ISCI to focus on 'capability arbitrage'

NEW DELHI, INDIA: International Software Center-India (ISCI), a core unit within Scope international, which manages Standard Chartered Bank’s strategic applications across all businesses in over 50 countries, aims to focus on ‘capability arbitrage.’

“Now we will focus on the ‘capability arbitrage,’ due to the availability of skilled manpower,” Akshaya Gaur, executive vice-president and Head of ISCI informed CyberMedia News.

Moving forward in the direction of ‘capability arbitrage’ he said that ISCI will now position itself as a premier banking technology solutions company for the bank from offering support functions of a BPO. Gaur said that people had started outsourcing to India for its ‘cost arbitrage’, which was one of the major reasons for setting-up of ISCI at Chennai too. “We are now moving from ‘cost arbitrage’ to ‘capability arbitrage,’ which is an alternative and innovative business model. Focusing on ‘capability arbitrage’ as a model sustains itself and grows overtime,” he opined.

“Usually an IT company works for customers sitting elsewhere and an IT division works within the business premises. At Standard Chartered, we are the IT people who deliver the solutions straight to the bank; we understand their requirements very well and improve and resolve them. This is a different approach from being a captive center within a bank. This has made us look at talent export to technology and business roles in other parts of the bank as we have built people with core domain knowledge combined with the strength of technology,” he said.

“We have grown from 100 people in 2000 to about 2200 people now, and are looking at doubling our headcount by 2010,” Gaur added.

ISCI was founded in 2000 to carry out applied research for the development of processes, frameworks and methodologies to effectively cater to its banking customers. ISCI’s foray into superior banking technology has helped Scope increase cost savings when processing transactions electronically and also helped them decrease customer service costs.

ISCI supports 51 per cent of the strategic applications of the Standard Chartered Group. With keen focus on business, technology and process, ISCI provides support for 40 per cent of all group applications. The business domains of the group that ISCI covers include Branch Banking, Wealth Management, Retail Lending, Collections, Security Services, Messaging, Trade Finance, Markets Operations, Information Management, Finance, Risk Management and ITES.

ISCI is also home to CMM Certified processes and centers of excellence. The center supports two of the four core Banking Suites for SCB, one of which holds the distinction of being developed in-house and also successfully benchmarked against 25 products in the market.

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