EbixCash Financial Technologies deploys a lending suite for Zanaco

EbixCash Financial Technologies deploys a lending suite for Zanaco

January 12, 2023

Overview

Established in 1969 to meet the financial demands of the Zambian economy, Zambia National Commercial Bank Plc (ZANACO) has grown to become one of the top banks in the country. The Bank is regarded as “citizen owned” because Zambians own a majority of its shares. The bank serves over 978,000 customers in the Personal, Corporate, Government, SME, and Agriculture sectors.

EbixCash Financial Technologies is a part of EbixCash, a global Fintech solution provider. It offers a suite of products and technology solutions for Banking & Finance, Telecom and Insurance Industries which support clients in 60+ countries. EbixCash Financial Technologies has delivery & support centres in India at Mumbai, Pune, and Chennai.

The project involved the end-to-end implementation of a complete lending suite which included the origination processes for retail and corporate loans, a loan management system, collateral management system, and collection processes.

Implementation Process

The project plan was prepared after mutual discussion and agreement between both parties. Weekly status/progress was published to all the stakeholders in Zanaco and a weekly status call was scheduled to track progress.

Internally, all project tasks were planned and tracked in Jira as a part of an agile methodology. Daily stand-up for task/issues discussion & planning is done through daily scrum meetings, which enabled synergy between the team to achieve targets faster and in a more effective manner. SVN management was done periodically, and sprints were released fortnightly to the product assurance team for testing. The product assurance team was involved in the testing and releasing of the components to User Acceptance Testing. The quality management team was involved from the start of the project to monitor processes.

Migration of data was achieved through an iterative process. Multiple iterations were performed to maintain data sanctity and usability. The time gap between India and Zambia was managed such that offshore support was provided to the client as per their requirement of business hours. Other complexities involved were integration with the host and third-party systems for smooth processing of data between the systems, effective communication with the client at various levels, and adherence to the timelines along with the management of customization requests.

Keeping various systems and corresponding requirements in mind, functional specifications documents and technical documents were prepared based on standard templates. These were reviewed internally and with the client periodically to adapt to any changes or new requirements.

Benefits Achieved

Improvement in efficiency was achieved through automation of manual processes, streamlining of the standard workflows across the organization, and adoption of the best market practices. Personal dependency was also reduced with the implementation of the new system, as the standard processes were adopted in workflows, resulting in ease of maintaining the configuration data.

Conclusion

In this way, the Implementation of an end-to-end lending suite was carried out, while integrating with the bank’s host systems and other third-party systems for seamless processing. With many customization requests and changing requirements, the project was delivered within the stipulated timelines for various milestones of the project.

Key Facts