Customer

One of the leading private banks in India, a full-service commercial bank providing a complete range of products, services, and technology-driven digital offerings, catering to Retail, MSME, and corporate clients.

It operates its investment banking, merchant banking, and brokerage businesses through Yes Securities, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bank. Headquartered in Mumbai, it has a pan-India presence, including an IBU at GIFT City and a Representative Office in Abu Dhabi.

Business Situation

This bank is a major player in the agency banking space, offering services like AePS, Micro ATM, and Domestic Money Transfer to customers, especially in tier 2 and 3 cities. They were using some other solution for these services earlier. However, as they wanted to expand their market share and business, the bank wanted a different solution to take care of the surging transaction load, as well as expanding acquiring business and at the same time, minimize system-related dependencies and risks. The expectation was very clear - the transaction switch would be responsible for processing transactions, recording transactions in the bank’s Statement of Record (SOR) system for accounting and other purposes. All agent-initiated transactions were to be routed through the registered Business Correspondents (BCs).

Apart from the Micro ATM and AePS Switching services, bank also wanted to get into the business of FASTag acquiring. The arrangement was that Maximus would onboard the toll plazas on a Program Manager model and carry out all the necessary technical activities for the toll plazas to get integrated with the NETC platform of NPCI, while the bank would be the settlement bank for all settlements to the concessionaires.

Solution

Maximus provided the switching services for Micro ATM (Card + PIN) and AePS integrated with the SOR and Aadhaar Data Vault of bank respectively. Both the switches were integrated with the middleware systems of the business correspondents, where applicable. All the transactions initiated from the Micro ATM or mobile applications connected to a PIN Pad or fingerprint scanner first hit the middleware and then the Maximus switches for their processing and onward routing to NPCI. eKYC of the agents was done either by capturing the biometric data through a fingerprint scanner or by a face recognition device. Reconciliation was managed by Maximus’ operations team. All reports and analytics were made part of the portal, and the bank teams could view or download the same.

For NETC FASTag, a comprehensive portal was provided to the bank in which it could view all the toll plazas onboarded under different concessionaires, configurations like the number of lanes etc. for each toll plaza, whether toll collection was distance or point based, the fare & pass configurations, transactions, and collections.

The plazas are provided with user credentials for logging into the portal to check the transactions and raise disputes in case they occur. Apart from FASTag switching services, Maximus handles all the daily operational activities like onboarding of the plazas, their configuration, coordination with the plazas, NPCI, and the bank for reconciliation & disputes, settlement, and compliances.

Benefits

There are several benefits to the bank in terms of vendor management, as a single service provider (Maximus) provides all the solutions - Micro ATM & AePS Switching Services and NETC /FASTag solution. There is no need for the bank to have different vendors for managing its business segments. The operations for both the solutions are handled by Maximus, and this helps the bank to utilize its manpower for its core banking services.

With Maximus bringing toll plazas to the banks, an additional revenue stream opens for the bank. After implementing these services, the bank has increased its market share in both the business correspondent and e-toll businesses.