Infosys Technologies (Infosys) and Hatton National Bank (HNB) today announced the successful implementation of Finacle universal banking solution across HNB's operations in Sri Lanka.
Infosys has implemented Finacle core banking, treasury and consumer e-banking solutions across 191 customer centres of the bank. HNB now operates its entire banking operations on Finacle to support over 2.8 million customers.
Hatton National Bank, which recently celebrated 120 years of service in Sri Lanka, has been a pioneer in the nation's banking industry. In accordance with its mandate, the bank wanted to focus its future expansion and offerings for growth sectors in the country. Financially enabling the society has been a key objective for the bank as well. HNB management decided to take a technology-led transformation route to make the bank more agile, flexible, and scalable to achieve its business objectives. In 2007, HNB decided to move to Finacle and the core banking replacement project was successfully completed in eleven months.
R. Theagarajah, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Hatton National Bank said, "Advanced core banking technology is vital to achieving our business growth objectives and improve customer service. We selected Finacle for its global leadership, committed investment in research and development in core banking and unmatched delivery track record. Finacle has provided higher scalability and flexibility to service our diversified retail, institutional and corporate clientele. Our new back office platform provides greater agility by consolidating disparate systems and reduced turnaround times, enables innovation to launch new offerings, and empowers staff to radically improve our customer service."
According to Haragopal Mangipudi, Global Head - Finacle, Infosys Technologies Ltd, "We are delighted to power success at Hatton National Bank in their journey of technology-led business transformation. We are committed to partnering the bank in achieving its business objectives and establishing new standards of excellence in the banking industry. The resounding success of this initiative will go a long way in Hatton National Bank gaining leadership in the region. South Asia has been a core growth engine for Finacle and we continue our focus to bring business relevant offerings and services to banks in the region."
Leveraging Finacle, the bank has been able to seamlessly integrate its services across channels and provide innovative products to customers with faster turn-around time and reduced total cost of ownership. Centralisation of all back-office functions on the platform has ensured more control over business processes and significant improvement in branch productivity. Integration with all 320 ATMs and 4618 other POS along with streamlining of channels has further enriched the customer experience. The centralised platform across the bank enabled by Finacle provides a unified customer view which has resulted in significant improvement in service levels and customer experience. A unified flexible core banking platform enables the bank to introduce sophisticated product offerings with a shorter time-to-market.
Further, Finacle treasury solution has enabled the introduction of more sophisticated products and instruments for the bank's treasury operations. The application has improved monitoring and control by effectively segregating front, middle and back office operations and tracking transaction / dealer profitability.
FinacleTM has a global footprint across 65 countries and has been acknowledged to be among the leaders in the core banking solution space by top analysts. FinacleTM has also been recognised through industry awards for its innovation and implementation capabilities, the most notable ones being The Banker Technology Award, The Asian Banker IT Implementation Award and The Banking Technology Judge's Special Award for "Innovative Use of IT".
As the local business partner of Infosys, MillenniumESP, the enterprise and service provider group of MillenniumIT, played an integral part in the Finacle implementation at HNB. MillenniumESP, with their experience in other local implementation of Finacle and in-depth understanding of local banking practices were able to provide specialist skills to support the implementation. The MillenniumESP team also provided post go-live support to the bank ensuring that the bank's business activities were uninterrupted. MillenniumIT also assisted in successfully implementing a fully fledged, state-of-the-art data centre & information systems infrastructure, the foundation of the back office platform at HNB.