Scaling Digital Success: A Leading South-East Asian Bank’s Journey Towards Seamless Corporate Lending

In the fast-paced world of finance, banks are continually striving to enhance their services and provide a seamless experience for their customers. This is the story of one such leading bank in South East Asia that is known for its progressive digital transformation initiatives. The bank is a prominent financial services group with a strong presence in 19 markets. Known for its comprehensive range of consumer, SME, and corporate banking services, the bank has received numerous global accolades, including being recognized for progressive digital transformation vision and success.

Digital Transformation Journey with Finacle

Since 2009, the bank has been associated with Infosys Finacle. Leveraging Finacle’s robust suite of products, including Finacle Core, Finacle Wealth Management, Finacle Treasury, Finacle Liquidity Management, Finacle CRM, and Finacle Limits and Collaterals, the bank has been able to modernize its banking operations across multiple countries.

In 2013, the bank embarked on a core banking transformation journey to expand its presence in overseas markets. The objective was to replace various legacy systems used in different countries, creating a standardized and optimized core technology infrastructure.

The transformation program was rolled out in a regional, phased manner, covering 13 locations within a span of 20 months. The deployment process was efficient, with almost one country going live every month during its peak. The benefits of this transformation were far-reaching, ranging from cost savings to rapid innovation across growth markets. The program empowered the bank’s overseas operations by enabling standardization of group charts of accounts and products, rationalizing system architecture, consolidating regional operations, and improving regulatory reporting and product offerings.

More recently, the bank is migrating its operations to the most recent version of Finacle Core Banking Solution to take advantage of the composable technology platform built on a modular, open and microservices-led foundation.

Digitizing Corporate Lending

As a part of its digital transformation journey, the bank also prioritized the digitization of its corporate lending processes, aiming to provide a seamless and efficient lending experience for its corporate customers.

By leveraging breadth of functional capabilities of the Finacle Core Banking solution, the bank has transformed its corporate lending operations, making it easier for businesses to access funding.

Here are some of the initiatives that the bank has undertaken to digitize its corporate lending with Finacle:

• The implementation of straight-through processing capabilities has automated and streamlined the lending processes, resulting in faster loan application processing and reduced manual intervention.
• Digital onboarding processes have eliminated the need for physical paperwork, enabling faster customer onboarding and a more streamlined experience.
• Through the development of application programming interfaces (APIs), the bank has seamlessly integrated its lending operations with external systems and platforms, such as accounting software and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This integration ensures a smooth flow of data, reducing manual data entry and enhancing efficiency and accuracy in the lending process.
• The bank’s mobile and digital channels provide corporate customers with convenient access to their lending accounts anytime and anywhere. Through mobile apps and digital platforms, customers can view loan details, make repayments, and access other loan-related services. This integration with Finacle core banking ensures real-time information availability and empowers customers with self-service capabilities.
• Furthermore, the bank’s integrated online banking platform enables corporate customers to manage their banking and lending needs digitally. With this platform, customers can easily apply for loans, receive approvals, and manage their loan accounts. Again, the integration with Finacle core banking ensures a seamless and real-time experience.

Finacle supports an extensive portfolio of loan products offered by the bank to its corporate clients globally. Some of the key offerings under the bank’s corporate lending portfolio include:

• Working capital financing solutions, such as overdraft facilities, short-term loans, and trade financing.
• Term loans with flexible repayment structures and competitive interest rates.
• Project financing to support large-scale infrastructure projects, renewable energy initiatives, and other capital-intensive ventures.
• The bank participates in syndicated loan arrangements, where multiple banks come together to provide financing to large corporations or consortiums.
• Customized structured financing solutions to meet specific corporate financing needs.
• The bank is committed to sustainability and offers various sustainable financing options to support environmentally and socially responsible initiatives.
• The bank supports businesses with their international expansion plans by offering cross-border financing solutions.
• Business financing for Micro and Small Enterprises.
• Commercial financing for medium enterprises.

The bank benefits from Finacle’s industry-leading architecture:

• Contemporary layered design consisting of data model layers, business components, service composition, customer engagement, APIs and UX.
• Declarative and RESTful APIs that empower the bank to co-innovate lending propositions with external ecosystems.
• Scalability, performance and resilience to power organic and inorganic growth and the heightened responsiveness expected in a truly digital lending world.
• Robust security enablers across infrastructure, data, and application layers.
• Continuous deployment that offers a set of tools for automation enabling continuous integration during development and continuous delivery during deployment. This enables an agile response to ever-changing lending requirements.
• Configurability, localization and extensibility to meet local practices and compliance; freedom to extend the solution independently for a specific market requirement in which the bank or lending institution operates.
• Event-driven architecture for dynamic event-driven processing.

Conclusion

The bank’s journey of digital transformation, powered by its partnership with Finacle, has paved the way for seamless corporate lending and enhanced banking services. The bank’s core banking transformation has standardized and optimized operations across multiple countries, resulting in improved efficiencies and cost savings.

By digitizing its corporate lending processes and leveraging the capabilities of the Finacle Core Banking solution, the bank has enhanced the customer experience, providing faster loan processing, streamlined onboarding, and real-time access to loan information. These advancements have empowered corporate customers to make informed borrowing decisions and manage their lending accounts conveniently.

As the bank continues to innovate and embrace technology, it sets a remarkable example for the banking industry, showcasing the potential of digital transformation to deliver superior banking experiences for customers. With its customer-centric approach and commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technology, the bank is well-positioned to lead the way in the digital banking landscape.