CAMS: An Integral Part of Indian Financial Infrastructure

With 25 years of experience as a key player in the Indian financial infrastructure. CAMS which operates out of Chennai has built a significant reputation as a Transfer Agency to the Asset Management industry in India and in time it has morphed into a  technology enabled service solutions partner to Private Life Insurance, Private Equity Funds, Banks, Non-Banking Finance Companies. Besides serving as B2B solutions partner. The company says that it brings in a unique ability of a B2C to serve the end customers through a variety touch points such as pan India network of service centres, white label call centres and white label online services.

The company has collaborated with Newgen Software Technologies as its technology partner for robust delivery of its services. Newgen Software Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Newgen Software Technologies Ltd., the leading global provider of Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Customer Communication Management (CCM) and Adaptive Case Management (ACM) with a global footprint of 1300+ customer installations in over 61 countries with large, mission-critical solutions deployed at world’s leading Banks, Insurance firms, Healthcare Organizations, Governments, Shared Service Centers, BPO’s & Telecom Companies.

In an interview to DATAQUEST sometime back, Ramanan S V, CEO, CAMS Insurance Repository Services, talks about the genesis of the company to what it is today and its collaboration with Newgen. Excerpts

Can you talk about CAMS genesis from a software development company to a managed BFSI services company?

The genesis of the company as you rightly said started from software, software training to where we are today. We realized that there is a niche of providing platform-based services.. So we started off by focusing on the mutual fund industry and  in time replicated that model to other sub-verticals like Banking, Insurance et al.

How did this collaboration with  Newgen  happened?

We were having our own products on the IT infrastructure, but the scale of operations demanded a more robust solution. That is the reason we partnered with Newgen to broad base it. We deployed three of Newgen products : Omni Scan, Omni Flow and Omni Docs and integrated these products into our workflow system and built our delivery platform.

Can you talk about a domain and how the integration happened?

Let me speak about insurance first. What we have done is that, we have taken the products, deployed our own team’s understanding of the insurance domain because we have close to 100 odd people who have worked in the insurance industry and with the help of Newgen development team we built what we call today a smart insurance platform. It is a platform which can actually manage from branch to back office and address all the functions that typically a branch office of an insurance company would do – from origination of a new business proposal to origination of a new agent proposal to origination of a customer service request.

We also have the ability to manage the back office, the middle office  and then upload to the core system of the insurance companies. Similarly, we have done it on the customer service side also and we call it by name I-Care. But the underlying product remains the same but this helps us to ensure that we are able to address the needs of the policy holders, so that we are able to track the last customer interaction and this, as a product, we have been extensively using in our insurance domain.

How many insurance clients you service?

We service about 17 insurance clients. The likes of ICICI, HDFC, Birla Sunlife, Tata, Bajaj to name a few. They have their core systems what we do is help manage their workflow. We fetch data from their core systems and populate the core system but we don’t replace the core system.

Can you talk more about compliance and risk management?

Typically like any large organization, we are certified for leading standards and these are certifications and I would call them as the necessary evil. Because that’s the way people will recognize whether you are compliant or not. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating it. For instance even during the Chennai floods CAMS delivered on all its deliverables.

So you have your own redundancy?

There are three data centers. Two in Chennai and one in Coimbatore. We have enough redundancy. Being in existence for more than 28 years, we have not got a single regulatory pull-up till date. I think that speaks volumes because when you are holding so many customer records and its no easy task. So we have all the relevant systems in place.

You talked about Insurance - can you talk about the banking side?

In the banking space we don’t work on the bank solutions. With the help of the product that we bought from Newgen we cater to the account opening process like KYC etc.

Who are your competitors?

All the IT companies are our competitors. Having said that, the unique value proposition that CAMS has been our ability to address the BFSI domain with our technology platform, end-to-end process capabilities and have a branch infrastructure in 270+ locations in the country. These three as a combination is I think makes for a unique value proposition which I think helps us to differentiate in the market place.

So, will you expand to the global markets?

Our current focus is domestic. We have carved the niche for ourselves in the financial services. We believe we are a part of the financial infrastructure of the country because we don’t sell or distribute. We are only a service provider and people use our back office infrastructure for that. So that is our focus. We have not, at the moment, looked of expanding overseas.