Chief Executive Officer, C-Edge Technologies Ltd
C-Edge Technologies is a joint venture between Tata Consultancy Services ( TCS) and State Bank of India and it caters to the small and medium banks and takes pride in its business operations in India. Small and medium banks never had any service provider meeting their technology requirements on long term basis, says K Krishna Kumar, Chief Executive Officer, C-Edge Technologies Ltd.
What are the products and solutions C-Edge Technologies Limited (C-Edge) offer?
C-Edge is a joint venture between Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) and State Bank of India (SBI). We are a distinct and a formidable corporate entity and a unique service provider which has got parental support of the biggest Indian technology company and the biggest Indian bank.
We cater to the small and medium banks and we are proud of our business operations as in India, small and medium banks never had any service provider which meet their technology requirement on long term basis. We offer end-to-end solutions for all the banking operations. Our entire model is hosted on cloud. It is a private cloud where customers do not need to worry about the cost. We allow them to pay for customised services on pay-as-you-go model.
Besides core banking, our products range includes solutions for net banking, mobile banking, technologies to support Rupay products – the NPCI (National Payment Corporation India) products; we also have anti-money laundering technologies. RuPay is an Indian domestic card scheme conceived and launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). So we have 40 – 45 products and solutions and we keep inventing newer ones to meet the requirements of our customers. We would like to mention that the costs of all these solutions is very competitive. Our products are being subscribed by several Gramin Banks in Andhra Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Telangana and other states of the country. We are also serving banks in foreign countries as well and foreign banks located in India.
How has been your experience of working with smaller banks in India?
Working with smaller banks is challenging as they are not trained to understand the newer technologies. As an application service provider, we have to invest a significant amount of time to train the staff and spread the awareness about the benefits of latest and advanced technologies within banking systems. We are proud to say that we, with our technologies, assist the banks in remote areas and convert them as our customers.
Are technologies very expensive?
We are here to provide technologies to our customers at a very competitive cost. We ensure that before a customer plans to deploy certain technologies, they are aware of the investment. Our customers do not need to worry about the infrastructure and training aspects; we take care of this for our customers.
What are you latest initiatives?
The newest initiative is that within 24 hours of demonetisation announcement, we have been able to finetune our systems as per the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) guidelines. The next area focuses on providing complete end-to-end support for GST (Goods and Services Tax) including the consulting and technological support. We would like to be one-stop shop for offering GST execution. We are also very positive about IMPS technologies. We believe mobile payment technologies will prosper in future.
How significant is research and development part for your business? How C-Edge is leveraging the expertise of TCS and SBI?
As we have stated on our website, “C-Edge’s Centre of Excellence (COE) aims to provide best practices, training, deep domain expertise, technical implementation, and testing expertise for the banking industry. Over the last 7 years, we have gained this expertise in the course of implementing banking solutions for over 150 banks.”
We would like to create products which can meet customers’ requirement efficiently. We want to create products which can be sold to different customers with competitive costs.
We are a separate entity. However, we seek help from TCS and SBI as and when we require. The association is indeed an advantage for us. On the board, we have two representatives from TCS and SBI each.
Recently, we came across a situation where security of millions of debit cards has been compromised. How can the banking system avoid such situations in future?
Every coin has two sides, and unfortunately, this is the other side of it. We need to keep on inventing and reinventing technologies to ensure our systems do not fall prey to hackers. Hackers also use advanced technologies to break into our systems, we need to stay a step ahead of them. We need to win customers’ trust and this is very important.
Within our organisation, we have physical security measures. We make use of the most advanced biometric mechanisms. We ensure that our data is not accessible to anybody and everybody. We also use automation within our premises and most importantly, we are always in search of that extra effort which can strengthen the security of our systems. Further, we have stored our data at certified data centres.
What is the market share of C-Edge in India?
We have well presence in tier-3 cities and rural areas. We have close to 60 – 70 per cent footprint in these areas. The economy is actually moving to these areas and we are happy to extend our reach to these organisations. Our products are very well received. Even the remotest of the locations, there is lot of enthusiasm for implementing technologies.
C-Edge’s Centre of Excellence (COE) aims to provide best practices, training, deep domain expertise, technical implementation, and testing expertise for the banking industry.
Which are the other sectors, you are planning to cater to with your products?
We have always been into banking, however, we are now moving into insurance sector. We believe, it is also a booming sector and there are immense opportunities in this domain as well. We are looking for partners to co-create software. We believe in partnerships. There are several companies which are doing extremely good by developing solutions for BFSI sectors. We will be happy to collaborate with such companies and promote their initiatives.
We want to be a one-stop-shop for our customers for all their technology needs. We are glad that we are a trusted company for our customers. We will like to develop software and services for GST which will be levied by Central Government on inter-State supply of goods and services.
What is your opinion about demonetisation?
There was a need for such a bold move to control the black-money menace. There was a need to stand up boldly against and this is one such move which – to a great extent – will control the undeclared money.
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