RBL Bank offers speedy, seamless consumer onboarding and credit decisioning with Salesforce

The financial services space in India is evolving at a dizzying speed. Fintechs are daily setting new standards of agility and seamless customer experience. This, as well as consumer expectations built on interactions with digitally native B2C players, is driving banks to invest in digital transformation to stay nimble and top of mind.

It is against this backdrop that RBL Bank aimed to grow rapidly as a national private bank offering a complete suite of financial services. “In our space, factors like product and pricing can be replicated in no time,” explains Utkarsh Saxena, Senior Vice President and Business Head, Credit Cards, RBL Bank. “So, we decided our competitive edge would be a differentiated digital experience that stood out for the present-day consumer.” 

The bank realised that its existing system could not fully support a digital pivot. It would need to deploy an agile solution supporting exponential growth across multiple product lines, such as credit cards and retail loans.

RBL Bank initially had multiple, fit-for-purpose loan origination (LOS) systems catering to the different product lines. However, as the bank’s customer base grew, it needed enhanced flexibility, scalability and reliability to digitise multiple processes and deliver a smooth consumer experience at speed and scale. 

Most solutions in the market were too niche or developed by small companies that did not have potential as long-term partners. “Salesforce did not have these constraints, and in addition, offered a rich partner ecosystem,” says Sankarson Banerjee, Chief Information Officer, RBL Bank. 

“Also, with Salesforce’s newly-launched Hyperforce, which enables local data storage on major public clouds in a compliant manner, we were confident of meeting regulatory requirements around an India data centre.” 

RBL Bank deployed Salesforce Platform to bring onboarding processes for all its retail lending units onto a single solution. The team moved quickly - once the system architecture and product design were finalised, migration from the earlier system took a mere 90 days.

Loan origination and consumer onboarding for the credit card business and rural vehicle and tractor finance now sit on Salesforce.

Leads flow in from multiple online and offline channels – including website, digital aggregators, Direct Selling Agents (DSA) and retail chains. “Our omnichannel platform built on Salesforce consolidates information across these sources to boost lead capture,” says Abhijeet Bhattacharjee, Senior Vice President, Information Technology, RBL Bank. 

Once a lead is captured, and a credit card  or loan application raised, the bank’s officers efficiently perform the required standardised eligibility checks. More than 15 API integrations with internal and external systems help them to rapidly run multiple eligibility checks, verification waivers, fraud and negative profile checks, and even an upsell eligibility check  before onboarding a consumer. Such streamlining and automation has led to a 30-40% reduction on the previous turnaround time for credit decisioning. 

RBL Bank’s system also offers the team instant access to reliable data, which is helping them communicate better with their customers. With access to real-time data, managers can work with teams to stay on schedule. This has led to faster turnarounds and a steady drop in consumer onboarding times, and hence, greater consumer delight.

The onboarding time of a credit card application via an external channel has also dropped by 50 percent.

“There is also a direct business benefit.  Faster consumer onboarding unlocks our income streams faster,” observes Banerjee.

Underwriting and credit approval also happens on Salesforce before the customer record moves to a loan management system. “Consumer journeys today are fast and non-linear, and this unified system gives us a crucial advantage by enabling us to make decisions on the go,” says Ankur Bhalla, Deputy Vice President, Digital Acquisition and Product, Credit Cards, RBL Bank. “Our upcoming migration to automated credit decisioning based on system decisions will further reduce the current TAT from two days to a few seconds.

Automation of onboarding processes has also helped RBL Bank expand its ecosystem rapidly. Earlier, setting up a new DSA took four days – on the new solution, it takes an hour.

Instant access to data is also helping teams with their digital campaigns. Earlier, the bank was unable to quickly redesign live initiatives like digital campaigns since performance metrics around these were typically available a day or two later. 

Now, with performance metrics available in real-time, the marketing and sales team can monitor and optimise digital campaigns every few hours. 

Finally, with rich reports available at their fingertips and features like report-builders, managers can construct any required data view or report without technical support. This enables rapid, data-driven decision-making.

The bank has developed many customisations to increase the efficiency of its processes and cater to unique situations. For instance, discrepancies in maker and checker data are identified through real-time validation checks, and then fixed quickly.  Today, data discrepancy is nearly down to zero.

These customisations happen at great speed as well. Master-level changes previously took around four weeks to be implemented; they now take only a day or two. Hence, the opening up of new sourcing cities, pin codes, and new products can be done on the fly, speeding up go-to-market.

“In a fast-paced digital environment, we need to go to market quickly. With Salesforce, we are able to do this,” says Banerjee.

As implementation partner, the Salesforce Professional Services team has walked the talk. Newer deployments are taking less time. While implementing the credit card origination process on the solution took eight months, the tractor finance processes took eight weeks. The next launch will take only a couple of weeks. 

According to Bhattacharjee, the Salesforce Professional Services team helped accelerate launches with no-code development. Also, together they rapidly deployed an MVP by leveraging available standard configurations - reducing cost outlay by 30-40%. 

“We are happy with the team’s systematic planning, positive approach to innovation and high-quality delivery,” says Bhattacharjee.  

RBL Bank intends to grow by 100% every year. It will continue to expand the unified platform that it has created to standardise retail loan origination. 

The team will build innovations and efficiencies to serve consumers better and faster. And soon, the bank’s system will work seamlessly with origination partners’ systems, creating a large and valuable ecosystem.