YODLEE TO EXPAND IN INDIA

Raghuvir Badrinath, Chennai/ Bangalore
Business Standard

In these times of economic slowdown, the only mantra is cost-cutting. And technology is one way they are adopting. Yodlee Inc, a US-based firm is one such firm which claims that its technology will help financial institutions reduce costs, generate new revenue and improve customer satisfaction. Yodlee’s solution powers over 100 large financial institutions in the US for their online banking transactions and leverages on the aspect that a customer may want to have a dashboard view of one’s finances - right from salary accounts to loan accounts to stock trading accounts and lot more.

In an interview with Raghuvir Badrinath, Peter Hazlehurst, senior VP (product development) Yodlee and R Subramaniam, MD & VP, Yodlee India, share the roadmap on how Indian financial institutions can benefit.

Excerpts:

The stress on financial institutions is too much given the economic scenario? What gives you confidence that they will invest in new technologies?

The proposition we come with is to generate business. When the customer of a bank gets to see all the transactional information from various accounts in one place, arrayed in ways that are understandable, they tend to spend more time analysing their transactions. This gives the banks a big leeway to cross-sell and up-sell their products. In addition to this, the cost of acquiring a customer drastically comes down for a financial institution through this mode. The solution helps consumers gain financial awareness and control through the online channel.

In the recent past you also sold your solution to Yes Bank? What is the roadmap for getting more clients in India?

We are in dialogue with large banks in India and we expect to sign up two more banks in the next few quarters. Our Indian operations will also be active in the Asia-Pacific region and we hope to sign up at least six institutions in this region in the near future.

In your conversations with Indian financial institutions, what are the roadblocks you are facing?

Customers across the globe have one major query - security. Given the vulnerability of online transactions, this is one issue we have to deal squarely. Our technologies are subjected to audits by the Federal Reserve on a constant basis and this is an issue on which we focus heavily, on a constant basis.

Yodlee has an active product development lab in Bangalore for the past few years? Do you think this will be expanded in the current year?

We have been here for the past close to five years and have invested around Rs 160 crore cumulatively and we employ 300 people. The expansion this year in India will not be aggressive and we hope to grow by 15-20 per cent this year. Software product development does not require that we add manpower like software services.