(Far Eastern Economic Review) ASIAN INNOVATION AWARDS: THE WINNERS 2004: GLOBAL [EMAIL PROTECTED] AWARD Bank On This A home-grown Indian banking solution is keeping tabs on global financial transactions -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By John Larkin/NEW DELHI Issue cover-dated October 21, 2004 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WANT TO START your own bank? You'll need money and an appetite for hard work. Chances are you'll also need Rajesh Hukku, the chairman and managing director of Mumbai-based i-flex solutions. This software company sells to banks the part of their operations that account holders never see. Every bank transaction sets off ripples of other transactions, like reporting obligations to regulatory authorities and fee calculations, which must be handled down the line by the bank's information-technology set-up. These back-office requirements vary from country to country, and more often than not have been in place for decades. Many have become a patchwork of IT add-ons over the years as new services cropped up, resulting in efficiency losses and millions of dollars in foregone savings. "Some of these packages have been around since I was in kindergarten," says 46-year-old Hukku. "It's like you have a beautiful body for your car, but the engine is 20 or 30 years old." That's where i-flex comes in. Its award-winning Flexcube software suite does the heavy lifting to help banks and other financial-services companies streamline everything from core banking to mortgages, investment banking, capital markets and mutual funds. It integrates all this data, enabling banks to monitor their risk exposure, regardless of location, to customers in real time across their entire range of products. That's often not possible at most banks with less-efficient systems. Flexcube also allows a banker with no programming expertise to create a new product within a week, rather than the months of reprogramming it would otherwise take. It can crunch nearly 7,500 transactions a second according to an audit by Ernst & Young. For banks, that means a less-expensive way to deliver better services. For the past two years, Flexcube has been ranked the top-selling core banking-software package by the British International Banking System. It is used at financial institutions in 88 countries, 15 of which were added in the financial year 2003-04. Now it can add to its list of accolades the Global [EMAIL PROTECTED] Award for 2004, awarded by the REVIEW, in association with Singapore's Economic Development Board in recognition of the best application of technology to a strong business model. Hukku puts Flexcube's success down to the ease with which it can be tailored to requirements in different countries. Nothing is hard-coded, allowing the customer to fine-tune the software to its own needs. Hukku even built that concept into the product's name--"Flex" stands for flexible. The last three letters of the name, "ube," stand for universal banking environment. "It's a bank in a box," proclaims Hukku. "If you ran into a lot of money and wanted to start your own bank, you could literally open our package and start the bank in a few months." Flexcube has 185 customers, and the number is rising. Its biggest contract is with Citibank, where Flexcube is being used to standardize its corporate-banking operations around the world. That means slashing the 59 existing patchwork versions of Citibank's in-house IT system down to just one--the biggest such conversion package ever undertaken, according to Hukku. Another client is Japan's resurgent Shinsei Bank, which uses Flexcube as its core system for retail and corporate banking. WHAT'S NEXT? The company has come a long way since its relatively humble beginnings in a small Mumbai office in 1992, ironically as a venture partly funded by Citibank. Now Hukku's mission is to keep the numbers healthy and eventually turn Flexcube into India's first global IT brand. It's already the top software-product company in India. Net income from operations rose from 1.14 billion rupees ($24.87 million) to 2.09 billion rupees between the financial years 2001-02 and 2003-04. It's one of the few Indian IT companies to build a business model based on its own home-grown product. The success of that endeavour will largely depend on the key United States market. Hukku is optimistic. "Over the next several years it could be great for Flexcube when [U.S.] banks decide to change their systems," he says. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $9.95 domain names from Yahoo!. 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