Xerox eyes financial inclusion, caters to banking sector

Banking, Financial Services & Insurance (BFSI) is a high-priority vertical for Xerox in India. Vishal Awal, Executive Director, Xerox South Asia spoke about how Xerox India is addressing technology requirements of the banking sector.

The solution

Xerox Corp offers a highly portable Xpress Banking Solution to banks and financial institutions that are looking at expanding their footprint in urban, semi-urban and rural India in a decidedly cost effective and largely automated manner for faster document processing. The practical constraints like limited bandwidth availability are factored into the platform’s development in such a way that only the variable date actually travels on the pipes, and at the destination gets super-imposed onto the pre-recognized document, thereby re-creating the full document without the need for reliablehigh-speed pipes.

Indigenously developed

Xpress Banking developed at Xerox Research Centre in India (XRCI, Bangalore) helps financial institutions like banks cut critical costs and processing times enabling the potential customers in small/remote towns to utilize personal banking services like opening a bank account, applying for loans etc.

How it works

Developed through ethnographers surveying the issues around getting financial services to rural areas, Xerox has run the technology in kiosks with one of India’s leading banks. These are easy to replicate, install and secure in both remote and densely populated areas. The solution builds upon the capability of Xerox multifunction devices to not only scan hand written forms, but to also interact with the resulting content. This eliminates the need for fully staffed bank branches, reduces paper-based processes and provides clients with a user-friendly experience. A prospective bank client walks up to the kiosk and inputs key information that can accommodate several languages. The system automatically verifies and validates the information, and populates back-end databases with the correct information.

The success so far

We have evaluated the document workflows in depth with one of the largest private sector retail banks in India. We have proposed an optimised and automated solution, which significantly enhances customer experience via drastically reduced turn-around times and near real-time processing, with built-in audit mechanisms and bandwidth optimization features. We, along with bank's help, have evaluated the cost of these workflow executions (per item), based on current approach and the new suggested approach. It clearly shows about 70%-80% reduction in costs! The execution processing time with new solution will be less than 5% of what it is today. The solution will be part of MPS, and the pilot in few branches to tune the solution, based on the field evaluation is planned. It will start with small infrastructure-wise challenged branches. Once the above is complete, the solution will be integrated into MPS offering for BFSI clients, even for their new branches. There will obviously be a need for a minor customisation for each client, in line with their unique process framework.

Future plans

The next few years are likely to witness enhanced thrust from Banking and Insurance sectors to penetrate deeper into rural India. With the government’s impetus on ensuring financial inclusion across the length and breadth of the country and the resultant regulatory and policy framing that is conducive to that goal, there is a huge opportunity for Xerox to not only partner such institutions in MPS and document management services, but also provide solutions like Xpress Banking that can bridge the rural urban divide.