HDFC Securities Limited (HSL) has been in the broking biz for
over a decade. A subsidiary of HDFC Bank, the firm is headquartered
in Mumbai with operations spread across all the major cities
throughout India. It serves a customer base comprising of
both retail and institutional investors and offers them a platform
to trade in equities, derivatives, currency futures and mutual
funds through NSE & BSE and other investment options such as
IPOs, bonds, corporate fixed deposits, insurance etc.
With close to 24,000 new investors getting added to its customer
base every month, HSL has witnessed a continued phase of strong
growth in the last few years. However, as is often the case,
business growth comes with attendant consequences and challenges
and HSL's story is no different.
It was late 2009, and the folks in the HSL operations team were
in a quandary. It seemed that with the growing customer base, the
challenge of opening customer accounts and managing records and
contract documents had only gotten worse. The firm had been
acquiring anywhere between 1000-2000 customers every day.
Processing that many applications on a daily basis for activating
customer accounts was proving to be a costly and time consuming
affair, especially since HSL did not have a proper workflow in
place. Neither did it have a system for document management which
made archiving and retrieving customer documents for any
operational or regulatory purpose, a nightmarish experience.
As per Manoj K Nanda, VP of Projects at HSL, “Our average
cycle time to activate a single customer account was something that
we wanted to improve on. We relied heavily on our back-office,
where data capture happened manually. This was time-consuming and
error-prone. Plus, the staff there could only upload the data in an
online mode which delayed the account opening process
further.”
HSL also wanted to optimize informed business reporting along
with a robust and scalable document management system (DMS). The
DMS would facilitate easy archival and quick retrieval of
documents, which was something the firm wanted
desperately.
“We were spending Rs.50 on average for retrieving a single
customer contract and yet we would have to wait for days, sometimes
even weeks just to retrieve a certain customer contract from our
warehouse located in Navi Mumbai,” informed Nanda.
It didn't take long for the folks at HSL to realize that they
needed to take action before the situation got out of hands. After
evaluating a number of vendor offerings, HSL opted to go with
Datamatics' solution. The firm recommended a solution which
comprised of tools including iQ for intelligent data capture, iPM
for workflow management, and EMC Documentum for document
archival/retrieval.
Kicking-off around August 2010, the entire project from
conception to implementation took nearly 11 months to complete. Of
this, nearly 4 months went into requirement finalization.
Talking about the experience, Rahul Kanodia, Vice Chairman and
CEO, Datamatics said, “There were basically three groups
participating while designing the new imaging-ready document. So we
needed integration from sales channel, operations and compliance
during the implementation. The requirement finalization stage, took
about 4 months time. A lot of brainstorming happened to make way
for a workflow based system from the existing manual
processes.”
For the project, a team of dedicated people from Business
Solutions Group and IT was deployed by HSL, with need based
participation from operations and CPU. 4-5 members worked
dedicatedly for the project with necessary managerial supervision.
The project did not require any major infrastructural investments
other than the basic support infrastructure needed for the data
capture engine, workflow solution and the EMC Documentum.
The AOF process at HSL today follows a simple yet effective
flow. After receiving the forms from its various branches, HSL
sends the documents to its CPU. From here, the forms are sent for
inwarding and scrutiny at which stage applications are verified on
a number of counts and cross-checked for duplicacy. Once verified,
the applications are scanned and images are uploaded on the iPM
workflow engine. With the help iQ intelligent data capture,
'Makers' at the HSL back-office fill-in all the details in the soft
copy. To ensure that the 'Makers' have filled all the fields
correctly, 'Checkers' are employed to examine the form and look for
errors, if any. The forms that are cleared at this stage, are sent
for hand-off to the core systems and DMS for archiving and
retrieval.
Going live with the solution in July last year, HSL has
witnessed a number of benefits since. In the AOF process, the data
capture cycle time has been reduced to 7 minutes as against 10
minutes earlier. Plus, the overall time for AOF process has been
reduced to 5 days instead of the average 7 days it took for HSL
earlier.
According to Nanda, archiving & retrieving documents with
bulk upload/ download facilities has resulted in cost savings on
document retrieval, which is now almost instantaneous compared to
the 7 days it used to take earlier. Not to mention the cost of
retrieving the documents which has been reduced to half.
From the productivity aspect of the back-office staff, manual
effort has been reduced considerably as the iQ data capture engine
addresses signature cropping, categorization of supporting
documents and business rule validations in the capture process,
leading to faster and more accurate processing of forms.
The iPM Workflow has enabled tracking (which form is where and
at what stage), auto-allocation, exception handling, and document
reconciliation. It provides HSL complete process control due to
real-time process monitoring as against manual tracking
earlier.
"There has also been a visible reduction in the load on the core
back-office system as a result of the deployment. Business
efficiencies, quality of services and satisfaction levels have
increased considerably whereas business, financial & regulatory
risks have decreased significantly with the new system," concluded
Nanda.
Benefits of a Partnering with a Security Service Provider
IT security is a sensitive topic for companies and many IT departments lobby their executive team to implement, host, and manage each layer of security internally
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