Peppers and Rogers Group (Asia), a leading international consulting firm specialising in customer-based business strategy, is offering its expertise to fine-tune Infosys’ recently launched Finacle CRM product.

Girish Vaidya, head of Infosys Technologies’s Banking Business Unit (BBU), said, “While banks and IT vendors always cite customer satisfaction as their primary reason for considering a CRM package, banks need to differentiate between managing customers for loyalty and managing customers for profit.” Infy BBU believes that the growth of retail banking in India has lead to banks realising the need for a CRM product that will help them retain, manage and attract new customers.

Infosys BBU’s expertise is in banking software and not in CRM. Therefore it wanted professional advice on improving modules in the Finacle CRM product. Infosys did not divulge the consulting charges it will pay Peppers and Rogers Group, but it however maintained that the firm would help fine-tune its Finacle CRM product to perfection.

Vaidya added, “We recently bagged UTI as our first customer in India who will be using Finacle CRM. UTI has signed up for the Infosys Loan Origination System built on Finacle CRM. The product covers end-to-end sales, marketing and support functionality with powerful interfacing capabilities to multiple systems such as bank office, treasury and telephony.”

Tim Tyler, founder and chairperson, Peppers and Rogers Group said, “A major driver of banking CRM software is ‘personalised service, products and relevance to customer needs, especially for High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI).” He adds that the number of HNWI in Asia has been increasing significantly and India stands fourth after Australia, China and South Korea in the APAC region with respect to HNWI population. “We see the demand for banking CRM increasing rapidly and India is a key market,” Tyler added.