Finacle Digital Banking Suite
The problem
Finacle is Infosys Ltd. (now Edgeverve) flagship digital banking product suite implemented in financial institutions in over 100+ countries. Finacle powers end-to-end banking operations with CORE, CRM, and Online (web+mobile) banking modules. The legacy product was a Frankenstein of organic additions and customization over the years. It was extremely cumbersome to use, added enormous cognitive load on the bank employees. Implementation added overhead to customize as per local regulations and processes. This reduced efficiency for the banks and narrowed revenue margins for the enterprise. ​
Design Thinking
After understanding the primary problem space, we conducted multiple focus groups with stakeholders to understand the key issues, improvement opportunities. We mapped the iterative design thinking process with the project timeline. We also planned several user interviews, contextual inquiry sessions, and focus groups.
Frame
We used affinity mapping to organize the problems identified during our research. The massive scale of this product demanded a modular design approach over an end-to-end curated flow experience. We grouped our findings based on the problems to solve.
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Problems to solve:
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Simplify the complexity of banking processes
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Reduce the cognitive load for bank employees
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Increase efficiency for bank employees
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Enable customization at multiple levels (bank, branch, individual employee)
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Enable localization based local regulations
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Rebrand based on bank's branding
Empathize
Our user research was targeted at 3 user groups:​
Our user research strategy combined diary studies, contextual inquiry, focus groups.
Bank: we observed typical branch employees servicing customers. During the process we noted pain points, observations and clarification. This was usually followed with an interview with the employee to get further understanding.
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Business: we interviewed the key business stakeholders individually to understand their vision and roadmap. After synthesizing the understanding from each interview, we presented the finding in a focus group to assign priority and identify dependency.
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Engineering: we interviewed the architects and engineering team leads to understand the current architecture and service design. We also brainstormed how the future solutions can be based a modular architecture.
Ideate
Our solution strategy involved designing a global business process for the different functions. Identify and create unique re-usable groups of functional elements. Join the groups in a sequence to form customized business process. Validate with business and engineering.
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We used rapid prototyping technique to envision future experience. We validated the flow and screens with the same stakeholders which we had interviewed. We set the following experience goals:
Define
We created a LEGO experience of modular components.
Each function is constructed by grouping the required fields/field groups together. If a bank doesn't need a field group the same can be turned-off for their implementation.
Functions can be attached in a sequence to form a business process.
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Banks can configure the business process by attaching these functions in the desired sequence.
In the above example, Customer Authentication function is created using fields for searching by Customer ID, Name, Account. Similarly other functions like Balance Inquiry, Cash Withdrawal are created using respective relevant fields.
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Once these functions are created, they can be combined into a business process. System can suggest some functions (e.g. Print Receipt) after completing a business process flow.
Solution Benefits:
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Designed a modular experience system that converted 2500+ data intensive, cognitive heavy screens into predictable, modern and responsive experience.
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Created a seamless omni-channel experience across branch, online and mobile channels for end users.
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Reduced task completion time by over 30% resulting in increase of customer handling rate for branch employees.
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Brought down the 3+ months of implementation timeline to half.