Accenture to Help AU Financiers Offer Digital Banking

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 the 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 MD Au Financiers, Sanjay Agarwal.

"Many of the 233 million un-banked population are reliant on smart phones that they could be using for banking services if such services were more readily available to them," said MD Accenture financial services India, Rishi Aurora.

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.

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations.