CustomerXPs 'RICE's with its banking solns

BANGALORE, INDIA: As a start-up, CustomerXPs — a Bangalore-based IP software product company focused on addressing the tough technical challenge of real-time intelligence - has already gained a foothold in the retail banking market with its unique solutions.

The company, which counts large enterprises like ICICI Bank among its customers, is now going for a global expansion by building an ecosystem of partners, who would provide it with the necessary market leverage to enable penetration. In an interaction with CIOL, its founder-CEO Rivi Varghese talks about its various offerings and business plans.

CIOL: What are the different kinds of solutions the company offers to various enterprises in India?

Rivi: CustomerXPs offers real-time, intelligent software targeted at large retail banks worldwide. We empower cross-channel customer interactions with relevant and contextual intelligence delivered in absolute real-time.

Also read: Retail banking technology on strong growth, says Ovum

Our solutions in the customer experience management and fraud monitoring space are designed to deliver human-like comprehension, using a multi-disciplinary approach borrowing from psychology, behavioral sciences and real-time analytics.

Our products are ideal for enterprises in the banking, telecom, retail, travel and web sectors. Two of our key products are:

1. Real-time Intelligence Conversational Engine (RICE): It is an effective, real-time customer experience management product

2. Real-time Intelligent Monitoring System (RIMS): It caters to real-time fraud management, compliance and monitoring.

Currently, ICICI Bank, one of India’s largest and tech-savvy banks, is a customer of our product suite.

CIOL: What kind of a business model does the company adopt to provide its solutions?

Rivi: The company's business model is similar to that of any pure play global software product company - we license our product to enterprises like banks, telecom companies, retail players and web properties. We also generate recurring revenues by way of Annual Maintenance Contracts (AMCs).

After the base product gets deployed, enterprises can then choose from a bouquet of products, which handle their specific business requirements. The leadership team took a conscious call that come what may, the company's first revenue should be a licence revenue and that too from a globally 'reference able' customer.

CIOL: What are the salient features of its solutions? What is meant by its unique multi-disciplinary approach towards software product development?

Rivi: By combining artificial intelligence, real-time perspectives and the traditional mechanism of running models on large database and doing this in-memory, it is possible to perform real-time fraud analytics or customer qualification for a product and notify at the point of customer contact.

This capability, combined with the proliferation of this software across traditional brick-and-click channels as well as unconventional ones like ATMs and kiosks, lends a unique edge to our offerings.

Our products internally maintain a customer 'aatma' (soul) inside our product, which is refactored in real time. It means that when a customer event happens, the entire digested history of that customer is available for ready reference in real time.

For example, a customer walks into a bank branch or goes to an ATM or dials up the call center, and asks for 200 cheque leaves. This transaction is passed to the core banking system (CBS).

The moment this transaction goes into the CBS, and since we are listening to it, our product immediately pushes the prompt back to the interaction point stating that this is 'out-of- pattern' behaviour.

Our product interprets the current information based on the cheque leaves consumed in a quarter, and infers that ‘most probably this customer is applying for a loan, but I am not sure’. And so it pops the question: ‘Sir, are you planning to apply for a loan?’

Now, let's suppose two days ago the same customer had logged into Internet banking and made a query for a home loan. Our product will use this partial information and infer that the customer is not looking for just any loan and rather he/she is looking for a home loan.

Thus, our products are relevant to cross-sell, up-sell, control fraud, compliance, risk and monitoring.

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CIOL: What are your future plans? Does the company have expansion plans?

Rivi: Right from the launch, we have been focusing on building a globally-viable solution and accordingly, we are now looking to actively establish our presence in global markets on an immediate basis.

On the sales and marketing front, our strategy is to build an ecosystem of partners, who would provide us with the necessary market leverage to enable penetration.

To be relevant, we also believe that it is essential for our products to be infused with enough local intelligence so that we are able to deliver results quickly, and to be customized enough to face some of the current challenges being faced in the specific market.

With these as our tenets, we are looking at expanding in the Middle-East and South-East Asia in the next year and are also exploring avenues to enter the more advanced U.S. financial services market over the next couple of years. We are in talks with partners in these geographies so that we can get a quick foothold in these markets.

CIOL: How is the company planning to capture the market which is already dominated by large enterprises like Cisco, HP and SAP?

Rivi: We at CustomerXPs are approaching this problem with a two-pronged strategy.

Firstly, we have through our market and competitive intelligence deduced that although the customer experience space is dominated by a few large vendors, there is a need to evangelize this whole new concept of instant intelligence delivered in a contextual and relevant manner consistently.

We are are also in talks with analyst and influencer community to help us in defining this space, the pain points banks are experiencing and the value real-time solutions such as ours bring to the table. This will help us in differentiating our value proposition in the market.

Secondly, we are also saying that our products do not replace the back-end systems offered by these vendors, but rather work in tandem with them by gleaning information from multiple back-end systems and applying the inferring and deducing algorithms to the info to make it context-relevant and actionable to yield business results.

So, it is a co-habit strategy that helps customers reap the benefits of these huge back-end investments, which can now, with the help of our solution, become intelligent and more business-relevant.