Overview

The First Agro-Industrial Rural Bank, Inc., commonly known as FairBank, started its commercial operations in 1999. Headquartered in Cebu, Philippines, its product portfolio includes deposits, loans, and microinsurance. Its vision is to be the financial institution of choice in the areas of its operations and to thereby promote financial inclusion in the region.

Founded in 2016, Bank-Genie is a Singapore-based FinTech company. Through its Genie-Transformation Suite of Products, it focuses on supporting digital transformation at banks and financial institutions. It allows commercial banks to serve their clients while also enabling MFIs to reach the underserved and unserved population.

FairBank set out several objectives including the setting of a customer-centric Standard Operating Model for Microfinance. The business model required the maximum outreach to customers in remote locations and the need to increase the productivity and value of their loan officers and field agents. At times, its customers had to commute to another island just to perform simple banking transactions, which was a waste of time and incurred additional expenses. Many business processes including customer authentication were manual, cumbersome and time-consuming. Compounding these issues was the unavailability of a proper 3G/4G network for reliable data transmission and connectivity which posed the risk of latency in data synchronization.

The primary challenge was to interface with multiple standalone implementations of its legacy in-house core banking system. Fairbank selected Bank-Genie’s Genie-Branch which provided a wide range of branchless banking features and functionalities including Loan Origination, Disbursals, Collections, Repayments, Cash Deposits, Credit Scoring, Commission Calculations, Enquiry, Mini-statement.

Implementation Process

Bank-Genie’s experiences from other markets and customers were leveraged to bring the best-of-breed products, services, and processes to FairBank. The program was split into two phases to enable FairBank to seamlessly move from manual to digital. In terms of man days, the entire program was delivered within a 30-day elapsed time window.

The best practices adopted were to take on the existing solution “As Is” with minimal tweaking to monetize FairBank’s investment as quickly as possible.

The transition to Genie-Branch was a 70-80% straight fit with only 20-30% enhancement effort to adapt to local regulations and processes. Stakeholders comprised of senior officials at both ends from ICT, risk, operations, and marketing, with weekly reviews at the project execution level and periodic senior stakeholder reviews that guided the operational teams on contentious issues that could threaten program delivery.

The program was divided into separate work-streams – eKYC-Account Opening, Branch and Branchless Operations, and Interfaces. Each workstream was driven by a different team and centrally governed by a key driver at each end. Scope was determined centrally to eliminate duplication and overlaps, whereas project plans for each workstream were decided by the concerned teams. The individual plans were then centrally agreed for purposes of optimization and prioritization.

All change requests were handled via a toll-gate committee consisting of representatives from FairBank and Bank-Genie. The development, delivery and review were handled by a combination of Waterfall, Agile and Scrum as a single approach would not have worked for a program this complex. Monthly reports were sent to senior stakeholders for reporting and guidance and the SWG – Stakeholder Working Group was consulted when needed.

Benefits Achieved

Genie-Branch serves as a Branch and Branchless Solution that can be deployed within existing branches or can create digital branches at any locations, thus increasing reach and doing business at the customer’s doorstep. The app provides all possible features and functions offered by brick-and-mortar branches. The solution serves retail/commercial banks and microfinance institutions.

Security is managed via various means including biometric, QR, customer ID, OTP, debit cards, etc. This also supports complete Agency Banking needs that serve the financial inclusion objectives well, at the lowest possible cost of service and operations. The use of dashboards, alerts, and reporting provide the bells and whistles to complement the rich set of features. Customer satisfaction improved as “the last-mile” access issues were resolved, and the bank journey became much more seamless and smoother for customers.

Other benefits include:

• Increased staff efficiency by 70%
• Increase in caseloads per officer from 100 to 900 accounts.

Conclusion

Bank-Genie was hence able to deploy a branch and branchless solution for FairBank, helping to increase accessibility for customers, and provide a host of banking services, such as loan origination, credit scoring, disbursals, and collections.

Key Facts

• Bank: First Agro-Industrial Rural Bank (FAIR Bank)
• Headquarters: Philippines
• Vendor: Bank-Genie
• Solution: Genie-Branch