The banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industry has emerged as one of the fastest growing sectors in the world. It is poised to become the biggest contributor to world economic growth with several micro and macro level changes in the global financial circuit.

Owing to the rising pressures for delivering accurate, error proof services to its customers, there arises a greater need for IT enabled innovations to lead its operational transformation and create customer centric processes. According to a recent industry research by analyst firm Ovum, IT spending by banks globally will reach $118.6 billion in 2013. The report attributes this rise to the increased focus of bank CIOs on customer satisfaction and revenue growth.

Innovative technologies such as mobility, cloud computing, and virtualisation have helped banks drive differentiation via increased operational efficiencies and enhanced customer experiences. More recently, IT enabled banking services have expanded to include electronic fund transfers (EFT), electronic clearance services (ECS), internet banking, automated teller machines (ATMs), mobile banking, point-of-sale terminals (kiosk banking), and electronic data exchange (EDI). The ever increasing customer expectations together with growing compliance regulations, threatens to marginalise the entities that are not a part of this IT revolution.

As globalisation impacts businesses worldwide, enterprises need to quickly realign their operational framework through smart technology investments. Mobility helps organisations add value at every step of the core banking process – from customer on-boarding to servicing. It enables faster and improved communication between customers, field executives, and the central processing office of the bank, allowing real-time servicing of customer requests ‘on the fly’. This leads to enhanced customer experience, enabling early adopters of mobile technology to gain significant competitive advantage.

Mobility has allowed customers to access their account information, locate branches/kiosks/ATMs/agents, transfer funds, process utility bill payments, and make service requests over their mobile devices, turning customer self service into a reality.

Newgen combines its expertise in the areas of imaging, business process management and enterprise content management with new-age mobile technology, to come up with an innovative mobility platform – ZapIn. It offers key stakeholders in the BFSI sector including customers, field executives and customer service representatives the freedom to anytime-anywhere banking services through their mobile devices.

ZapIn holds the ability to completely transform different usage scenarios, for BFSI companies. For instance, it enables insurers to streamline the entire sales lifecycle from lead management, customer on-boarding, to policy servicing. It makes their field sales executives well equipped to conduct need gap analysis, educate potential customers, and influence their decision making, while delivering an unmatched customer experience.

Newgen’s eKYC solution further simplifies the customer on-boarding process by enabling allows point-of-sale executives to capture customer information first-time-right, at the point of customer contact, and initiate its processing in real time at the central processing office. Generally field executives collect physical copies of KYC documents, which are submitted to the local branches where they get scanned and processed. The solution allows banks to digitally receive all customer related information from the UIDAI database and seamlessly validate it using Aadhaar authentication. This will drastically reduce the customer on-boarding turnaround time and operational costs, leading to an enhanced level of customer satisfaction.

Mobility is thus slated to be the top IT investment priority for most BFSI companies owing to the insatiable demand for real-time customer services, increased penetration of mobile devices and stringent regulatory compliances. Also, majority of the small to medium sized organisations will move away from conventional IT systems to cloud based applications to add value to their offerings.

Modern banking solutions like mobile banking, electronic funds transfer, and specific business focused solutions (such as loan origination and trade finance solutions) will continue to grab centre stage in driving the BFSI industry forward.