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Q3: What are your recommendations in cash management?
A: The cash management scenario in India is rather different than in most countries across the world. The fact on the ground is that many of our banks still maintain paper books of account and are not automated as much of the developed world would expect. While rapid progress is indeed being made by the banking industry in India, the heterogeneous state of evolution of different banks does pose some unique challenges. Thus, many of our cash management products are designed to help our customers work around some of these 'natural hurdles'. In that sense, some of them are surrogate substitutes for an ACH or a country wide paper clearing system! That said, our Cash Management services offer a full range of receivable and payable products to meet the complex cash management needs of businesses both big and small.
In my view, cash management must be designed as a service to offer liquidity, quality and superior client service. It should save businesses both time and effort as well as add to their bottom line. Cash management solutions would in the final analysis need to integrate across the entire cash supply chain.
Q4: How will supply chain management evolve into the future?
A: The convergence of Internet technologies, heightened global competition, and the advent of lean practices has made supply chain management one of the key differentiators of the future. Delivery units have now to provide essentially better services with shrinking budgets. Hence integration of supply chain practices across the board will provide huge efficiencies. In the near future, the use of business intelligence in various supply chain management processes will help anticipate customer demand, generate insights to act upon and optimize supply strategies.
Q5: What were the major technology challenges in ICICI and how do you plan to solve them?
A: Any rapidly growing, technology-enabled organization is bound to face challenges along the way. I think ICICI Bank has been no different.
As an example, as customer retention assumed importance, new and innovative products variants mushroomed. Often, given line of business structures these were manufactured by different teams. This led to a major challenge in maintaining a single version of customer relationships. We then worked on unifying our data sources and invested in a business intelligence framework. Some of these initiatives helped us deliver consistent, reliable and accessible information.
Another challenge that has been getting our attention is increasing server sprawl. We have embarked upon a server virtualization strategy that we believe, will help us improve server utilization, increase flexibility and reduce server footprint. This would improve manageability and reduce our TCO.