Oracle supports co-op banks to face challenges

New Delhi, May 10 (UNI) To help compete co-operative banks better with nationalised and private banks and hold back their customers, leading enterprise software company Oracle today said it has tied up with EBZ Online to provide complete back-office solutions to these banks all over the country.

''The initiative will offer value-added services including faster loans, issuing Kisan Credit cards, mobile banking and on-line banking to customers,'' EBZ Online Managing Director Mandar Agashe told reporters here.

In addition, Oracle plans to set up a Co-operative Banking Centre of Excellence in Pune to extend its focus on the co-operative banking space.

''We are providing services to 300 branches of 50 cooperative banks in Maharashtra and are targeting 10 states within the next three years,'' Mr Agashe added.

With the nationalised and private sector banks targeting rural markets in a big way, the cooperative banks need to gear up their technology, he said.

''The unique data design of Bankeasy allows use of low bandwidth to transfer all customer data daily from branches to head office directly to facilitate the operations.'' Even it provides multiple benefits to the banks including faster and accurate decision making and central availability of customer level data, Mr Agashe said.

The solutions will be available to cooperative banks at one-fourth of the cost of the traditional core banking solutions.

The Oracle-EBZ Online solution framework will help streamline and consolidate financial accounting, enable better asset deployment and management and ease the procurement process.

Co-operative banks in India are facing several challenges that can be addressed by robust information systems. Due to increased competition, and changes in banking regulations and RBI rules, co-operative banks now need to ensure capital adequacy, comply with exposure norms, control non-performing assets, adopt efficient risk management and introduce good corporate governance.

Oracle India senior director (service industries) Suraj Pai said that Information technology can help these banks meet these challenges.

On the services side, these banks will have to start offering internet banking, mobile banking and other services like ATMs to retain their existing customers. For this, they will have to put in place the required IT infrastructure, Mr Pai said.

UNI