Godrej Housing Finance, the latest entity from one of India’s largest conglomerates, Godrej Group, brings the value ecosystem of innovation, sustainability, and excellence to the retail financial service sector. The business aims to offer customer-centric solutions in housing finance with products such as Home Loans and Loan Against Property.

Godrej Housing Finance has a customer-centric approach, and its product offerings are led by a three-pillar strategy, i.e. flexibility (customisation of payments and repayments), affordability (higher eligibility and competitive pricing), and personalisation (tailormade loan offerings). These pillars, backed by a segmented understanding of consumer needs, provide the organisation with the framework to do business in a fair, fast, and flexible manner.

Project scope: Implementing a flexible, next-gen lending system.

While Godrej Housing Finance works towards reimagining the sector with its customised products and services, the primary objective is to provide these offerings in a remarkably low turn-around time. To this end, the company began an exhaustive search for the right lending system that would match the flexibility needs of its new-age customers, and the ever-changing market dynamics, regulatory and compliance requirements. After a thorough evaluation process, Godrej Housing Finance selected the lending product of Pennant Technologies — pennApps Lending Factory (PLF) – for the core system along with various custom solutions for the Instant Sanction Journey and customer service needs.

The decision by Godrej Housing Finance to invest in a next-generation lending platform was not only an operational requirement but also a business imperative to develop a stronghold in the marketplace. According to Jyothirlatha B, CTO, Godrej Housing Finance, “The Godrej Housing Finance team selected Pennant Technologies based on the suitability and compatibility of the solutions. The required parameters set by the team were in line with Pennant Technologies’ offerings. Hence, the team went ahead with this provider.”

The primary focus of Godrej Housing Finance was to build the right platform for driving market development, business growth, and enabling best-in-class digital customer experiences. In addition to bringing strong product architecture and functionality, Pennant Technologies was also selected for its singular focus on delivering right-fit, future-ready products to the banking and financial services industry and extensive experience in implementing lending systems for leading Indian Non-Banking Finance Companies.

Implementation: Re-modelling project management for the right business outcomes

With the initial launch plan with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), the project kicked off in early 2020. However, pandemic-induced lockdowns and the subsequent delay in securing regulatory approvals led to the postponement of the launch of the MVP solution slated for April 2020 release. Ultimately, the product implementation was completed in November 2020.

The team from Godrej Housing Finance and Pennant Technologies, totalling 40 members including business analysts, architects, programmers, and other resources, utilised the additional six months (April-October) to develop and deliver the complete product. With the implementation of the lending system, Godrej Housing Finance launched its business operations in India in November 2020. During this period, the Godrej Housing Finance team, with the support of Pennant Technologies were able to build a mature system and enhance the application’s version.

“The scope of the earlier defined Minimum Defined Product (MVP) was enhanced with multiple features that improved productivity and reduced number of errors in production. Pennant Technologies product benefited Godrej Housing Finance with flexible product configurations and reduced dependency. This, in turn, has helped Godrej Housing Finance with improved agility and turn-around time of products.” – Jyothirlatha B, CTO, Godrej Housing Finance.

Pennant Technologies’ pennApps Lending factory (PLF) version 5.2 was implemented for Godrej Housing Finance with all the product modules, including the loan origination system (LOS), loan management system (LMS), collections, etc. Various interfaces to bank statement analysis, bureau, rule engine, digital document storage, and GL accounting system running in the cloud environment were made available as part of the complete lending system. All the product modules, including those for customer onboarding and Instant Sanction Journey, were part of the complete lending platform.

Godrej Housing Finance now has the key to a secure and seamless lending management operation with the PLF solution. PLF places the customer at the forefront of development and harnesses the right technologies to support lending. The product’s componentised approach, leveraging highly flexible loan origination and loan management capabilities, enables Godrej Housing Finance to operate with exceptional speed and agility. Additionally, PLF’s rule-based workflows and functional factories bring together people and the information required to sustain efficiency and accuracy throughout the entire lifecycle of a case.

The project involved a medium level of customisation. There were few changes to the product as the customisations were mainly for integration with other systems to improve operational effectiveness.

Challenges faced: Covid-19 pandemic influenced impact

With the Godrej Group entering the housing finance market through the launch of Godrej Housing Finance, the project implementation was a Greenfield implementation and other systems like DMS, ERP, and HRMS.

The project implementation and timelines were significantly impacted by Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the functioning of businesses, markets, and governments across the globe severely affected. Covid-induced lockdowns last year affected the travel and onsite functioning of teams. Some of the challenges that this project faced, which Godrej Housing Finance and Pennant Technologies effectively managed included:

• Ensuring the health and safety of employees.
• Navigating a complex set of uncertainties such as managing project teams working from home in a crisis, communication, and collaboration-related issues, among others.
• Building a technology environment for project teams to work from home or in remote environments.
• Market de-growth challenges arising due to the lockdown impacting the home loans market growth.

The project team, comprising Godrej Housing Finance and Pennant Technologies team members, effectively mitigated the risks arising out of the pandemic by quickly re-modelling its operations:

• Moving to remote and virtual working for its team by leveraging the 24/7 IT infrastructure support such as VPN connectivity, digital collaboration, etc.
• Bringing in greater flexibility and readiness in its delivery model, process, and operation by adopting a fail-safe BCP strategy, thereby effectively addressing evolving risks and resiliency issues.
• Leveraging its fully automated and secure systems for product development.

Benefits Achieved: Delivering innovative and personalised loan offerings to borrowers.

Pennant Technologies’ pennApps Lending Factory (PLF) product provided Godrej Housing Finance a high degree of flexibility powered by its functional factories and execution engines, which further helped in streamlining operations and ensuring better visibility and transparency of the process. PLF enabled Godrej Housing Finance to launch innovative and customised product offerings to effectively meet the ever-changing customer needs of personalisation and dynamic market changes without worrying much about system constraints. The cloud-ready solution helped Godrej Housing Finance to quickly go for cloud enablement based on business and market needs.

With the implementation of Pennant Technologies’ pennApps Lending Factory, Godrej Housing Finance was able to realise many business benefits:

• Reduction of paperwork with high-level of process automation.
• Completely optimised and streamlined workflow that offers better control.
• Customer alerting mechanism that provides the real-time status of applications.
• Reduced application processing turn-around-time (TAT).
• End-to-end integration and provision of interfaces enabling other systems to communicate in a controlled environment.
• Improved process efficiency with better control resulting in better risk management.
• Maximisation of productivity with more customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

The Godrej Housing Finance team is satisfied with the Pennant Technologies product implementation. Moreover, as part of the future roadmap, the team has launched a new range of products, including Design Your EMI, a flexible scheme for customers. The design has been developed along with Pennant Technologies and has been launched recently. The team plans to move towards secured and unsecured loan offerings as part of the future roadmap and has more products in the pipeline.

Key Facts

• Financial Institution: Godrej Housing Finance
• Headquarters: Mumbai, India
• Supplier: Pennant Technologies
• Solution: Lending