With more than 100 branches, an employee count of 2,000, and more than Rs 3,700 crore disbursed, Shubham Housing Finance is a home loan and financial services provider to people in the informal sector.Backed by billionaire Azim Premji’s investment firm Premji Invest, Shubham Housing has digitised all of its core functions–be it Sales, Credit, Finance, HR, Customer Support.
The major system includes Finnone Neo Core lending platform which is extensively used by Sales, Credit, Collections, Operations, Risk control teams.
The lending system ‘Finnone Neo’ is integrated with all major systems & peripheral systems. It’s a one-stop solution for our core lending needs – right from the point the customer is on-boarded, covering disbursals, loan servicing, regulatory compliances and collections. It is integrated with various peripheral systems like Bureaus, Score cards, Rule engine, DMS, accounting system etc.
“We have a lean in-house development team which constantly innovates on the open source front. For example, we recently launched an internal MIS portal based upon React, node.Js, Spring boot which we built in-house,” Abhinav Arya, CIO, Shubham Housing said.
A digital servicing channel for customers with WhatsApp enabled notification and chatbot functionality has been introduced. This enables customers to track dues, EMIs and pay online through multiple channels, of which WhatsApp is one of them.
A cloud-based multi-channel, end-to-end employee lifecycle management system has been put in place which includes every process starting from Recruitment, Onboarding, HRIS, Travel, Performance management all the way through Exit.
The company also maintains a state-of-the-art Software defined WAN (SDWAN) system for securely connecting all its branches/ecosystem with real time monitoring capabilities.
For cyber and data security, Shubham Housing has deployed a data leakage prevention system for tracking the data at rest and in movement.
According to Arya, today’s IT workloads need to be simple, fast and flexible. He believes that cloud is the way to go for managing IT Infrastructure and applications. The right pay-as-you-go approach is the mantra for being inexpensive and innovative at the same time.
“We have worked with a number of top public cloud players. We moved our core lending workload from another leading cloud player to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and realized a 2X improvement in application performance. Last but not the least, we are finding cloud to be highly cost-effective; we are realizing around 25 percent more cost savings than before,” he added.
The company is planning to extensively leverage AI/ML for its Analytics function. Arya and the team are in the process of envisioning an enterprise-level data warehouse/data lake, with underlying ML support to help the lender leverage predictive and prescriptive analytics. “This can help us derive propensity models, complex behavioral score cards etc.”
Talking about projects in the pipeline, Arya said, “Customer engagement has always been our priority. With rapidly multiplying customer interaction touchpoints, we want to give a ‘WOW’ experience to our customers every single time, irrespective of the touchpoint. With our CRM upgrade, the new CRM layer will act as a “System of engagement” while all other core systems will complement it as “systems of records”.
Apart from that, Shubham Housing Finance is making its vendor management system more robust to provide seamless connectivity with the partners/vendors through mobile app and web channel for processing transactional requests, invoice processing and payments.
