Fino Payments Bank is one of the newer payments banks launched after the Indian regulator RBI granted payment bank licenses to increase the banking penetration in India. The bank was incorporated on 4^th April 2017 and went live with 410 branches and more than 25,000 banking points on the day of its launch. The bank is part of the parent company 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 software product under the brand name Clari5. The company claims, Clari5 currently processes over 10billion 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 their 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 started 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 with all scenarios factored with dynamic behavior profiling for better ADR (Account Detection Rate) and minimizing 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 of the reasons, i.e. suspicious transactions. A risk-based approach to fraud detection at scenario level and out-of-the-box canned reports along with Integrated Reporting and Dashboards for MIS and ongoing banking requirements are a key attribute of the solution implemented at the bank.

Implementation:

Clari5’s leveraged its enterprise-wide project management framework, Clari5One to help achieve complete control of the Delivery Management Plan and addressing potential roadblocks and played a key role in achieving timely project delivery. Also, tele/videoconferencing tools, operational rigor, 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 fraud 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 optimization, infrastructure setup for application, integration approach and methodology finalization, SIT/UAT support, and final thrust for go live. The supplier believed the positive outcome for this project provides them 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 was enabled and established by the weekly project status reporting. This provided a common view of all stakeholders on the project’s progress.

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

Project Impact:

The bank was satisfied with the solution implementation with the Clari5 solution processing transactions of over 1.7 mn + customers, 400+ branches, and 200,000 banking points. The bank appreciated the seamless integration with the bank’s business-critical Financial Inclusion channel. The expedited investigation capability based on the risk level of fraudulent transactions with integrated case management capability and the ability to measure FRM initiative efficacy with reports and dashboards were important for the bank. 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