The Institute has set up set-of-the-art facilities for aiding and promoting research work. The Labs and Research Centres are being constantly upgraded with the latest systems, devices and tools to keep pace with the ever-changing technology trends. Presently, the Institute has the following laboratories for focused research and development:
Research Centers
Almost all banks are on the core banking platform. 'What next' has been engaging the minds of the banking chiefs. IDRBT has been evangelizing the theme of "Beyond Core Banking" to prepare the bankers for the next big step of business strategy automation and optimization. As part of this initiative, IDRBT has set up a CRM lab to provide hands on training to bankers. The lab is first-of-its-kind in the country with multiple solutions and technology under one roof.
Governor Dr. D. Subba Rao inaugurated the lab in the presence of Dr. K. C. Chakraborty, Deputy Governor, RBI and Chairman, IDRBT and Members of Governing Council.
Dr. Subba Rao exhorted the need to ensure that the benefits of the CRM Lab are actually felt in banks by taking up a pilot project with a couple of banks. Dr. Chakraboraty spoke on the importance of CRM in banks while Dr. R. B. Barman, Member, Governing Council stressed on the importance of Data Warehouse in the overall success of a CRM initiative in any bank.
Activities of CRM Lab
- Customized Training programmes for Banks: After the CRM Lab was inaugurated by the honorable Governor, RBI, Dr D. Subba Rao on June 18, 2010, we conducted three customized training programmes one each for Bank of Maharashtra, Indian Bank and Karur Vysya Bank during June-Dec, 2010.
- Insights about Analytical CRM from European Banking System: IDRBT conducted its first Executive Training Programme abroad in association with Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel, Department of Marketing, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium during August 15-18, 2011. Fifteen Senior Executives (of GM level) from various PSU banks participated in it. It started with a 2 day EDP at IDRBT on all aspects of CRM. The Belgian leg of the training included a four-day course of "Predictive Analytics for Customer Intelligence in Financial Services". The program designed with a judicious mixture of Analytical CRM talks and presentations about hot topics in marketing from expert in Analytics Industry as well as Banks. The programme lends a valuable experience to the Executives and provides insights into the CRM arena in European Banks. While, the presenters from the banking industry stressed upon analytical problem solving in tackling various business questions that bank face day in and day out, all of them unequivocally mentioned that data warehouse/data mart is a given prerequisite for applying analytics and deriving useful land actionable results. Customer retention is found to be low hanging fruit and many banks try to achieve that first before embarking on cross-sell/up-sell. Change management is critical for the success of a CRM initiative in banks. Many banks do it consciously by imbibing the customer centric ideas and business processes to the entire spectrum of the bank personnel. People aspect is addressed by recruiting specialists like data miners, business analysts and segmentation managers. Some banks claimed to have on average 10-15 products per customer, which is way beyond what we have here at present.
- Working Group on CRM : Formed in September 2010 to publish a report suggesting the Indian banks (i) Optimal organization structure for successful implementation of CRM initiative to address the people dimension of the CRM (ii) Best practices with respect to people, process and data dimensions of CRM. The working group consists of IDRBT, Syndicate bank, Punjab National bank, Bank of Baroda, ICICI Bank, Dr. Santanu Paul, Distinguished Fellow, IDRBT and IBM. The report was launched by Shri Anand Sinha, Chairman, IDRBT on November 06, 2011 during the Bancon at Chennai.
- CRM Proof-of-the-concept executed on the Live Data sets from Bank of Maharashtra, Indian Bank, Karur Vysya Bank and Syndicate Bank: Formulated the Analytical CRM problems viz., Default prediction, Customer segmentation and customer churn prediction and collected the data from BoM and mined it with SAS EMiner and IBM SPSS PASW Modeler and open-source tool KNIME.
One of the focal areas of research recommended by the External Expert Review Committee is Security Technologies for the Financial Sector. In order to carry out research in the area of Security Technologies, the Institute has now set up a Security Technologies Lab.
The objectives of the lab include emerging as a Knowledge house in the area of security; developing POCs of security algorithms, attacks, architecture, etc; innovating new security protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc., bringing in awareness about security; conducting hands on training programmes in security; and publishing research papers, guidelines, working papers, etc.
Research work is already under way in lab. One member of Faculty and four research associates are working on various areas related to Security Technologies such as XML Schema based User interface; Dematerialized Deposits, etc.
Under the aegis of the lab, the following activities have been undertaken:
- Conducting Programmes on Network Security. We plan to conduct this program every alternate month.
- Every alternate month, we have been conducting training programmes on Developing Web Services and as part of this, we conduct sessions on Developing Secure Web Applications and Using Crypto Libraries
- Planning to conduct separate workshops on OS Security and Database Security