Financial services without the silos
Dunia Finance's customer-centric approach to financial services requires a CRM-driven infrastructure that gives fast, reliable access to customer data, to give a holistic picture of customer interaction and business.
Launching into an already well-served market is a challenge for any business, but to launch into the UAE financial market, which is cluttered at best, during a time of financial crisis, is a very tough proposition. This was the situation facing Dunia Finance LLC, known as dunia, a finance company that was created as a strategic partnership between Mubadala Development, Waha Capital, AA Al Moosa Enterprises, and Fullerton Financial Holdings (a wholly owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings in Singapore). The company was established to provide a range of financial services to individual and business customers, including loans, credit cards, deposits, labour guarantees, and payroll solutions.
Because Dunia, which means ‘world', was set up by an established team of bankers, the company took a different approach from other financial institutions from the start. Barlas Balabaner, operations head, Dunia Finance, explained: "We have seen from experience that it often becomes difficult for most large financial organisations to move the ship late into the business. As a group of seasoned bankers, at dunia we unlearned a lot of the things that did not work well and kept the good things. We started business with a blank slate and knew exactly what we wanted."
One particular aim for the company was to be customer-centric. dunia takes a customer-centric and segmented approach that aims to first understand customer needs and then offer relevant financial solutions based on that. To manage this, the company decided its business approach, and underlying IT systems, also needed to be customer-centric.
"Our research indicated that most financial institutions tend to work in silos, with a product focus instead of a customer focus, implying that there is no holistic solution being offered to customers to meet their needs. The customers on the other hand are not serviced in a well-rounded manner. So one of the things we focused on was to structure an organization where people, technology and process that are driven based on organizational customer segments and not product focused," he added.
dunia's IT architecture is built around an integrated Oracle EBS CRM with IT systems and infrastructure including an Oracle data-warehouse, that makes customer information available instantly, with all data flowing back through the CRM including the analytics.
The company regards technology as one of the key enablers for the business so it implemented a fully integrated, best-of-breed, customer centric IT infrastructure, that is intended to be both robust and scalable. The infrastructure is designed to provide redundancy and high availability of all enterprise applications ensuring near 100% availability to the business. As a start-up company, and to further boost IT resilience, dunia decided to outsource its infrastructure management, and it now hosts the entire production and development IT infrastructure with UAE service provider eHosting DataFort.
"In managing our infrastructure, eHDF delivers on a very critical function that is core to our process management environment which supports our business. We often compare the scenario to having a second heart that ticks outside the body with eHDF," Balabaner added.
The company has proven to be a success, breaking even in 30 months and picking up a number of awards for customer service.
"Looking ahead at expansion we see growth in the existing business and we are also looking to grow into new geographies and new products and technology will continue to be a strong enabler to support this growth," Balabaner concluded.
DUNIA IT INFRASTRUCTURE
- IBM Power Series
- IBM X Series
- IBM Blade Centres
- Oracle EBS Suite
- Oracle data warehouse
- FinnOne from Nucleus