Infosys' Finacle platform sees demand as banks move their data to cloud

Infosys core banking platform ‘Finacle’ is witnessing rising adoption of its cloud-enabled services as banks are slowly moving their non-core data to the cloud.

Finacle, which is the flagship core banking system (CBS) from Infosys’ stable, had started providing services in the cloud environment in 2016. “All the new installations that have happened in the last two years, most were in the cloud,” said Rajashekara Visweswara Maiya, global head-business consulting of Finacle.

According to the company, Australian Military Bank was the first one to move to the cloud on the Finacle platform. BDO Unibank of Philippines and Shivalik Mercantile Co-operative Bank in India are few other banks to have adopted Finacle in the cloud environment. 

Maiya, however, said lack of regulatory clarity on migration to the cloud in various geographies was delaying the cloud adoption process. “The regulatory environment with regard to the cloud is not evolved yet (for banks). However, things are slowly changing. 

For instance, India, Singapore, Hong Kong and even China have come up with data localisation guidelines,” he added.

Currently, Finacle is being used by more than 200 banks globally across 100 countries, and it is considered as one of the major platforms in the CBS space. Finacle is part of Infosys’ wholly owned subsidiary EdgeVerve, which mostly focuses on the product and platform business of the IT services major. It competes with Tata Consultancy Services’ ‘BaNCS’ and Oracle’s ‘i-Flex’ among others in the core banking platform space.  

In order to expand its service offerings as part of Finacle, Infosys has also introduced solutions on payment, trade finance and digital identity among others. 

“We have also launched our artificial intelligence-enabled solutions with ‘NIA’. We have also created applications around RPA (robotic process automation), fraud detection services and early warning system for banks to recognise NPA in the Finacle platform,” Maiya said.  

According to the company, banks are slowly adopting subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) model over licensing model. “We are giving our clients combination of revenue models comprising both licensing and subscription models,” he added.  

As IT companies face margin pressure in the services side of the business, they are increasingly looking at product and platform side of the business to generate more revenues. 

All Indian IT majors, including TCS, Infosys, HCL Technologies and Wipro, are aggressively investing in 

various platform-based solutions to win large outsourcing contracts.