Girish G Vaidya

When Infosys relaunched Bancs2000 as Finacle, it hit upon a winner. The rebranded product helped propel revenues in Infy’s Banking Business Unit (BBU) from Rs 23.5 crore in 1999-2000 to Rs 103 crore in 2001-02. Hoping that some of Finacle’s magic will rub off on its other banking products, Infosys has extended the brand to its five other banking products.

“Finacle is not just a core banking product,” said Girish G Vaidya, head, BBU, Infosys. “Our aim is to have a suite that covers all banking needs. While we are still working towards that goal, a major chunk of a bank’s needs are covered by the new Finacle suite of products.”

The brand will now include Infy’s Bankaway which has been split into two products—Finacle e-Channels for the retail segment and Finacle e-Corporate that provides Internet banking facility to corporate customers. It will also encompass the treasury product Infy acquired during its acquisition of IQ Financials’ treasury division.

The fifth product in the Finacle suite is Finacle CRM, which the company claims is the first CRM product to be tailored for the banking vertical. The company acquired this technology from Trivium. “We have added banking specific code for basic analytics, allowing customer IDs to be linked to multiple products and doing a share of wallet analysis across them,” said Muralikrishna, head marketing, BBU, Infosys. It also provides a generic interface to various back-end operations. This is essential since most banks have legacy systems at the back-end and the CRM software is expected to span across the various products of a bank such as mutual funds, credit cards and current accounts. The most significant addition has been the loan origination module. “The loan origination system is linked to the CRM product. From the loan application to disbursement, the whole process is tracked by the CRM system. The sales, marketing and support modules are customised for banking in terms of scripts and workflows,” said Vinod S, marketing manager, Europe BBU, Infosys.

The first rollout of the suite is taking place at the National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. “Many banks use three of these products, the remaining two—CRM and Treasury—are recent introductions,” said Vaidya.

The treasury product already has an existing customer base in the US, UK and Japan. As part of its efforts to increase its focus on developed markets, the BBU relocated its global head of sales and marketing office to London in July 2002. With 50 percent of BBU’s revenues coming from abroad last year, it’s not surprising that the new Finacle is spreading its wings overseas before it does the same in India.