JJIT Fintech powers Indian cooperative banks on their cloud journey

NEW DELHI: The Indian banking, finance and insurance (BFSI) sector is going through the next generation digital transformation where banks pan-India need customized and optimized automated solutions to meet the ever-increasing demands.

JJIT Fintech Pvt Ltd, a leading provider of banking solutions with latest emerging technologies, is already helping more than 81 partner banks across the country in their digital transformation.

Established in 1997 in Pune, the company works closely with clients in the BFSI sector by thoroughly understanding their businesses.

Kantilal Badale, Managing Director, JJIT Fintech Pvt Ltd told IANS that cloud technologies are helping to accelerate the adoption of their solutions in the cooperative banking segment, especially in the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) era which has just exploded with record transactions with every passing month.

Here are excerpts from an interview:

Q: What is JJIT Fintech’s USP and Mission Statement?

A: Our USP is a strong support system and team with banking domain expertise focused only on the collaborative banking sector.

We are the only Core Banking Software (CBS) provider that offers CBS application on AWS Cloud and aims to provide robust and secure banking solutions and services to the collaborative banking sector with user-friendly and state-of-the-art technology.

Q: What is the current scope of your business and your growth plans over the next 4-5 years?

A: JJIT serves 81 partner banks pan-India and plans to increase its service platform to more than 300 customer banks in partnership with Amazon AWS.

Q: As a leading provider of banking solutions to cooperative banks, how have you taught your customers to embrace new digital technologies?

A: In addition to the programs designed (pan-India) by RBI and NPCI to educate the banks in understanding the updates in the banking industry, JJIT has organized seminars as well as customer specific programs to educate them and help them adapt to new technologies.

Q: Can you tell us about some of your customer success stories?

A: We serve one of the large scheduled cooperative banks with more than 40 branches, have their own data center and disaster recovery site in another city, and invest in human resources to manage it with large investments in various outsourced services and server upgrades.

JJIT implemented an AWS solution, which helped the bank leverage its human resources and costs for infrastructure and various services. The ultimate investment in the solution saved almost 40 percent of their local data center.

At the same time, AWS Services gives up the bank’s transaction capacity and performs much faster than their local server setup.

A cooperative bank with over 20 branches and more than 150 users made use of private cloud provider services. They experienced communication problems, any upgrade/change in infrastructure services offering to be approved, service delays, low performance servers and other issues.

We migrated the bank to AWS and now they have to coordinate with JJIT only. They are directly registered with AWS to use the selected services with the AWS service to replicate the critical data. The execution speed is much higher than their previous DC provider.

Also, another co-operative bank with six branches, with local setup, had its database server down for some reason. The bank planned to restore the server and continue with the on-site setup.

JIIT immediately guided and migrated the bank on AWS. Within a short time the bank went live and after a week the bank management decided to continue with AWS services instead of on-premises setup.

Q: You have been one of the early adopters of the cloud in the BFSI space and built your CBS platform on AWS. What were some of the main reasons you chose AWS and how did it help you in terms of business results?

A: JJIT built the browser-based CBS solution way back in 2014, but infrastructure management was always a challenge. In 2017, based on our understanding of the market trend, we thought to explore services beyond Private-Cloud providers and then assessed available players.

After thorough research and conducting POC & UAT, our technical team settled on AWS as it was the perfect solution for the collaboration sector, especially with their managed database offering by RDS where database licenses were also included in the pay as you go model.

The AWS team worked closely with us to help us optimize our application and deployment architecture while helping us reduce costs by using reserved instances. Our team was also quite comfortable with easy-to-use console and computer services that ensure high performance.

Our association with AWS helped us create a CBS platform with high capacity and high performance infrastructure. As an infrastructure partner, JJIT could seamlessly serve customers, and the brand of AWS helped build trust and credibility with our customers.

In addition, in recent years the banking sector has gone through many digital transitions that the traditional IT infrastructure could not keep up with; for example, UPI, which is a very convenient payment method for end users, requires high capacity, uninterrupted data performance and seamless support service, such end-to-end services were made available by AWS.A

Another critical area was data replication, which is part of the compliance process in the banking sector; with AWS, we could perform it in real-time, with no time delay using automated multi-AZ replication service.

All these reasons helped us build our core offering of CBS on AWS and extend the value of the AWS cloud to our customers, helping to accelerate the adoption of our solution in the cooperative banking segment