Technology Enablement in Financial Services

Financial services remains our largest sector of focus, enabling us to drive sustainable growth through consulting across the BFSI industry

We make technology decisions work for our clients in the financial services sector, using a combination of domain and implementation capabilities. Our areas of engagement span digital strategy, enterprise architecture, technology implementation, quality assurance and fintech integration. At KPMG in India, FS remains our largest sector in focus, with deep consulting and implementation skills across banking, financial services and insurance, enabling clients to rapidly scale the maturity curve in a sustainable manner. TE-FS has significant experience in upstream digital consulting and downstream technology implementation.

Our offerings

Digital strategy and PMU (Project Management Unit)

Digital strategy involves the assessment of our clients’ ambition, comparing it against their existing ability to deliver to the ambition using their existing application and infrastructure; and there upon working with them towards transforming, through adoption and adaptation of modern technology, infrastructure, and application deployment frameworks.

TE-FS helps BFSI clients with digital strategy and implementation services across core banking, lending, infra and cloud, payments, treasury, technology cost optimisation/tech debt, selection of core systems across Indian private, public, cooperative sector clients, as well as MNC clients spanning banking, insurance, wealth, broking and fintech segments. During this important phase, we also help clients with a keen insight into revolutionising service offerings using artificial intelligence, modernising enterprise architecture, value engineering and cost management including frameworks such as AIOps and FinOps for cloud workloads.

Additionally, we help clients select appropriate technology platforms and deploy them across regions whether they be complex core banking platforms or migrating data centres from on-premises to cloud, using our proprietary project governance and run-book frameworks.

Our cooperative banking digital advisory business has worked with many cooperative sector clients aligning their technology agenda to business aspirations, in India and ASEAN, and ranks amongst the leaders in this important segment.

Core banking and lending tech

We have experience in technology implementation in automating aspects of core banking and lending. This spans both traditional platforms from OEMs such as Oracle - Flexcube, and Infosys – Finacle, but also new-age platforms such as Thought Machine – Vault, for bringing speed and agility to core banking transformation. Additionally, we work with a range of tier one lending technology OEMs ranging from digital journey definition to deployment of these packages across banks and NBFCs.

Technology transformation forms the bedrock of digital transformation – we work with clients from building strategy to downstream systems deployment.

Development and innovation

Our investments in high and low-code environments have been carried out keeping in mind our clients’ evolving needs and the possibilities that are being thrown up by rapid shifts in technology. These investments have allowed us to co-innovate with clients both in India and abroad, delivering products and services in an agile manner, factoring in cloud-native and enterprise architecture principles.

Combining our deep engineering capability with our proven functional capability, has led us to put in place teams and value propositions that are relevant to the changing demands of our time. One of the areas of deep interest remains the ‘citizen developer’ concept, which has caused us to align closely with our LCNC partners to create value. Whether it is running hives of development pods or setting up a digital innovation office, we bring strength and energy to enabling client ecosystems.

Quality assurance

We have significant experience in managing complex end-to-end testing programs for core system implementations, spanning functional and technical testing, including performance testing for both automated and manual testing segments. Our teams comprise resources with functional understanding who bring context to testing scenarios in client environments, further improving the effectiveness of the testing strategy.

Insurance tech

At KPMG in India, our multidisciplinary insurance teams combine deep industry linked implementation and domain related experience, coupled with technical capabilities, leading collaborations, technologies, and outcome linked methodologies to help organisations optimise their insurance operations and technology and thereby position themselves for sustainable growth and success in this fast-changing sector. Our deep technology experience has also aided clients to evaluate the implementation of low code platforms to replace their aging core insurance platforms across front, mid and back-office areas. Increasing automation and safeguarding risk within manageable cost parameters has been at the core of our work in the insurance sector in India and abroad. This evolving field, where third-party linkages are playing an important part, also brings a substantial risk coverage requirement from a technology perspective, which KPMG in India understands well.

Fintech and TechFin ecosystem

This competency within TE-FS works closely with the ecosystem enablers – comprising FinTechs (ventures focusing on pertinent financial services use-cases using technology as an enabler), TechFins (ventures focusing on providing low-code-no-code (LCNC) technology platforms for sector-agnostic use-cases), government bodies (think tanks, regulators, ministries, and other industry bodies), investors (private equity and venture capital), academia (STEM and business), incubators, accelerators and financial institutions – to develop and nurture a conducive FinTech ecosystem. We collaborate with these innovators and disruptors to speedily provide value to clients in the financial services sector, using a lease-versus-build hypothesis, exploring a range of sell-with and sell-to propositions. Areas of impact using the fintech construct have spanned payments, lending, collections, and risk management. KPMG in India’s ‘digital hub’ framework is an outcome of our conversations with these clients.

Infrastructure and cloud

We have deep experience in designing, setting up and running large infrastructure platforms, be they on-premise or cloud. We have helped several clients to assess the benefits of moving to cloud platforms and aided them in the decision of which services to port, all within the purview of good governance and suitable cost parameters.

While a significant part of financial services businesses still resides on-premise, we have noticed a trend to move these components sequentially to the cloud using a single or multi-cloud format. We also have significant capabilities in designing and building out plans and capacities for clients that are working on modernising their on-premise footprints. We have aided large market infrastructure players scale out their data centres and high compute environments within time and budget.

Our ambition is to make client environments resilient and reliable through deployment of modern sustainable infrastructure frameworks, in a cost optimised manner. With proven experience across ‘journey to cloud’, and associated technology transformation, TE-FS in KPMG in India is well set to achieve this ambition for its clients.

Business integration

The TE-FS team has worked upon mandates to manage the end-to-end delivery of the technology agenda for clients in financial services spanning from application management, application re-architecting, infrastructure deployment and running of production workloads in a secure-by-design environment. In such mandates, clients usually work with KPMG in India to define the target or goal, which business aspires to meet. This goal could be a growth or cost target, or a compliance-driven outcome that is desirable. The definition of the goal and attainment thereupon, requires professional services firms such as KPMG in India to go beyond the ordinary and think beyond just ‘systems integration’. Upon receiving the mandate, KPMG in India’s FS tech service line works with multiple systems partners to design a reference architecture, which is in line with expected business ambitions, and then outlines a technology roadmap using refreshed components across application, infrastructure, and security to attain the roadmap over a discrete period of time. KPMG in India as a ‘business integrator’, then uses its own resources and meshes with other systems partners to work alongside the client’s business and IT teams to meet these goals, while monitoring the defined KPIs for the programme appropriately. The FS tech team works alongside multiple service lines from KPMG in India to achieve the technology outcomes and provide the compliance requirements.

Our work areas focus on attaining this end state, while improving the compliance posture for our clients, keeping the region’s regulatory aspects in mind. This focus goes beyond standard ‘systems integration’ mandates, keeping the interests of business – front and centre, of technology delivery over a protracted period.

Case studies

Large MNC bank based in Asia
A large Public Sector Bank – Core Banking System upgrade
A large MNC bank based outside India
One of India’s largest and fastest growing home finance companies

KPMG in India implemented the design, build-operate-transfer of a customer due diligence platform for corporate banking customers
Brought agility to operations in areas such as onboarding, outreach through technology automation comprising Java, Appian and cloud components
Provided support for multiple languages including Japanese, Chinese, French, and more, enhancing user experience for a diverse customer base
Built a smart AI assistant to assist customers with various queries, improving customer service and engagement
KPMG in India helped keep systems updated with respect to guidelines regarding regulation, BAU patching and security
Managed SLAs to bank’s client, using a services framework
Used an offshore delivery centre framework to manage change and run aspects of the solution, that is integrated with other technology aspects of the Bank

KPMG in India assessed the current architecture of the core banking solution with other solutions available
Worked alongside the bank to aid in the selection of a services partner, and worked alongside the services partner to aid in completion of the application deployment lifecycle
Helped the bank with systems and process upgradation on the Finacle stack, along with the systems integration partner
Evaluated, designed, and deployed options for the bank to embark on its digital banking journey

large-public-sector-bank-core-banking-system-upgrade

As an Invested partner in the bank’s journey, KPMG in India aided in the implementation of modern corporate banking architecture which could handle all its business clients in a fully integrated ecosystem
KPMG in India studied the existing technology landscape of the bank and created the blueprint for the Minimum Viable Solution (MVS) for implementation of Flexcube 14.x modules for universal banking, corporate lending, trade finance, treasury, payments, limits, and collateral
Prepared the implementation architecture and Integration architecture for the MVS
Create customer journeys
KPMG in India followed a ’execute and validate’ testing framework that ensures test coverage and transparent traceability for the scope of work

KPMG in India developed a five-year business plan for bank’s digital lending products
- Benchmarking, DLD blueprint, branding and positioning
Redesigned digital onboarding journeys across lending products
- Current state, product prioritisation, customer journey enhancement
Target digital-focused operating model
- Solution architecture, vendor selection and RFP rollout
Enterprise architecture development for digital customer journeys
Risk and analytics
- Underwriting scorecards, credit policy
- Enhancing analytical capabilities.

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