Equitas SFB Is Getting Digital-ready

V.R. Sridharan, CTO, Equitas Small Finance Bank, discusses the technology initiatives in the bank and how it got transformed into a digital organization in a small period of time:

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Equitas Small Finance Bank completed an envious task of transitioning from an NBFC into a bank in a short span of 10 months and launch its operations in September 2016 as one of the first small finance banks in the country, thanks to its vision to create a best in breed technology landscape. The bank’s CTO, who was responsible for the creation of the technology infrastructure, V.R. Sridharan, says the goal was to set up a system, which leverages an open architecture enabling easy integration with other application platforms. “Equally important for us was to ensure information security and compliance to the regulatory environment. We wanted a technology setup, which would not only be comparable to the best banks, but also give us the competitive edge in our chosen customer segments,” says he.

This vision was pivotal in driving the information technology induction plans of the bank, says Sridharan, and adds this was accomplished in just about 10 months. “We have set up around 375 new bank branches in a record time of around 12 months as part of this journey. We have also made a significant capital investment in technology as part of this transition,” he adds.

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY IS CORE

Sridharan maintains that customer centricity and employee empowerment formed the core drivers of the IT team’s endeavor to create a state of the art technology setup. Scalability to meet the business growth, need to deliver change quickly to meet business demand and being future proof were the other key considerations in this technology journey and one of the significant features was setting up of an Enterprise Integration Layer as part of this transformation program, which enabled the core system to integrate easily with other external applications.