Accenture to Help AU Financiers Offer Digital Banking to Indian SMEs

Accenture will help AU Financiers (AuF) set up as a small finance bank (SFB) to provide retail lending, small- and medium-enterprise agriculture product financing and savings products to Indian consumers. AuF, a Jaipur-based, non-banking finance company, was one of 10 companies granted an in-principle approval for an SFB license by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in September 2015.

Accenture will help AuF realize its vision of creating a differentiated, customer-centric bank that emphasizes its mobile digital capabilities as a core feature of its banking services. “As a small finance bank with a digital-first approach, our aim is to offer an enhanced customer experience by capturing customer imagination through our products offering and services levels,” said Sanjay Agarwal, MD, Au Financiers. “We worked closely with Accenture to develop the strategy and overall roadmap for our transition into a small finance bank, and look forward to providing state of the art banking services that combine the best of an online and offline experience to our customers.”

“Many of the 233 million unbanked population are reliant on smart phones that they could be using for banking services if such services were more readily available to them,” said Rishi Aurora, managing director, Accenture financial services, India. “Many banks would like to offer more services but don’t have digital technologies that cost-effectively enables more financial inclusion, or a strong backbone of internal processes. We look forward to helping AuF build a solid foundation from which to extend such services.”

Accenture will customize, integrate and support AuF’s new core banking platform and enterprise resource planning software (ERP) licensed from other third parties by AUF. The core banking platform, with online and mobile banking digital capabilities, will enable AuF’s customers to operate their accounts from anywhere in India. The ERP software will help AuF optimize its business operations, control work process flows across internal departments, and effectively manage reporting needs.  Accenture will also implement an analytics-rich customer resource management (CRM) solution to help AuF manage customer records and relationships, and create cross sell and upsell opportunities. Accenture will also work on Digi-Bank model for Au Bank.

This new contract follows a management and technology consulting services agreement the two companies signed in April. Accenture helped AuF conceptualize and construct its product offerings and create the blueprint for an IT architecture that meets its long-term requirement to provide scalability and depth of offerings.

Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.