Case study: Mobile Solution for Agent Banking
Background
Adarsh Credit Co-Operative Society started its operations in 1999 as a cooperative society primarily serving farmers in Rajasthan, India. Adarsh is
among India’s leading credit co-operative societies in terms of branch
network, agent strength and deposit base. It operates in 15 states
through over 90,000 agents and 700+ branches.
Adarsh Credit provides saving products to cater to the needs of its
members including: fixed deposits, recurring deposit and daily deposit
products. To provide services to its members Adarsh has created network of agents serve the
customers at their door step. The agents travel throughout rural, semi-urban and urban areas to
meet the customers and collect deposits. The rural environment creates travel challenges and
agents are therefore not able to return to the office every day. Many Adarsh agents are full time
and are constantly in field for collections, opening new deposit accounts and servicing the
customers daily.
Challenges with current agent tools
Currently the agents have two means of handling deposit collection:
1. Carry a point-of-sale (POS) machine with them and input the deposit transactions in offline
mode (given lack of communication channel). When they return to the office, they transfer
the data from the POS to the core-banking system (CBS). Importantly, given the bulky POS
machine, agents can be easily identified resulting in a risk of theft.
2. Pen and paper. Agents write down the client information and deposit amount in a paper
book. When they return to the office, the transaction details are entered manually into the
bank’s systems. This approach has significant risk of error, data loss and data entry
inefficiency.
Both approaches require the agents to return from the field daily to update the bank’s systems.
For the banks customers, this creates a significant and worrisome delay before receiving an SMS
confirmation of deposit.
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Leapfrogging to the future
To solve these problems and increase its efficiency, Adarsh has rolledout a new mobile solution for their agents powered by Mistral Mobile.
Now the agents use their mobile phones to take deposits, handle loans
and provide payment & customer services. Agents no longer need a
POS machine and all the deposit-taking can be handled instantly while
they are still with the customers. Even in rural areas without mobile
data availability, the Mistral Mobile solution means transactions can be
completed instantly and securely.
As a result, customer accounts always reflect the true deposit status.
With the new Adarsh Credit mobile solution, agents collect cash from
the customer and use the mobile application to enter the customer
details. The mobile solution immediately processes the collection and updates the bank’s systems.
At the same time, the customer receives a notification SMS stating the new account balance. If the
customer has any questions, the agent can also immediately submit those to the customer
services helpdesk using the application.
Adarsh Credit mobile solution on
Android device
The future has arrived for agents
Laxman Singh Ranawat is an advisor (an agent) with the Adarsh
Sheoganj branch. Sheoganj is a town in the Sirohi district with a
population of fewer than 30,000 inhabitants. Sheoganj has a
regional market for sweets, vegetables, wedding cloths and
groceries.
Laxman Singh has been working as an Adarsh advisor for over
fourteen years during which time he has created a customer base
of small businesses in the town and rural area around his village.
In the morning Laxman Singh visits the local wholesale vegetable
market called ”SabjiMandi” and in the afternoon the main
commercial market area of the town called Bazar.
Advisor doing the collection from a
customer
He starts his day early in the morning and follows a daily routine to visit his customers for
collections, customer services and sale of new products. Along with his bag and food box, he
carries two mobile phones with him. One phone is for personal communication and a second
phone for his business. The second phone is an entry-level Android phone with the Adarsh Credit
mobile application installed, which he uses in his native language Hindi.
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He leaves from his home in a nearby village around
0800 on his motorcycle and starts collection
activities from the village grocery shops and tea
stalls. Thereafter he proceeds to town and
SabjiMandi. By this time, wholesale trades are
taking place over in SabjiMandi and traders are
available for collections.
SabjiMandi market
He parks his motorcycle and then visits the shops
and counters of wholesale commission agents and
traders. Generally he meets 30-40 customers daily
in the SabjiMandi and uses his Adarsh Credit
mobile application to post collections and resolve
customer queries.
He reaches the Adarsh Credit branch by 1100 and spends 3- 4 hours for cash settlement,
submitting forms for membership, schemes, premature withdrawal, loans and meeting branch
officers.
His 2nd round of collections and field work starts in the afternoon. To cover his 100+ customers,
he walks around 5 km on roads, streets and lanes of the market for 4 -5 hours daily.
The Modern Customer Servicing Process
Laxman Singh is a veteran Adarsh agent and has used many solutions introduced by Adarsh to
facilitate agents’ work.
He feels proud to witness the process and technology advancements in
agent banking. Before the mobile agent banking solution, he was using
a POS machine for collections.
When asked about his views about the new mobile solution, he says
“Transactions happen immediately, customer gets instant confirmation
and I can carry all the tools in my pocket. Before I had to carry a heavy
POS machine hanging on my waist belt. When I enter a transaction on
mobile, many customers do not believe that I am doing banking on
Hindi language UI
smoothening
work for
mobile and when they started getting SMS confirmations, they felt
advisors
confident and happy with this solution. Now I also log their customer
services issues immediately with the mobile application. It saves my time in the branch that I used
to spend to upload collections from POS. Now collections are posted directly from the field and I
just need to deposit the total collected cash in my collection account.”
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Conclusions
The Mistral Mobile solution has enabled Adarsh Credit to realize cost savings and increase its
operational efficiency:
1. Online Everywhere: the majority of Adarsh agents work in semi-urban and rural areas
where mobile data services are not regularly available. Even when data service is not
available, the solution still completes the transaction. It enables Adarsh agents to collect
and transact everywhere.
2. Branch Operations Optimization: Transactions are posted online into the core banking
system in real-time as the collection entry is made. It saves manual efforts required at the
branch offices and results in savings in man power and infrastructure expense.
3. Better Float Management: Previously there were long gaps between cash collection by the
Adarsh agent and actual deposits into customer accounts at a Adarsh branch office. After
enabling online field transactions with Mistral Mobile’s applications, Adarsh branch officers
always know how much cash is carried by an Agent. This has allowed Adarsh to put
improved controls on the amount of cash held to improve float management and reduce
the risk of theft.
4. Increased Customer Confidence: Money is deposited into the customer’s account at the
same moment that the cash is collected and the customer is informed by SMS immediately
thereafter. It provides security and confidence to the customers to do transactions with
the Adarsh agents.
5. Additional Financial Services: With the availability of an online mobile agent management
platform, Adarsh is planning to expand its offering of financial services products to its
members.
Governments and regulators are fueling the adoption of agent-based financial services models, as
a means of bringing financial inclusion to underserved populations. With their new mobile
approach, Adarsh is leading the way to making financial services simple and accessible for their
customers by empowering their agents through innovative mobile solutions.
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Interview with Himanshu Shah, CTO, Adarsh Credit
1. Please tell us about Adarsh's financial inclusion program in general
Financial inclusion is the first and foremost goal of Adarsh. Adarsh is the largest credit cooperative
in India serving the bottom of the pyramid and we have about 100000 agents serving a customer
base of 1000000.
2. How does the mobile-based agent banking fit into Adarsh's strategy?
Mobile is clearly the best way for the agents to service the customers as it enables reaching all the
rural poor as well. All the agents anyway have mobiles, and customers as well.
3. Could you tell a bit more about the solution you are now using?
Our agent banking solution is using the SAP as the backend processing system and Mistral
Mobile’s m-Agent™ Banking Suite as the mobile frontend, which includes all the mobile
applications and gateway to connect to the SAP backend. There is also good video describing the
approach and showing Mistral applications which are front-ending the SAP system
(http://youtu.be/MYQoJn7soEY)
4. What was the selection criteria used to choose the m-Agent™ Banking Suite from Mistral
Mobile?
We evaluated multiple vendors and after careful analysis found out that revenue opportunity and
the total cost of ownership were both significantly better than with alternative solutions. On some
of the key capabilities, the ability to update the applications remotely means we can evolve and
add new services to our customers, without any change request costs. Also the solution does not
need mobile data – this is a key thing for being able to serve the customers in rural areas.
5. How many of your agents are using the solution currently, and what were they using before?
Before the agents were using clunky POS machines which couldn’t be updated, were expensive
and heavy (as agents are doing rounds on foot). And some of the agents were using pen and paper
which was totally inefficient and required agents to report back at the branch office at the end of
the day and all data to be entered manually into the system. We started off with a pilot which has
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been very successful, both our agents and customers are very happy. Currently we are rolling out
the solution to all of our 100000 agents.
6. What do you like most about the mobile solution?
First, it’s mobile operator independent--our agents can use whatever phone they have with
whatever SIM card they're using. Secondly, the menu and icons makes it super easy to train
agents and use, most don't require much training at all, everything is very intuitive. Some of the
agents are doing over 200 trx per day so this is extremely important. Also as the applications are
fully localized to be in Hindi language it makes the usage natural for the agents. Finally, there are
no security concerns and we are very pleased to with the security model used.
7. What problems or reliability issues have you encountered with the solution?
We have experienced none, applications and the solution are very robust.
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About Mistral Mobile
Mistral Mobile’s mobile solutions are used by banks, financial services companies and payment
service providers. Mistral Mobile’s Money Mobility Suite™ is designed and built based on
experience in mobile technologies with deep knowledge of how mobile financial services operate,
and is the basis for Mistral Mobile’s solutions for the financial services industry, ranging from
mobile banking and agent-based services to retail payment acceptance solutions. Money Mobility
Suite™ can work with any type of financial service to make it mobile.
To learn more about the power of mobile solutions, watch an introductory video at
www.vimeo.com/MistralMobile/intro, visit www.MistralMobile.com or contact our sales
department at [email protected]
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