Transactions per second scales new heights

BANGALORE: The Indian banking sector is slowly coming of age and hand grooming this sector is the banking solution market, which has carved a name for itself in the global arena. Not to forget the pro-active government reforms that are helping the Indian banking market reach greater heights and adding glitz and glamour to Indian economy as a whole.

While i-flex solutions’ flagship product Flexcube has been rated the #1 banking product in the world by UK based IBS, an independent banking solutions rating vendor, Infosys Technolgies’ Finacle is all set to humble its competitors by having recorded 4562 transactions per second in its solution. Audited by independent and consulting major, Ernst and Young, this record stands tall against the ‘close to 1000 transactions per second’ by its nearest competitor. It calculates to roughly 16 million transactions per hour.

"It is the highest against any banking solution in any platform," claimed Girish G Vaidya, Senior Vice President, Head, Banking Business Unit, Infosys.

Finacle has achieved this with its new soon-to-be-released Version 7.0. Along with the record the only product of India’s second largest software exporter added features such as enhancing of loans handling, retail asset management, wealth management, datawarehousing apart from architectural and design changes will be included.

"Globally banking process varies from country to country. For instance in the Middle East, suddenly the government will announce a holiday on loan repayment during the Islamic holy month or like in Kenya, where the interest is compounded daily or in Nepal, where they follow the Hindu calendar. A lot of these issues have been taken in to consideration, while enhancing the product," mentioned Vaidya.

The present version that is currently in the market is 6.2.3 and installed in 83 plus banks today spread across 24 countries. Its nearest Indian competitor is present in almost 80 plus countries. "We have had a late start and are gearing up to reach out. Marketing of our banking business unit services is getting aggressive and the new financial year should witness some action in terms of order wins and stepping into new markets," said Vaidya.

The software bellwether, which expects its sales to touch $1 billion this fiscal, had roughly $33 million being contributed from its BBU product division last fiscal. It had churned out $3 million in 1999. "All products of Infosys is focussed on banking under the Finacle umbrella," added Vaidya. The components of the Finacle suite include the core banking solution-Finacle, the retail net banking-e-Channel, the corporate banking solution-e-Corp, treasury and CRM. The company is also targeting the insurance sector quite strongly this year.

"Out of the eight new private sector banks in India, five of them use Finacle and out of the five large public sector banks that have decided to go for core banking solution, three are Finacle users. Having established ourselves in the country, we will be aggressively reaching out to the global banking market," said Vaidya.

The 600 strong products division of the otherwise 15,000 strong Indian software giant is taking all efforts to make Finacle a "globally respected and accepted product" instead of achieving a top slot in IBS ranking based on the number of installations across the world.