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NET @ WORK
The
Click-And-Bricks Corporation
One of the first Indian companies to go
on-line, ICICI is now poised to take a major leap in the Net-based trading
business.
By Roshni
Jayakar
In July, 1999, in the course of a
routine conversation, ICICI CEO K.V. Kamath asked the company's General
Manager, Madhabi Puri-Buch, how much time she spent on the Net every day.
''An hour,'' she replied. Kamath was shocked: ''That's appalling,'' he
exclaimed. ''I want you, and each one of the people in your group, to surf
the Net for a minimum of two hours, office time; you need to know where
the world is moving to.''
Now, 10 months later, Kundapur Vaman Kamath
does not have to log on to the Net to find out what the future will be;
he's helping his company create it. The objective: to convert the
brick-and-mortar universal bank into a clicks-and-bricks full service
provider, a comprehensive on-line financial services marketplace.
And Kamath is using speed and the real-world
strengths of ICICI to do so. Every Web initiative, his diktat runs, needs
to be completed in 45 days. Avers Nachiket Mor, 35, Head (e-Commerce
Initiatives), ICICI: ''With the super-duper five-star kind of approach,
you may spend three years developing it, but the customer may not want
it.'' Seconds Kamath, 45: ''We are ramping up rapidly to secure the
first-mover advantage. That, our brand-equity, and the ability to nurture
relationships will ensure our competitiveness in the digital world.''
Only, ICICI hopes to complement this competitiveness with its lean
real-world presence like ATMs and call-centres.
Explains Lalitha Gupte, 51, COO, ICICI: ''We
believe an appropriate option for India today is the clicks-and-bricks
model.'' But ICICI's efforts to become the first corporate citizen among
the digerati transcends clumsy attempts to patch together a
hurriedly-framed Net-strategy with its terra-firma infrastructure. It
takes the form of a three-pronged initiative--Web-enabling the company's
products and services, investing in start-ups, and seeking opportunities
in e-products--that has a foot firmly entrenched in two different, but
adjacent, worlds.
Functioning on the www
It's an axiom straight out of e-Biz 101: to
become a C&B (Clicks & Bricks) corporation, you have to move at
least some customer transactions on-line. ICICI was an early player in
this game. In 1997, in Phase I of its Infinity Net-banking project, ICICI
Bank hosted a demo on its site. In Phase II, the bank rolled out a series
of on-line utilities including enquiry-processing and
transaction-tracking. And these were available not just to the bank's
valued corporate clients but also to small retail ones. And, in February,
2000, in Phase III of the Infinity project, ICICI Bank introduced an
on-line Electronic Bill Presentment & Payment (EBPP) service.
The customers of ICICI Bank can use this
facility to log on, present bills from utilities on-line, and have the
amount transferred electronically to the utility from their accounts.
Today, the utilities on the EBPP facility include MTNL, BPL, BEST, and
Tata Telesystems. But with Net-access threatening to be a choke-point,
ICICI Bank does not wish the EBPP to be constrained by its delivery
mechanism. Thus, this facility will soon be available through the
companies' 'brick' call-centres, ATMs, and info-kiosks that it proposes to
set up. The software that enables this? Infosys Technologies' Bancspay
that presents an integrated and unified view of customer-information and
transactions across various delivery channels.
The functional attributes of the EBPP system:
maintaining a database of payees, handling registration of new payees,
scheduling payments, and maintaining a payment-status interface. But
Infinity isn't restricted to the bank's retail customers. Infinity for
corporates aspires to be the banking homepage of ICICI Bank's as well as
ICICI's corporate clients. Avers Chanda Kochhar, General Manager, ICICI:
''Infinity for corporates is a comprehensive interface between the bank
and its clients.'' When the company's authorised representative logs on to
its Infinity account, he, or she, can view the details of the company's
transactions with the entire gamut of companies that make up the ICICI
Group: payment-schedules, status of letters of credit, and the status of
guarantees.
Even the financial services conglomerate's
treasury operations aren't exempt. Explains Kalpana Morparia, Head
(Treasury), ICICI: ''We plan to Web-enable all treasury products--bonds,
deposits, Government of India securities, third-party bonds, and
securities products.'' How? First, by acting as an infomediary which
provides market-related information; and second, by acquiring the
technological and business expertise to enable a customer transact, or
close, a deal on-line.
While striving to become an e-enabled
financial portal, however, ICICI has not ignored the Web's ability to
serve as a sales and distribution channel. Thus, its retail finance arm
maintains a presence on themed sites. Once the customer decides what to
buy, ICICI's finance options are a click away. Avers Puri-Buch: ''Sites
like this serve as our cyber-DNA. They pass on critical customer
information.''
The Ideal Medium
Nor has the company turned a blind-eye to the
Web's ability to serve as the ideal medium for a business that thrives in
any real-time environment: trading in stocks. ICICI Web Trade has launched
a Net-based trading service at www.icicidirect.com. A few days after it
announced the launch of the service, ICICI had notched up 10,000
registrations. icicidirect.com offers an end-to-end integrated Web-based
trading service: every investor opening an e-invest account automatically
becomes eligible for a free demat account, and a free on-line banking
account. And ICICI proposes to get its brick-entities to double up as
cyber-points, from which investors can access the Net. Bottomline? Bricks
+ clicks renders the issue of access redundant.
But irrespective of the nature of the service
and the type of customer, ICICI's efforts, invariably, span bricks and
clicks. The technological implications of this are immense: a host of
channels should be vested with the capability to carry information on a
slew of products, and to facilitate transactions at a low cost, in a
manner that makes things easy for the customer. Whew!
B2B > B2C
ICICI's objectives for the B2B space are, to
put it mildly, ambitious. Says Renuka Ramnath, General Manager, ICICI:
''We wish to focus on businesses that are trying to use the Net to cut
costs, manage their inventories better, manage dealer networks, and
collate and use sales-data.'' Most of these businesses do not operate in
marketspaces of their own; they prefer to remain and operate in ICICI-space.
To serve the needs of such clients, ICICI has
forged an alliance with a Compaq-led consortium to offer companies,
customers, and merchants a payment gateway in its own space. The B2B
payment gateway facilitates the processing of innovative payment
instruments like e-cheques, purchase cards, direct debits, and on-account
payments. And the B2C one serves as a secure interface between the
shopper, the on-line store, and the bank.
ICICI is also striving to function as an info
intermediary between companies, its dealers, and its suppliers. In the
tired economy, companies used to insist that dealers provide them with
post-dated cheques that could be encashed when the products were
despatched from the company's warehouse (or plant) to the dealer. In the
wired world, both the company and the dealer open an account with ICICI
Bank. On the day the company despatches its products to the dealer, an
authorised representative logs on and simply debits the account of the
dealer.
Will this work? Ask Hindustan Lever. The
company uses this arrangement for the dealers of its Aviance range of
cosmetics. Or ask 59 other companies, and 3,000 dealers. The benefits? A
simpler funds-transfer mechanism, and better inventory management. But
ICICI, points out Kochhar, gains too: ''This provides us an entry point
into cash-rich companies who may not require a loan from ICICI.'' And the
dealers become eligible for working capital assistance from ICICI Bank.
ICICI's digital-morphing doesn't stop with
its defined area of business: financial services. Following the Nokia
model, ICICI sees itself as a Net catalyst that invests in and incubates
other Net start-ups. It has, thus far, invested in six dot.coms. Justifies
Ramnath: ''We have a strong corporate franchise, retail brand equity, and
access to financial and intellectual capital--in fact, everything that it
takes to make a venture successful.''
If that sounds opportunistic, it's because
Kamath has inculcated the spirit of seeking new business opportunities in
ICICI's digital nervous system. The re-born ICICI will offer an array of
financial services--off-line, on-line, and through a mixture of the
two--to customers and companies alike, and hope to convert
bricks-and-clicks into revenues and earnings. There's nothing static about
ICICI. It's constantly e-volving.
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