Conflux Technologies -Pioneering Customisable Digital Banking

In sync with the ‘Digital India’ initiative, Conflux Technologies is enabling the usage of cashless economy. Its flagship product FINFLUX works seamlessly to help the customers to automate loan origination in a completely paperless fashion, says Nayan Ambali, co-founder, Conflux Technologies, in conversation with Rashi Aditi Ghosh of Elets News Network (ENN).

Give us an overview of your product line and services in India.

We are pioneers in providing customisable banking software and mobility solutions on a SaaS model in India. Our Flagship product “FINFLUX”, is a next generation banking platform that enables cashless and paperless banking and is targeted towards digital banks, payments banks, fintech lending (SME and MSME),  NBFC’s (Non-Banking Financial Company) , MFI’s (Micro Finance Institutions) , Cooperatives, SHG’s (Self Help Groups) and Business Correspondents.

FINFLUX works with Aadhaar enabled biometric integrations for e-KYC (Know Your Customer), a highly configurable workflow engine, machine learning enabled risk assessment engine, granular business rules management engine and integrations into local credit bureaus like CIBIL, Equifax and Highmark. The features work together seamlessly to help our customers to automate client on-boarding and loan origination in a completely paperless fashion. In scenarios where manual decision making is preferred, Finflux provides the necessary controls to ensure that user decisions are in-line with organisational policies.

FINFLUX integrates into Aadhaar enabled payments, NACH (National Automated Clearing House) and mobile money channels, that provides multiple options for organisations to go cashless – both for disbursements and collections.

It is hosted on AWS Mumbai Region and our support team is available round the clock to provide our valued customers with reliable support 24/7.

Instances like demonetisation and banking data breach have opened new vistas for Data centres, cloud and computing. How are the cloud based services provided by your organisation assisting the BFSI sector in this regard?

 In the immediate aftermath of demonetisation, the BFSI sector and the Indian economy has been forced to take major steps in the direction of going cashless. With our background in working with cashless economies (Kenya in particular), we seized this opportunity to strengthen our argument on the benefits of going cashless to existing and potential customers.

In short time, partner Micro Finance Institutions (MFI) companies began to completely automate their disbursal by allowing us to Integrate FINFLUX with their Bank accounts. In this regard, we should make a special mention of banking partners like RBL Bank (formerly Ratnakar Bank Limited) for making the entire process seamless for our customers.

We must thank Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana for enabling every Indian citizen to have a bank account. This has powered our MFI partners to collect repayments directly from customer’s bank accounts through NACH mandates. FINFLUX automates this workflow for cashless repayments.

From mid of May 2017, many of our customers would be using the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS) to go completely cashless. Running on AWS has helped us scale easily to cater to the increased transactions and ensure that we are able to on board new users and partners quite seamlessly on our platform.

Security is of utmost importance for any banking platform.  FINFLUX understands this. The fact that FINFLUX mandatorily runs over HTTPS, makes use of multi-factor authentication and has been audited and implemented in 15 countries gives our customers more confidence when trusting their precious data with us. Additionally, our hosting infrastructure is completely based on AWS which makes the industries best network security availability to us. Also, by using the AWS Mumbai Region, we are compliant to the data sovereignty guidelines for our industry.

In collaboration with the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and GIZ, Conflux is implementing FINFLUX core banking system at over 33 Indian micro-finance institutions. Tell us about the progress of this project.

The project was successfully completed one month ahead of its schedule and provides NABARD with a consolidated view of their channel partners’ performance.  NABARD also gets a 360-degree view of the loans and subsidies provided to each of the channel partners and their borrowers in real time.

Additionally, FINFLUX implementations at each of these channel partners have enabled them to transition from a paper-based beneficiaries and loan monitoring system to an affordable and automated MIS. This gives NABARD full real-time visibility to the quality of the portfolio of the channel partners.

How is your organisation dealing with data redundancy?

We use Amazon Aurora for storing our customer’s transactional and analytical data.

This choice was made primarily because Amazon Aurora’s storage is fault-tolerant and self-healing with the ability to detect and repair disk failures without compromising on data availability.  Using Aurora, our primary transactional data is stored in India and replicated in real time across two different geographically isolated regions (United States East and West). In the event of failure in a particular region we can seamlessly switch over to one of the available replicas, thereby providing our customers with zero downtime.

Additionally, daily complete database backups are stored on Amazon S3 and incremental backups are stored at Conflux’s local servers in Bangalore. For added peace of mind, our customers have the option of downloading complete or incremental backups onto their local servers at the end of every business day.                                                                             The document management system integrated with FINFLUX uses Amazon S3 for storing versioned documents. Amazon S3 is a highly durable storage infrastructure that synchronously stores data across multiple facilities.

India is getting digitised with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India dream, how is Conflux Technologies assisting the nation in embracing digitisation?

In banking and in financial inclusion, there are several paper-based manual processes. These include customer onboarding, KYC documentation, loan application and loan origination, credit verification and eligibility checks, loan documentation, disbursements, repayments and sharing information between branches and/or agencies.

FINFLUX ships with the facility to avoid paper-based records at each of these processes and sub-processes. These include:

• Aadhaar enabled e-KYC
• Online Credit Checks with CIBIL, Equifax and Highmark etc
• Electronic KYC document management
• Electronic loan document vault for sharing documents between branches or agencies
• Workflow based loan origination to route loan application through different roles and teams and locations
• Rule based risk assessment, customer profiling and eligibility checks
• Cashless disbursements and repayments – with optional maker-checker facility
• SMS confirmation for sanctions and disbursements and Instant SMS receipts for repayments