Mobility Solution Helps Magma Fincorp Improve the Business Cycle for Loans and Insurance

Shaking off that tag of a long and tedious documentation process, Magma Fincorp has entered an era of a quick decision and loan disbursement!! It enriches the lives of millions of people every year providing loans and insurance to its customers. Setting up shop in 1989 they have come a long way.

They manage assets worth Rs 160 billion and it is just the beginning. Magma Fincorp – with their family of 8000+ Magmaites, and Magma Fincorp’s 26+ years’ experience–has shown that  mobility based solution  is the answer to sanction loan requests much faster. Let’s examine and explore their journey.

Before the mobility solution went live at the NBFC, the business sourcing continued using hard copy loan application forms and photocopied documents.

“The field force needed to spend a lot of time carrying KYC, address proof and other documents while commuting from the customer base, dealer locations and Magma offices,” says Subhamoy Chakraborti, Head Enterprise Mobility, Magma Fincorp. After bringing forms to office, the operations team used to do data entry into the core system. This created a lot of clutter for the NBFC.

There was no systemic way to capture sales. At times, the illegible handwriting of the sales representative, made it difficult for the operations team to type in all the details correctly.

“Sadly, the commute time for the sales team was too high and took a long time to disburse the loans to customers,” says Chakraborti. With so many problems at hand, the company was boxed into discomfiture.

After a deep thought, a golden idea struck the IT team of Magma Fincorp – Why not introduce a mobility based solution to reduce the cumbersome hassle of sanctioning loan requests from customers?

“The main objective of the organization was to make sure that the field force remains on the field and does not require to come to office for doing their daily transactions,” he says.

The mobility based solution works on a 7 inch Android Tablet with 3000 devices on field. “For sales, we use native Android application and for Insurance, we use HTML5 based hybrid Android application. The key feature of the applications is that they can work completely in an offline mode. Also all the mobility applications are being built on open source stack,” says Chakraborti. The offline mode was necessitated as Magma does most of its business in rural and semi-urban sector, where the connectivity is poor. The data synchronization takes place when connectivity is satisfactory.

When it comes to sales, a camera on the tablet captures the photograph of key documents. Also, all the applications have a web module attached to it where all the photographs go to the web portal. Also as soon as the customer details are captured, the system automatically triggers a request to the Credit Information Bureau Limited (India) Limited system to know the financial history of the customer. This helps in deciding about the loan eligibility of the customer and avoids the manual work by Operations team to do a search themselves.

MHDI, a group company of Magma Fincorp is into General Insurance business. The condition of the vehicles is assessed by the surveyors who take photographs of them.  This information flows to the server after which, the claims team analyses it.  All this workflow has been built in the mobility system.  

 Interestingly, everything is done in real time. The server has a data base which runs on PostgreSQL server open source data base. Then, credit and operations team logs into the web server, which runs on Apache/Tomcat, to check all the loan application details and documents.

 If the documents are not clear, the operations and credit team can raise queries in the web system and it automatically gets pushed to the tablets of sales representatives. Sales executives can respond to the queries in text or via sending image of documents. The interesting part is that this entire query workflow has been built in the core system and in the tablet system.

In parallel, supervisors can also make a daily journey plan for the sales representatives through the web system. That creates a daily calendar for the sales executive in their tablets, which they can refer to for planning their day. “Prior to introducing this project, they used to carry hard copies and notebooks, to note down all the details, but now the mobility built solution has put all problems at bay,” explains Chakraborti.

The applications are custom built with a bunch of security features. For example, the data stored in the tablet is encrypted so that data in it remains secure.

 Also, the company has invested in Mobile Device Management, Mobile Application Management and secure content Management through Airwatch for all the devices on the field. This helps in securing the devices as well as sharing the policy documents over the air remotely to all the tablets.

  “Initially, we stuck to one ISP but found that that one network provider cannot give satisfactory data connectivity all over India. Subsequently, we did a survey to find out which ISP is strong in a region and then tied up with them”, says Chakraborti. Also, the sales executives often capture document images in low lighting conditions.  To circumvent these issues, a lot of fine tuning & image processing were done to make the documents legible.

Apart from the technical challenges, Magma definitely overcame a lot of change management challenges throughout the rollout of the project. IT team worked closely with business team in solving the teething issues via data driven metrics and solid helpdesks.

The mobility solution was initiated in October 2013. Grit Innovation was chosen to develop the sales application, as they were agile with deep technical insights in mobility domain. On the other hand, Magma Fincorp zeroed in on Majesco and GoDB technologies to build the Insurance applications as they have domain knowledge of Insurance business while having relevant technology skills.

In this mobility journey, he says that his role was to partner with business leaders in defining the roadmap, building the partner ecosystem using both Tier 1 and start-up vendors and also to chart out the right technology architecture to build a scalable, agile and cost-efficient system.

At the moment, Magma Fincorp has a mobility footprint for Asset Based financing business where they provide loans against cars, tractor, commercial vehicles, and construction equipments as well as SME products and partly for General Insurance business.

Stressing on plans for the future, Chakraborti says, “we would like to get into the B2C space, where we would like to build an application, where a customer of Magma can see the status of his loan, check EMIs and pay from his mobile.”

 Magma Fincorp has redesigned itself from the ground up to be digital—the very fabric and foundation of introducing mobility built solution.