Transaction Authentication Solution

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The Client

A major international bank which offers online banking services.

The Challenge

The customers of the bank had access to the bank’s portal to authorize payments and carry on financial transactions. It was a safe and secure method of authorization; but it was confined the transactions to desktops and laptops, as the portal was not supported on other devices.

The bank wanted to enable banking on-the-move. They wanted to develop a mobile app to facilitate authorization via smart phones and tablets.

How We Helped

GTL was asked to develop and make the transaction authentication application live in a short period. It had to be made available through different app stores – for multiple mobile operating systems. It had to support a wide variety of devices and older versions of popular operating systems too. Security was a critical factor. The app had to work only on authentic devices and provide 100% transaction safety.

GTL conceptualised, designed and delivered the complete solution in four months, with support for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices. The application incorporates bank-level security with two-factor authentication. It offers a secure channel between the client and the server, meeting SSL, PSL and AES norms for data and channel encryption.

It underwent two rigorous rounds of testing – internally for quality assurance and business acceptance, and externally by a recognised agency, for penetration and security, receiving a fool-proof tag.

The application helped the bank to increase the overall efficiency, as transactions were made possible through a variety of devices, Enabled location-independent but secure banking and provide faster, reliable services to customers

Social Media App to create awareness on Trading

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The Client

Geojit Financial Services, the parent company of GTL is a reputed financial services organization based in India.

The Challenge

Most Indian families with a financial surplus do not invest in equities or related products. One of the key reasons is lack of awareness and an improper understanding of the ‘risk’ concept. GFSL with GTL as the technical partner wanted to clear the misconceptions and let audiences have practical experience in equity-related transactions, but in a safe and user-friendly way.

As social media usage has been increasing in India, a Facebook app was chosen to engage with the country’s young audience. The Bombay Stock Exchange supported this initiative. This resulted in launch FLIP Social, a Facebook app, to reach young users.

How We Helped

FLIP Social was launched by the CEO of the Bombay Stock Exchange and is a part of the institution’s investor education initiative. It was rolled out as a first-of-its kind knowledge dissemination and transaction platform in India. This is the first transaction-enabled social media application in India’s retail capital market segment.

FLIP Social has both educational and transactional functionalities. Its key features include:

  • A knowledge dissemination system with definitions of terminologies used in the capital markets, ratios, etc, with virtual classrooms
  • A virtual trading platform for users to create portfolios, buy or sell, book virtual profit or loss; users can invite friends to participate in this game
  • Live global indices and important market news for greater awareness
  • Trading and investment options for KYC compliant users of GFSL; all transactions are routed via a secured broker’s network and subject to surveillance and risk management
  • The application saw phenomenal success with new-users signing up for the games and live updates.

For GTL and GFSL, it helped to build greater brand recall, create an online platform for investors, traders and potential investors to interact and also a channel for lead generation and conversion with cost per client conversion reduced by more than 50% compared to traditional acquisition channels

Trading on the go

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The Client

Geojit Financial Services (GFSL), a prominent Indian financial services organization with international operations.

The Challenge

GFSL, with its great priority on customer service wanted to attract and retain a growing segment of young customers, they wanted to facilitate trading-on-the move and to increase the ease of transactions.They asked GTL to find a solution.

How We Helped

GTL has always believed that businesses need to use technology to stay ahead of competition. We had begun work in 2009 on a mobile version of our FLIP Platform for faster and smarter capital markets transactions. However, regulatory limitations had slowed its progress. In 2010, the regulations changed to permit mobile interfaces to stock exchanges in India. GTL soon launched FLIP Mobile Edition (FLIP ME) for GFSL, which offered unprecedented functionality.

FLIP ME is a single platform to support multiple stock exchanges through multiple mobile operating systems and phones. It supports transactions-on-the-move with an increasing percentage of customers using it on a regular basis. It’s thus a valuable tool for customer service and retention, and gives GFSL, the distinction of being a forward-thinking enterprise, highly adaptive to market trends.

Some of the key features of Flip ME include:

  • Intuitive design, which is flexible and user friendly
  • Ease of transacting through simple phones and not just sophisticated smart phones
  • Grid watch for a new, simple and efficient way of showing market data
  • Intra-day charts to support real-time trading
  • Easy access to call centre with the click of a button – customers don’t need to type their TIN/ PIN information, which increases the solution’s user-friendliness
  • Alerts function to push notifications to the handheld
  • Integration with customer care for better customer engagement
  • Integration with research desk for useful trading ideas and tips
  • Educative videos, access to knowledge forums, etc to increase awareness about trading

Robust Technology Platform for Trading

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The Client

Geojit Financial Services (GFSL), a prominent Indian financial services organization with international operations.

The Challenge

GFSL needed a smart technology platform to bolster their operations. The existing software was decentralized and had several lacunae. Risk management policies differed across branches, resulting in confusion for customers. Lack of data centrality meant that orders placed through browser and mobile channels did not get immediate visibility at the branches. Multi-location servers added to infrastructure and resource costs but did not provide scalability.

How We Helped

GTL developed the FLIP platform- a comprehensive solution suite for trading. FLIP became a product suite with all the features essential for financial institutions and traders to carry on their capital markets transactions. Some of its unique features include:

  • Bank-level transactional security – with two-factor authentication, 14-points password policy, and other features to ensure optimum data safety
  • Payment gateway to enable easier financial transactions
  • Real-time research call based on market behavior and risk monitoring
  • Pop-up alerts
  • Offline order placing – where calls placed after trading hours are forwarded the next morning
  • User-friendly margin system called Credit Request Facility (CRF), which was a path-breaking facility
  • Enhanced portfolio management options to help brokers gain greater visibility and better manage client’s share holdings

In November 2010, the web and mobile edition apps were launched, giving GTL the distinction of creating the first mobile trading application in India to place orders on BSE and NSE.

FLIP followed a phased-development approach powered by team work. Gradual inclusion of value-added features ensured that the product was successful. FLIP was soon offered to dealers after receiving NSE’s approvals.

GFSL gained from centralised operations, faster processing capabilities and ability to manage larger volumes. FLIP reduced overall infrastructure costs. A clustered server pattern ensured there would be no system down-time even if individual servers were affected and also provided a blue-print for scalability.

Digital Customer Experience

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The Client

A digital bank serving customers in Germany and France.

The Challenge

The bank wanted to create a feature-rich mobile banking application to attract and serve young customers. The application’s pre-requisites were new age banking features, ease of use, augmented user experience and compatibility with popular technology platforms.

How We Helped

GTL was selected to build the application based on our previous success stories with the bank. The app was developed in six months and integrated with existing client systems. A well-defined integration interface eased linkages with third-party mobile applications.

GTL’s custom-developed app helped the bank to attract more customers, enable users with faster decision-making capabilities and speed-up transaction capabilities by 30%. Following the immense success of the mobile application, GTL also built an iPad app for the bank to provide their customers highly-structured information for decision making.

The banking app for digital banking offered the following features:

  • Bank accounts and deposits overview
  • Cash transfer (internal and external)
  • Purchase/ sale of financial instruments
  • Detailed portfolio and cash transfer report
  • Secure transactions: Two Factor Secure transactions with TAN (Vasco Token)
  • Real-time quotes pushed on mobile
  • Custom watch list
  • Intraday and historical charts
  • Instrument snapshot with a detailed view of finical instruments
  • Support for all major Android devices starting from OS version 2.2

Branchless Business Solution for major European Bank

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The Client

A major provider of banking and financial services to individual customers through their consumer credit and mortgage activities in Europe.

The Challenge

To optimize operational costs and deliver added value to customers, they wanted to implement an innovative branchless business model for deposit gathering and customer service.

How We Helped

Developing this multi-lingual portal meant excellent quality assurance measures for the delivery, with short and fast releases. Integrating the solution with back end systems and flawless customer care were highly crucial and the time-to-market was short. Moreover the new business concept and change requirements demanded quick work. Moreover, the project asked for global coordination with multiple stakeholders scattered across locations in India and Europe.

GTL rose to the challenge and came up with a cost-effective solution with an integrated customer portal, secured employee workstation and content management abilities. The portal featured a digital account opening form signed with TAN.

We had a flexible development approach and used a team with strong skills in business, technology and testing. The project was divided into multiple iterations and followed agile methodology and development practices. This shortened the gap between teams – front end, middleware and QA. Other highlights of our approach included:

  • Organization of workshops with business before each lot
  • Establishment of strong and close communication with the business and the stakeholders
  • Manual and automated testing to ensure impeccable quality
  • Strong participation of the QA team in the development process

The implementation helped the client create a new benchmark in the banking sector.

GTL services for the engagement included:

  • IT Project management and coordination with multiple stakeholders
  • Requirement management and engineering
  • Architecture design
  • Software development
  • System testing and quality assurance
  • Release management
  • IT support for the business