HSBC to scale up data tracking operations

The Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) is beefing up its data tracking infrastructure in India by rolling out largescale RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Device) traceability solutions across its departments such as home loan, mortgage, loans and credit cards sections over two years.

Since the start of the bank's RFID drive six months ago, over 100,000 tags with unique IDs have been implemented, supported by requisite handheld data retrieval devices and antennae to implement a working RFID network at the bank's Chennai locations, industry sources said.

The RFID rollout, which initially started off with a pilot of 5,000 RFID tags, has been effected in the loan and mortgage sections of the banking giant to keep track of critical customer documents.

"Earlier, where document tracking and key information retrieval would take up to two weeks, it will now take just two days for HSBC's loan and mortage departments to know the whereabouts of any file, missing or misplaced as the case may be," said Anand Surana, chief executive officer and managing director of Icegen, a Chennai-based privately held company offering RFID solutions to the Indian and US markets.

The bank is known to be actively looking at further RFID rollouts within its key loan and credit card sections.

The loans section alone holds the potential for monthly RFID tag rollouts exceeding 30 lakh, Surana said. Icegen declined to quote a specific rollout target, simply stating that lakhs of tags would be involved in the live implementation.

RFID would be crucial in tagging money bundles and segregating them by denomination types in the vital credit cards section.

Money bundles categorised by currency denominations would be easy to keep track of and retrieve in case of loss or malposition, thus making disbursements a much easier task for the bank's credit cards department.

Costing $1 each, the tags have been custom designed by Alien Technologies and Texas Instruments and encapsulated for this project. The tags employ a hybrid approach with both encoded RFID algorithm as well as conventional bar code.

This enables the supervisor to keep track of files and other inventory promptly through the bar code in the event of the RFID mechanism becoming defunct or unreadable.

RFID antennas and readers cover the entrance to the bank's storage vaults and any file that moves into or out of the vault will be recorded automatically and registered in the back-end database for processing.

"While we started off with $2.50 per tag, we could bring down per tag costs on the back of implementation volumes," Surana said. Average RFID per tag cost worldwide has dropped to $1.75 from the $3-$4 range three years ago. The tags run on the Icegen's proprietary Fangtooth RFID middleware. Icegen has so far invested over $2 million in developing Fangtooth applications which facilitate fast data interception and retrieval in RFID-based ecosystems.