Catholic Syrian Bank to re-engineer its business processes

Venkatachari Jagannathan
15 September 2006

Says NR Achan, chairman of the bank, "The business process re-engineering (BPR) exercise will increase our manpower utilisation and attain better operational capabilities."

Apart from reducing the time spent by a customer at the branch, the BPR is targetted at cutting the loan processing time from around 71 days that it currently takes to process large trade, business and industrial loans. Even retail loans take around a fortnight to process.

"With the implementation of BPR, the processing time for large industrial or business loans is expected to come down to 20 to 30 days and five days for retail loans," says N Sivaprasad, consultant, Pragna Consultants Pvt Ltd, Chennai, the bank's BPR consultants.

The bank will also centralise its retail loan processing and other routine activity at four - five back office centres. "We expect increased volume at reduced cost," says KR Rajagopalan, assistant general manager (BPR).

What is interesting is that the BPR activity will go hand in hand with the development of end-to-end core banking solution. The bank has joined hands with Laser Soft Infosystems Limited for development of core banking solution.

Says B Suresh Kamath, managing director, Laser Soft, "The core banking solution will be designed to implement back office processing centres as required by the bank and will incorporate all BPR requirements." The browser-based core banking solution is jointly being developed on a J2EE platform.