)
While micro-finance firm Janalakshmi Financial Services (JFS) has entered into a six-year transformational pact with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to revamp its business and technology capabilities, Ramesh Ramanathan, chairman of Jana Group said that an earlier agreement with Accenture will not be impacted by the same.
In October 2013, JFS had entered into a five-year agreement with Accenture for business process outsourcing and information technology (IT) services designed to help it rapidly scale up operations to deliver micro-loans. Under the agreement, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)-listed Accenture is responsible for managing JFS's customer and account master data and providing processing, reconciliation and reporting services as part of their customer on-boarding and processing operations.
Accenture is also responsible for managing JFS's application platform, including its core banking system, customer relationship management software, and employee portal and website.
"The canvas of the Accenture partnership has remained intact to what we had originally initiated," Ramanathan said. "The RFP (request for proposals) that we had put out for this (business transformation) partnership was in some sense connected to Accenture partnership continuing to exist on standalone basis."
Both IBM and Accenture will work together to define 'technology work and processes work', Ramanathan said with IBM handling the former while Accenture will work on the latter. "They'll have to figure that out, but they have done that for many clients," Ramanathan said.
JFS is a provider of micro-finance services to low-income women in India. The company currently has 154 branches across 81 locations in the country, serving over 1.5 million customers. The company is adding close to 0.1 million new customers each month
Under the six-year partnership with IBM, JFS will utilise the technology major's business consulting expertise and capabilities in new technologies, such as, big data, analytics, cloud and mobility, to expand its plans and vision to deliver affordable financial services to individuals and enterprises across India.
"IBM will provide JFS with an end-to-end technology platform along with mobile and analytics based solutions which will gather and harness customer information as well as digitise and automate the organisation's processes," IBM said in a statement. "IBM will strengthen the existing JFS payment platform based on these same insights, which will enable them to create and offer an ongoing set of new payment products for its customers."
IBM will also use analytics to integrate JFS's geo-spatial insights with credit-decisions process to help improve distribution and collection model. IBM will also help JFS's underlying infrastructure to support multiple deployment options and ensure fully integrated services management.
Ramanathan added that the micro-financing firm is not looking to consolidate its technology vendors.
"We are not contemplating that (switching to a single technology vendor). We are delighted with Accenture as our partner," he said. "I want to clarify that they (Accenture) bring a tremendous amount of value to us. The contract that IBM has bagged was a separate procurement and so we went ahead with a separate due diligence process and we arrived at where we are."
