Overview

HDFC Bank was incorporated in August 1994 and is among the top 3 banks in the Indian private sector and caters to a wide range of banking services including commercial and investment banking on the wholesale side and transactional/branch banking on the retail side. HDFC Bank also acts as a clearing/settlement bank to various leading stock exchanges. Currently HDFC Bank has a nationwide network of 1416 Branches 3382 ATMs in 550 Indian towns and cities.

Forbes magazine has chosen HDFC Bank as one of Asia Pacific’s best 50 companies. It was chosen from among 500 publicly traded (listed) companies in Asia Pacific with revenues or market capitalization in excess of $ 5 billion (INR 22,330 crore).

Business Needs / Challenges

HDFC Bank has a highly automated environment in terms of Information Technology with substantial investment in best available technology to create world class banking infrastructure. Like any large bank HDFC bank also has a highly heterogeneous technology environment comprising several disparate applications running on a variety of platforms.

Over the time a maze of corporate applications each fulfilling a particular “business service” has emerged around the Core Banking system. Going forward, HDFC Bank faced many challenges:

1. These “satellite applications” were based on old technologies and not scalable to meet the growing customer demands. “Satellite Applications” have mushroomed around the core banking system and worked as “silos”.

2. Operational Management for these applications was also a huge challenge (from the Data Center point of view)

3. Maintenance of these applications was also a huge effort as some of these applications were hosted on PCs and small scale databases

HDFC Bank realized that in order to expand in the future, they would have to create a ‘Common Framework’ that binds the internal and external services together. Using this framework, ‘business services’ will be exposed within HDFC Bank and will represent the individual services underneath.

HDFC Bank started looking at various technology platforms and technologies. They soon realized that none of the existing market solutions could meet their unique requirements of an innovative, flexible and customized ‘Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)’ which is also well within their budget. Also they wanted to scale step-by-step in iterations rather than adopt a big bang approach.

Moreover, the bank was not keen to subscribe to any particular vendor’s vision on how they should go about adopting the solution and also not commit to available huge, over engineered and highly expensive platforms. Instead they decided to retain their freedom to have a say in defining their own Roadmap.

Functioning of systems

1. HNW Statement Processing: Finware (HDFC’s core banking system) generates spool files containing statements for different category of customers. Along with the spool files Finware also provides a summary / header file that includes metadata (information) about the individual statements within the spool files. The HNW Statement Processing system provides features to process the spool files to generate files to be send to Printers (and to Couriers)

that then send out the statements to the Customers. System also allows tracking of the statements printed and couriered to Customers.

2. Dummy GL Reconciliation: In HDFC Bank, the account opening forms are received from the prospective customers by the branches and forwarded to the respective CPU (Central Processing Unit). The funds received from the customers by the branches as initial deposit are credited to a Dummy Account maintained in Finware Retail Banking System. The Dummy accounts need to be reconciled with actual funds transfer and Finware system. Also there were various gaps to ensure error free reconciliations of dummy accounts.

3. Client Service Portal (CSP): Earlier in HDFC Bank, central team at CPU used to publish the daily MIS data required by the branches through Lotus Notes application. Branch users could view their respective cases by using the various search parameters. However due to the increasing volumes, the existing extant application was not able to handle the workload and also there were some extra functionalities required for better operational efficiency.

Departments

Services offered

The HDFC Bank provide mainly three banking service. The services offered by the HDFC Bank are -

1. Personal Banking- Accounts & Deposits- Loans- Cards- Investment & Insurance- Forex & Trade Services- Payment Services- Imperial/Preferred Classics- Private Banking- Access Your Bank

2. NRI Banking- Accounts & Deposits- Remittances- Investment & Insurance- Loans- Payment Services- NRI Preferred Banking- Access Your Bank

3. Wholesale Banking- Corporate- Small & Medium Enterprises- Financial Institutions & Trusts- Government Sector

How the services are carried out

1. NetBanking2. OneView3. InstaAlerts4. MobileBanking5. InstaQuery6. ATM7. PhoneBanking8. Email Statements9. Branch Network

Types of technologies used

1. Recently HDFC Bank had tied up with IBM to replace their existing servers with more sophisticated servers from IBM. These servers are based on System Z technology. With the adoption of this technology HDFC Bank had joined the league of top 50 banks of the world which continue to run on the mainframe based on System Z Technology.

Security of the transactions

Maintenance of privacy

How the transactions are monitored

TQM, CRM & ERP

Information technology in 1994 and 2009