A retail banking system


The development of the retail banking system started in 1990 and it went live at Citibank in India in 1994. Internally, the system was called RB and was implemented to replace another in- house system, the Prime-based Cosmos (out of which came Citil’s Microbanker, the predecessor to Flexcube). RB was also installed in Citibank in the Czech Republic, Hungary, South Africa, Luxembourg and Monaco. On the commercial market, Orbitech initially branded the system as OrbiRetail. A treasury system was used within around 20 sites in Citibank, of which the largest was Singapore. This system was launched by Orbitech as Orbi-Treasury. Citigroup India was the main site for the retail applications. The platform was broadened markedly during the second half of the 1990s to support more or less the entire Indian operations. It looked to constitute an integrated suite, with users able to move seamlessly between applications and with the ability to gain a consolidated view. The bank was highly automated, not only at the branch but also via other channels. In some ways, this was a necessity. The bank’s direct presence in India was effectively capped by regulations, so to grow it had to attract customers via non-branch banking. It had done so on an impressive scale, via the telephone and increasingly via the internet.


The bank had 15 branches in the country. The tellers were


linked via the bank’s Mumbai data centre to the back office system in Chennai. Citibank claimed to have been more or less the first to adopt a centralised retail system in India (the new private banks were not far behind when they arrived on the scene). It also claimed to have been the first to install ATMs (1987), the first to launch phone banking (1991), the first to offer debit cards (1998), and the first to offer activated kiosks in the branch (2000). The core system supported all of the bank’s Indian retail


business across current accounts, time deposits, savings accounts, and overdrafts. There was a general ledger and the system supported central liability, credit initiation and account opening, clearing, auto-sweeping, and all reporting and statement generation. The tellers could view all accounts and could move seamlessly between the customer’s retail activities and other accounts, such as credit cards. They could view all account history and could see the total value of the customer relationship from a single screen. All of the operations were handled within this integrated platform so there was no need


to access any other systems. There was a piece of middleware called Integrator which tied together the different applications that made up the platform.


The platform was also used by Citibank’s call centre and


relationship management staff. The latter had Siebel, with this fed by RB and with links into the teller system. The importance of phone banking was reflected in the fact that by 2002 around 1.2–1.3 million transactions were via this medium per month, versus fewer than 100,000 via the branches. The bank was taking 1.4 million calls per month, handled via eight call centres providing 24x7 service. In terms of increased automation, around 40 per cent of calls were answered by interactive voice response. The solution was based on an offering from Tata Telecom, but with Orbitech providing the underlying software and interfaces. All of the call centre software itself was from Orbitech. This also tended to be used by the other country operations of Citibank which had RB. The platform to support all of this was seemingly robust, with end-users pronouncing themselves happy. It also provided rapid response times, with no apparent performance issues. Clearly, the call centre software was working in a relatively high volume environment, even if this was not particularly the case for the back office and teller solutions. Orbitech set about bringing together the functionality


from the Indian applications and the versions elsewhere around the world into standard offerings, with all of these intended to reside on Unix and Oracle. The suite as a whole was branded as OrbiPack. It apparently underwent an assessment by a Delhi-based consultancy, Dimensions, which gave it a glowing report. An early ongoing bid in Kuwait had also been reassuring, said Bhagwat. The bank had been looking at Orbitech’s credit card management system and some other applications and the only gaps identified had been for local requirements, he said. The supplier felt that the credit card system and a mutual funds application might be the first focus in India, due to market interest in both areas. The suite included Orbi-Trade for trade finance, Orbi- Cash for cash management, Orbi-Treasury for FX, MM and fixed income across front and back office, Orbi-Funds, Orbi-Custody, Orbi-Brokerage, Orbi-Lending, Orbi-Sales (a prospect database and contact management solution), Orbi- Collections, Orbi-Collateral, Orbi-Credit, Orbi-Warehousing, Orbi-Direct (spanning internet and wireless channels), Orbi-


Universal Banking Systems Market Report | www.ibsintelligence.com 221


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