have cost the
bank five times more than the cost of creating Genius.
Business problem The operations and commercial side of the Railways needed computerization due to the huge amount of data and reports generated |
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IT solution A 3-tier solution with two modules for rake management (operations) and terminal management (commercial) for real time information |
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Implemented |
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Technology platform Alpha servers, Oracle, Tuxedo, BEA WebLogic. Application and database servers in separate load balancing clusters |
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Ravikiran Mankikar, Deputy GM (IT), SVC Bank |
The core banking solution automates most of the bank's
functions while conforming to RBI's guidelines. In fact the bank has gone many
steps ahead of other fellow cooperatives and added a lot of firsts to its
credit. It claims to be the first cooperative to have an online data warehouse,
first to have a real-time reporting service that's available 24x7, first to
have implemented IP Telephony, first to have implemented an e-token based ATM
payment solution, and many others. These are all remarkable achievements, given
the fact that most cooperative banks today are living under fear of losing
market share to the larger players.
What Shamrao has done, therefore, is a clear example of how
to align IT with business needs and really benefit from it. From having a total
business of around Rs 800 Crores in 1997, the bank has clocked more than Rs 4000
Crores worth of business in the last financial year and all this with a marginal
increase in staff. Genius I offers an impressive functionality. Genius also
offers tele and sms-based banking facilities using modules called Banc@call and
Banc@cell. It has even built in capability for Real Time Gross Settlement on a
straight through processing mode. RTGS transactions normally take 6—24 hours,
but with this solution, this time has come down to
2 to 3
mins.
An online liability monitor checks for the direct and
indirect liability of borrowers. Plus there are modules for generating online
MIS reports, online monitoring for control and reporting, and even an online
data-mining. Also, the bank has deployed modules for anti-money laundering,
asset liability management, know your customer, risk management, etc-making
the bank more Basel II compliant. Genius has also managed to automate processes
like emailing statements of accounts, and real time fund transfers on a 24x7
basis, automated interest payments by credits to customers accounts. Other
technologies used by the Bank to manage its IT infrastructure include CA's
Unicenter for managing the network, MS Operations Manager and Systems Management
Server for optimizing server utilization and automated patch and asset
management, BizTalk Server to integrate the banking software with RBI's Real
Time Gross Settlement project, and Exchange Server. Genius has been
implemented on a three-tier architecture, and is built on MS products. It has a
decentralized architecture, and is quite interesting in the way it works. All
branches have their own local servers, which replicate data online to the
central server. The data at the central server is then used for MIS and data
warehousing. Due to this, despite having a decentralized architecture, the bank
offers any branch banking capability to its customers.
The Genius is a three-tier server client architecture operating on Windows 2003 based servers and Win XP based desktops |