Shivam MathurMasarrat Jamil

Company Profile

In year 2000 and later when anytime, anywhere banking came to our country, ICICI Bank had to move away from the branch-centric model and make its services available nationwide. The solution was to centralize its applications.

Legacy systems: The traditional systems at ICICI Bank were very centric to the branch.For example a server at New Delhi was specific to the branch in that city; the ATMs were standalone catering only to the city branch. The banking transactions were thus limited to the respective branch offices as customer data was not available in other branches. This made banking a limited service and very branch specific. ICICI realized the importance of offering nationwide banking but this would be possible only by having a centralized data repository.

Infosys is one of technology partner for ICICI Bank which game the assistance to implement Finacle for handling all the banking activities

Bill Desk for online payments SYBASE(Business Intelligence, Database

Management Information System, Mobile Enterprise Solutions)

SAS(Business Analytics Software and Services)

The shiftThe basic network was set up for providing the e-

mailfacility, but none of the applications were linked to

the network. The network comprised of a mix of serversrunning different applications at various branches of

the bank. With growing business and rapidly increasing accounts, the company found it extremely difficult

to administer and manage the system.

What ICICI was looking for was a robust network, a design with a mix of VSATs(Very small aperture terminal), leased-lines, radio-links and ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network)was selected. A mixed design was selected because of the disparate locations of the group across the country.

The network follows a hub and spoke architecture—a mix of VSATs, leased lines, ISDN and radio links. It has around 800 leased lines, about 600 VSATs, approximately 800 ISDN lines and multiple 34 Mbps lines.

The network supports the ICICI group offices, banks, branches, and over 1000 ATMs. There is a primary site from where spokes go out to the regional branches and the other offices. The secondary site has the disaster recovery system.

There are around eight hub locations, which have 3, 4 or 8 Mbps lines as per the requirements for connecting to the branch and regional offices.

One of the biggest challenges for Finacle was ensuring straight through processing (STP) of most of the financial transactions.

Finacle needed to seamlessly integrate with multiple applications such as credit cards, mutual funds, brokerage, call center and data warehousing systems. Another key challenge was managing transaction volumes.

With Finacle, the bank currently has the ability to process 0.27 million cheques per day and manage 7000 concurrent users.

Finacle – a core banking and universal banking solution from Infosys

The network follows a hub and spoke architecture—a mix of VSATs (Very small aperture terminal) , leased lines, ISDN and radio links. It has around 800 leased lines, about 600 VSATs, approximately 800 ISDN lines and multiple 34 Mbps lines.

UNIX is the preferred OS for most of the hardware while most of the databases use

Oracle with a few on Sybase and MS SQL.

Certain recommendations are as follows: The ICICI VSAT network is large, with almost a

thousand nodes. Keeping it going turned out to be an even bigger challenge for the group. The entire network is monitored from one center. Any error in the network at any point is rectified in a short span of time and the system is up and running with minimum downtime. ICICI must have a proper control and look over this issue

ICICI Bank’s name comes in various controversies than any other bank mainly the method of recovery. This may hinder the BPR process further in future if the bank gets into any type of legal case. To avoid this ICICI Bank must follow the rules and regulations.