Fino Payments Bank is one of the newest payments banks launched after the Indian regulator RBI granted payment bank licences to increase India’s banking penetration. The bank was incorporated on 4 April 2017 and went live with 410 branches and more than 25,000 banking points on its launch. The bank is part of Fino Paytech Limited, a technology solutions provider for institutions like banks, governments, and insurance companies.

CustomerXPs is a Bengaluru-based software product company providing financial crime risk management and customer experience management solutions to banking institutions. Founded in 2006, the company sells its financial crime risk management products under the brand name Clari5. Clari5 currently processes over 10 billion transactions, manages over 450 million accounts, and secures 4% of the global population’s banking transactions.

Project details

Fino Payments Bank wanted to boost its fraud risk management framework and address regulatory requirements. The bank required a solution that could perform real-time detection and prevention of potential fraud for financial and non-financial transactions for its Internet Banking, Mobile Banking, ATM/POS, Cards, Core Banking, and Financial Inclusion channels.

The bank chose Clari5 after an extensive selection process as its enterprise fraud management solution. The project commenced on 27 September 2019 with go-live achieved in six months on 26 March 2020. The project teams consisted of 1 member evenly split between project management, requirement gathering, development, quality analysis, and implementation.

Solution

Clari5 leverages multi-layered technology, including BI rules and AI for financial and non-financial transaction monitoring all scenarios factored with dynamic behaviour profiling for better ADR (Account Detection Rate) and minimising false-positive rates. It has real-time transaction monitoring and prevention with suspicious transaction monitoring with the flexibility to add unlimited trigger conditions and push up/down factors for risk scoring. It also boasts of integrated case management for managing the investigation of cases triggered for any reasons, i.e. suspicious transactions. A risk-based approach to fraud detection at scenario level and out-of-the-box canned reports, and Integrated Reporting and Dashboards for MIS and ongoing banking requirements are key attributes of the solution implemented at the bank.

Implementation

Clari5 leveraged its enterprise-wide project management framework, Clari5One to help achieve complete control of the Delivery Management Plan, addressing potential roadblocks and played a key role in achieving timely project delivery. Also, tele/videoconferencing tools, operational rigour, real-time communication, and continuous updates ensured project team members were completely in sync throughout the project journey.

The implementation had to deal with additional challenges brought on by Covid-19. Instead of working side-by-side with the bank’s risk management department officials, Clari5 had to rely on working in a completely remote manner to achieve the target on time and with no margin for errors. The outcome was a mindset shift in the project implementation approach.

Key takeaways from this implementation include project management hyper optimisation, infrastructure setup for application, integration approach and methodology finalisation, SIT/UAT support, and final thrust for go live. The supplier believed the project’s positive outcome provides it with a vast scope for a substantial number of future implementations in other geographies to be performed remotely.

Program governance

The supplier ensured internal alignment to understand Fino’s needs and business goals of the project and alignment between Fino and itself with a ‘project kick-off’ session for scope, key expectations, goals, dependencies, risks, key governance processes like change management, status reporting, etc. Transparency in project status, management of key dependencies, discussion on risks/issues/concerns, and weekly project status reporting were enabled and established. This provided a common view for all stakeholders on the project’s progress.

Since the project delivery had to be managed remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, individual tasks were being completed in different locations and assembled. Project management platform included inbuilt ticket and task allocation, review of task progress, task dependencies, percentage of work completed at any point in time, etc., for the project manager to have a clear view of the project status.

Project impact

The bank was satisfied with the solution implementation with the Clari5 solution processing transactions of more than 1.7 million customers, 400+ branches, and 200,000 banking points. The bank appreciated the seamless integration with its business-critical Financial Inclusion channel. The expedited investigation capability based on the risk level of fraudulent transactions with integrated case management capability and measuring fraud risk management efficacy with reports and dashboards were necessary. The fact that the solution complied with the regulator’s guidelines for implementing capability for early detection/reporting of fraud was a key positive outcome for the bank.

IBSI view

The Fino Payments Bank EFM project is a success story of a full-fledged mission-critical enterprise-level fraud risk management solution going live and catering to all of the bank’s requirements. The fact that it was managed and implemented remotely is a testament to the supplier’s capability.

KEY FACTS

Bank: Fino Payments Bank
Bank Headquarters: India
Solution partner: CustomerXPS
Solution: Clari5
Timeline: 6 months