IBM Enters Into 6-year Agreement With Janalakshmi Financial Services

Bangalore: IBM on Tuesday announced that it has entered into a six-year agreement with India-based micro finance provider Janalakshmi Financial Services (JFS) to transform its business and technology capabilities.

The company, however, did not reveal the financial aspect of the deal.

Utilizing IBM's business consulting expertise combined with the big data and analytics, cloud and mobile capabilities, the company will strive to expand on its plans and vision to deliver affordable financial services to individuals and enterprises across India, the officials said.

JFS provides innovative solutions for the urban under-banked and for the untapped nano and micro enterprise segment in India.

"...this particular relationship I think allows us to exercise an industry transformation which is such a big part of a national agenda, as well as the corporation we are working with....," IBM India managing director Vanitha Narayanan told reporters in Bangalore.

"We are pleased to join JFS in its journey to help drive financial inclusion across India, empowering citizens with access to financial services that improves financial stabality and quality of life," she said.

"By leveraging leading Big Data, analytics and mobility solutions, JFS will be able to use the power of technology to differentiate and drive profitability, which is critical to its expansion and growth."

She said that through this engagement, IBM will be able to help JFS make critical strides in achieving business transformation, improve service delivery and increasing customer satisfaction.

IBM will provide JFS with an end-to-end technology platform along with mobile and analytics based solutions which will gather and harness customer information as well as digitise and automate the organisation's processes.

IBM will strengthen the existing JFS payment platform based on these same insights which will enable them to create and offer an ongoing set of new payment products for its customers, company officials said.

In addition, IBM will use advanced anylatics capabilities that integrate JFS's geo-spatial insights with credit-decisions process to help improve distribution and collection models.

IBM cloud solutions will also help the company underlying infrastructure to support multiple deployment options and ensure fully integrated service management.

"As we continue to expand, we need a strategic partner like IBM with proven domain experience in the financial sector. IBM's established credentials in successfully driving organisational transformations both globally and in India were key to our decision to work together," Jana Group chairman Ramesh Ramanathan said.

He said IBM came up with an innovative commercial model that will provide a direct connection between business performance and IT costs, "while enabling us to scale operations and build an agile technology environment".

JFS officials said the company has an aggressive expansion plan to increase its foot print from 154 branches and 3 million accounts to 1,400 branches serving over 20 million accounts by 2020.

The solutions also include IBM MobileFirst portfolio to support JFS's sales force to conduct door-to-door marketing and customer service activities.