Infosys targets small banks with cloud software

Infosys, which has started offering core banking solutions on the cloud is targeting smaller lenders with offers of fee-based product usage.

Haragopal Mangipudi, senior VP and global head of Finacle at Infosys, said the company was working with some cooperative banks on this and also looking at the African market for the product.

Finacle on the cloud would allow smaller banks lacking the required resources to offer their customers the same kind of anytime anywhere banking service offered by new generation banks. Also, they would be able to use multiple channels like ATMs, internet and mobile for extending banking services without making large investments. The IT giant has also implemented Finacle in 10,000 regional rural banks (RRBs). However, in case of RRBs, although the core banking solution was not on the cloud it was hosted by the sponsor bank.

According to Hargopal, although most Indian banks had put in place a core banking solution, a replacement demand existed considering that Finacle was now in its 10th version. The software has been upgraded over the years so that many of the add-on features like customer relationship management are part of the main product.

There was also significant international potential considering that banks in US had not yet migrated to a core banking solution, he said, adding, that Asia Pacific was an early adopter as the banks leapfrogged directly to a core banking system.

Banks in the US still ran on disparate system with spaghetti structures created as a result of upgrading legacy software over the years, and they were thinking on lines of migration due to pressure for compliance, which was very high, he pointed out.