Move Over, Flexcube

A co-operative bank with branches in 35 towns of South India has developed its own Core Banking pplication based on .NET platform

Formed in 1969 by the Indian government to rehabilitate the Repatriates from Burma and Sri Lanka, Repco Bank is headquartered in Chennai with branch offices in 35 towns of Tamil Nadu including Salem, Coimbatore, Namakkal, and Erode, besides branches in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka. The share capital of the bank comes from govt employees in all these states besides the repatriates. Today, Repco Bank is run by about 450 employees, armed with 371 PCs across 50 branches.

Repco Bank is the first co-operative bank in the Southern region to implement its own core banking solution. With Thesys Technologies and Theme Technologies as its partners, it began the first phase of deployment of CBS on July 1, ‘06. A pilot branch in Chennai was computerized after which 25 branches have been core banking enabled till date. In its second phase, the bank plans to automate 5 more branches by the first week of March this year after which the remaining 20 branches would be added to the list tentatively by June 30 this year.

Interestingly, 2 years before the bank decided to deploy core banking app, it started using a proprietary handheld device to enable its customers with daily deposits and loan collections at their doorsteps. The device, named Repco Genius, which resembles a credit card swipe machine, lets you punch in the account no. and select the transaction. With instant response to daily deposits and credit details and on-the-spot receipts, Repco Genius allowed customers to see daily balance, loan status, remittance details, and more importantly, eliminated room for human error. When the CBS was implemented in ‘06, Repco Genius was made to link up with the system and make the CBS react real-time to daily transactions.

Behind Core Banking Solution

The biggest challenges faced by you in deploying CBS?

A mid-sized organization like Repco Bank could not afford CBS product like Flexcube because of its high price proposition. The only other way out was to create our own low-cost solution. For this we roped in two software vendors: an app provider and an ISO-certified software company. The bank also has the source code for future maintenance. Since both the banks and the companies involved in the project were new to the concept of core banking, there were as many as 4563 bugs identified. Of these, 4509 have been solved. The other issue was data migration–from Dbase to SQL Server. We had also wrongly assessed the hardware sizing for the data centre.

What technology has gone into the CBS?

The front-end of the system is Microsoft’s .NET, while back-end has SQL Server and IBM’s SAN. The project also used BSNL’s Leased Line and ISDN.

How has the bank benefited from the deployment?

The biggest achievement was the ability to generate instant balance sheets. When more branches became core banking enabled, customers of a branch graduated into that of bank, reducing responsibility for branch offices. Repco Genius could be synced up with CBS, and this enabled us to take core banking to our customers’ doorsteps.

R Rajagopal, General Manager (IT),Repco Bank