IT is as important as breathing is to you!

HDFC Bank has grown from strength to strength to be a technology savoir-faire entity. CN Ram, head-IT, HDFC Bank spoke to Prasad Ramasubramanian of Cybermedia News on the importance of IT in the banking sector and latest initiative with Symantec Corporation.

How do you work out synergies with Symantec with whom you have entered a three-year strategic Enterprise Level Agreement?

HDFC Bank has been working with Symantec for several years and has confidence in the company as a trusted partner.

We entered into this deal with Symantec to further enhance the bank’s security posture, ensure our data is protected and available, and help facilitate our compliance and corporate governance programs to increase customer confidence.

There is a steady rise in the amount of frauds in the banking and financial sector. How has HDFC Bank geared up to face the same?

We have a lot of fraud detection systems and it actually detects the user-spending patterns based on his/her transactions.

Normally it gets triggered when things get out of place or you suddenly purchase something costly, which is higher than what you normally do and this leads to detection of  something that is out of the ordinary.

Without sounding too clichéd about it, how much importance does ‘IT’ figure in the functioning of this sector?

From an importance point of view, I would say—IT is as important as breathing is to you. It is almost part of the infrastructure today and nobody does anything without IT today!

Now, IT is not restricted to just core banking systems. Even the services that you provide the customers—the likes of internet banking and phone banking are all IT-enabled. So, you can figure out the importance.

How does HDFC Bank typically map out its customer?

We have things like data warehouse, Business Intelligence and we mine a lot of information about what customers do.

We come to know how a particular person likes to bank with us, for example--this guy in tune with net banking or someone is more in tune with phone banking. You can get such information out via the systems.

Could you talk to us on some of the IT implementations done over recent years?

Over the years, there have been numerous initiatives and implementations that have been carried out by us.

Today, we are talking a lot of automation systems to help our customers. One of them is –typically customers have multiple accounts and in one plane we consolidate all the banking-related matter.

Another initiative was to generate a one-time user card available only on the net. This was undertaken because there are many customers reluctant to shop on the Internet for fear of their data being misused.

So what we did was--once you finish shopping and get the card worth of say, Rs 500 and use that card number, expiry date and CVV number –you use it and after that the card just dies.

What is the IT expenditure of HDFC Bank and how many people work in your team?

Our expenditure would be about Rs 150 crore. Our team is about 300 people and it is highly centralized and we sit in Mumbai.

What would be your expectations from the vendor’s end?

We would like to look at partnerships with the vendors.