We have a dedicated team in place for driving our digital strategies. Ourdigital platforms leverage advanced technology, to enhance customerexperience across all touchpoints, maximise returns on technologyinvestments and reduce operational costs. We will continue to ramp up ourdigital investments to emerge as a new-age, tech-enabled bank.
Repayments came from digital and
fintech repayments infrastructure
by March, 2021
We are building new cost-efficient sourcing and servicing channels powered by analytics as we aim to scale up customer acquisition and provide superlative services. During the year, we fast-tracked our digital initiatives through:
We are partnering the Indian fintech and startup ecosystem to foster strong relationships and provide them with the right Application Programming Interface (API) infrastructure and a single-window clearance. We have developed 159 banking APIs ready for consumption by these fintechs, built over a robust API Gateway Platform, powered by IBM.
We are now among those select universal banks, which provide API Banking with six API Banking initiatives live across areas of Digital Lending (Nira, LoanTap and Progcap) and Loan Repayments (Airtel Payments Bank, PayNearby and Setu). We also enjoy healthy partnerships with 24 fintechs across areas such as loan repayments, digital onboarding, robotic process automation, marketing automation, digital lending and artificial intelligence.
COVID-19 impacted our collections efficiency, and the safety of our customers and teams had to be prioritised. As a result, we designed a new digital collections infrastructure that also enabled our technologically-challenged customers to make loan repayments with assistance.
We scaled up loan repayment touchpoints by collaborating with Airtel Payments Bank and PayNearby to provide a collection point within a 500-metre radius of each customer. We also added a digital self-service arm using popular payment apps and Ujjivan Bank Mobile Banking App for peer-to-peer money transfers and bill payments through UPI or debit cards. We further embraced the Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) platform with our partnership with Setu, enabling our customers to repay loan EMIs from anywhere.
Visible transformation
By March, 2021, repayments through online money transfer and fintech engagements overtook the repayments via cash at centre meetings.
Payment of Ujjivan Bank EMI's is now enabled through any of the Airtel Payment Bank outlets.
24
Fintech partnerships
We have implemented a series of disbursal enablers such as digitalised ID verification, automated bank statement analysis, e-sign of loan agreements and e-mandate collection, during the year. This improved our TAT by 70–90%. We also introduced the Video KYC platform for video-based personal discussions before loan disbursals.
We converted the end-to-end onboarding journeys for affordable housing loans, MSME loans, vehicle loans and personal loans, besides being the first bank to integrate with digital onboarding platforms such as Saarathi from Decimal Technologies – a fintech as part of our overall fintech engagement programme.
We leveraged the robotic process automation to drive an extensive process automation journey and successfully automated 8 processes during the year. By March, 2021, we were processing over 1 Crore transactions/ month. Going forward, we will automate 100+ processes, reducing costs and human resources expenditure significantly.
100+
Processes scheduled to be
automated during FY 2021-22
The new-age technologies play an important role in providing high-service standards at a large-scale and help us manage customer relationships better. We invested in several future-focused technologies such as an Artificial Intelligence Platform to help us digitalise our phone banking responses, enable customers to fulfil service requests and make basic transactions in their chosen language and through their chosen channel (such as WhatsApp, and so on)
We also invested in a Marketing Automation Tool by an emerging fintech, MoEngage through which we will integrate all digital and physical touchpoints to provide contextual and real-time communication, advice and offers. We are already using this tool to drive digital collections and cross-sell/up-sell initiatives to enhance the Customer Life Time Value (CLTV), thereby strengthening our bond with our customers.
Going forward, we aim to strengthen our end-to-end process digitalisation efforts and use the power of digital as a new customer acquisition and service channel. Our focus for the next year will be on enhancing our payments and e-commerce presence. We will also leverage the power of analytics for actionable insights for data-driven decisionmaking. We will continue to leverage our full-stack API Banking platform to partner with the fintech ecosystem for faster time to market and innovative products and solutions for our customers.
Annual Report 2020-21