Building World s Largest Agent Network for Mobile Financial Services: Case Study

Transcription

1 Building World s Largest Agent Network for Mobile Financial Services: Case Study Adarsh Credit: A trusted brand for rural members Adarsh Credit Co-Operative Society ( Adarsh Credit ) started its operations in 1999 as a co-operative society primarily serving farmers in Rajasthan, India. Adarsh is among India s leading credit co-operative societies in terms of branch network, agent strength and deposit base. It currently operates in 20 states & 4 union territories with over 140,000 agents and 800+ branches. Adarsh Credit provides savings products to cater to the needs of its members including fixed deposit, recurring deposit and daily deposit products. To provide services to its members Adarsh has created a network of agents to serve its members at their door step. The agents travel throughout rural, semi-urban and urban areas to meet with members and collect deposits. The rural environment creates unique travel challenges, often roaming long distances, which means agents often cannot return to the office or branch every day. Many agents at Adarsh Credit are in the field on a full time basis, and are constantly in the field for collections, opening new deposit accounts and servicing members daily. Previously, the agents had two main means of handling deposit collection: 1. Point-of-sale (POS) machine. Agents lug around a heavy POS device with them and input the deposit transactions in offline mode (given lack of mobile data/communication channel). When they return to the office, they transfer the data from the POS to the Adarsh Credit Core Transaction System (CTS). 2. Pen and paper. Agents write down the client information and deposit amount in a paper book. When they return to the office, the transaction details are entered manually into Adarsh Credit s systems Mistral Mobile 1

2 Both approaches require the agents to return from the field daily to update Adarsh Credit s systems, often manually. For Adarsh Credit s members, this creates a significant and worrisome delay before receiving an SMS confirmation of deposit. The mobile revolution: rolling out at scale In order to overcome the challenges faced by agents using either pen and paper, or carrying unwieldy POS machines with all transactions only recorded at the end of the day at a branch offices--adarsh Credit decided to roll out an easy to use mobile solution to provide their agents simple and powerful tools to serve members and transact in real-time no matter where they are, or how rural their location. Adarsh Credit started rolling out the new mobile solution powered by Mistral Mobile in The solution enables agents to use their Android-based mobile devices to take deposits, handle loans and provide payment and customer services. Even in rural areas without mobile data availability, the Mistral Mobile solution means transactions can be completed in real-time and securely. Adarsh Credit provides Samsung mobile devices to some of their agents who don t already have a suitable mobile device in order to accelerate the roll-out. Initially, agents performing high volumes of transactions in geographically dispersed locations were chosen. They were asked to start doing their collections using the mobile application after full end-toend training. After only a few months, the results were impressive. One agent explains: [T]ransactions happen immediately, customer gets instant confirmation and I can carry all the tools in my pocket. Before I had to carry a heavy POS machine hanging on my waist belt. When I enter a transaction on mobile, many members do not believe that I am collecting deposits on mobile [but] when they started getting SMS confirmations, they felt confident and happy with this solution. Now I also log their customer services issues immediately with the mobile application. It saves my time in the branch that I used to spend to upload collections from POS. Now collections are posted directly from the field and I just need to deposit the total collected cash in my collection account Mistral Mobile 2

3 As the initial set of agents gained confidence with the mobile application, other agents were asked to start adopting the new mobile approach. In parallel, the processes required for training, operational support, mobile device procurement and setup were fine-tuned to enable large-scale roll out of the solution. The process flow for agents is very simple and efficient: 1. Adarsh Credit agents fill an enrollment form at their home branch, providing their details and the mobile phone number to be used for the mobile application. 2. Branches send the enrollment forms via to the central back-office in Ahmedabad. 3. The central back-office team creates an agent account for mobile-based collections and registers the agent on the system. 4. Once the registration is completed (during the same day), the agent is asked to install the Adarsh mobile agent application from the Google Play marketplace. The application performs a smart self-activation process including multi-factor authentication then the application is ready to be used by the agent to provide customer services. The fully branded menu-and-icon application is highly intuitive and agents are able to start using them without any external training required. 5. There is a helpdesk provided for the agents in case they have questions or problems related to making transactions or otherwise using the application. After this the agents are ready to go to the field and perform all their customer servicing using the application Mistral Mobile 3

4 Adoption & Growth Encouraged by the good results from the initial roll-out, Adarsh Credit adopted a more consistent approach with the target to have all 140,000 Adarsh Credit agents fully equipped with the mobile solution by year end In order to drive the roll-out, Adarsh Credit s management released a circular announcing that all agents performing deposit collections should do so using the new mobile application and that the branches will no longer accept manual collections. In addition to expedite adoption, an incentive scheme was developed: qualified agents are provided a Samsung mobile device cost-free, ensuring they will be able to adopt the mobile approach easily. Currently there are already more than 20,000 agents on the mobile solution and the number keeps growing by several thousand per quarter. Every day, there are over 100 new agents performing their customer services using a mobile solution. 15,000 Samsung mobile handsets have been disbursed to date and future agents will have an option to receive Samsung mobile tablets all cost-free. Coincidentally, this has made Adarsh Credit the top customer for Samsung India by order value. Figure 1. Growth on the number of agents on mobile 2014 Mistral Mobile 4

5 The current agent pool is conducting a large number of transactions for their members at over a million per month, and daily transaction volumes have already surpassed 40,000 transactions per day. Some of the best performing agents conduct a staggering 200 transactions or more each day. All Daily Deposit and Recurring Deposit services are already currently performed exclusively via the mobile solution powered by Mistral Mobile. Figure 2. Growth on the daily mobile transaction volumes Becoming the world s largest mobile solution-based agent network As a result of the decision to adopt a mobile financial services solution from Mistral Mobile for agents, Adarsh Credit has been able to grow the mobile-solution based agent network extremely fast to make it the world s largest mobile solution-based agent network, serving a population of over one million members. The solution is highly intuitive for agents, and they do not require much by way of additional training, so the whole enrollment/onboarding process for new agents on the mobile is extremely fast. Adarsh Credit is planning to roll-out additional member servicing features on the mobile application to expand the scope of their financial services. The Mistral Mobile solution enables them to easily bring totally new member servicing features to all of their agents in the field without requiring the 2014 Mistral Mobile 5

6 agents to do tedious application re-installations: all mobile application features can be updated remotely using a push method unique to Mistral Mobile. Adarsh Credit is benefiting massively from the overall increased operational efficiencies, better member servicing capabilities and ability to increase the financial services scope easily in the field. Himanshu Shah, CTO, Adarsh comments: The solution is mobile operator independent--our agents can use whatever phone they have with whatever SIM card they're using. The menu and icons makes it super easy to train agents and use, most don't require much training at all, everything is very intuitive. Some of the agents are doing over 200 transactions per day so this is extremely important. Also as the applications are fully localized to be in Hindi language it makes the usage natural for the agents. There are no security concerns and we are very pleased to with the security model used Mistral Mobile 6

7 About Mistral Mobile Mistral Mobile solutions unleash mobile devices for secure use in ing, payments and commerce. Mistral Mobile s market-proven mobile front-end solutions are used by retail, issuing and acquiring s and other financial service providers to offer secure and flexible solutions to rapidly introduce mobile payments, mobile ing and mobile authentication services independent of mobile operators and for all mobile phones, from smart to simple phones. Mistral has two solution lines: Money Mobility Suite : The only -centric, telco & data independent, white-label mobile platform to reach the next billion consumers in the growth markets. m-aegis : The only comprehensive, multi-factor, telco-independent authentication and security solution for mobile applications and OTP replacement. Founded by former Nokia Money leaders who believe in both the commercial and socio-economic benefits of mobile financial services globally. Mistral Mobile is privately held with offices in New York City, USA, Finland and India. To learn more about the power of mobile solutions, watch an introductory video at visit or contact our sales department at Sales@MistralMobile.com About Adarsh Credit Co-operative Society Ltd. Adarsh Credit Co-operative Society was founded in 1999 with the primary objective of uplifting the social and financial status of its members by inculcating saving habits among them through the spirit of co-operation and providing technical and financial support. As of March 31, 2015, the organization had more than 800 branches across India with a deposit base of INR 5,139 crores and loans deployed of more than INR 5,523 crores. The principal function of Adarsh Credit is to provide financial services to its members and to reach every nook and corner of India. For further details visit Mistral Mobile 7