Maximum Business Impact: Shamrao Vithal Cooperative Bank

Thursday, June 08, 2006

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
IT solution A 3-tier solution with two modules for rake management (operations) and terminal management (commercial) for real time information
Implemented by Center for Railway Information System (CRIS), under Ras Behari Das, Group General Manager, FOIS and team
Technology platform  Alpha servers, Oracle, Tuxedo, BEA WebLogic. Application and database servers in separate load balancing clusters
	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

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