Punjab National Bank sets a milestone for the Indian banking industry

Company Brief

New Delhi, February 05, 2009

Punjab National Bank (PNB), India’s second largest public sector bank today announced that it has completed 100% core banking implementation at all its 4604 branches and extension counters through the Finacle Universal Banking Solution from Infosys, on Sun infrastructure and the Oracle Database setting a significant milestone for themselves and a new benchmark for the Indian banking industry.

Completed in November 2008, 4 months ahead of schedule, the bank implemented industry-leading Finacle core banking solution from Infosys across its operations running a flexible, and scalable database platform from Oracle and innovative and cost-effective Sun SPARC enterprise servers from Sun Microsystems

With its pan India presence, PNB offers a wide variety of banking services through its 4604 branches including 249 extension counters – the largest amongst Nationalized Banks. With an increasingly dynamic business and regulatory environment, PNB sought to not only achieve automation, but also centralize operations, standardize branch processes, achieve high scalability for future business growth, provide flexibility of creating innovative banking products to its lines of business, and at the same time, reduce overall costs.

The visionary zeal and the futuristic view of the Bank’s top management in the year 2000-2001 incubated the idea of introduction of a Centralised Banking solution. The bold and innovative thought culminated into the CBS architecture with Finacle application on Oracle Database and Sun hardware platform with Solaris Operating System.

In 2001-2002, PNB embarked upon a transformation journey unparalleled in the country in terms of scale and technology. The bank became the first public sector bank in India to opt for a new generation core banking platform – Finacle from Infosys. Since then, Finacle has enabled the bank to consolidate and centralize its operations, improving branch efficiency and productivity per employee. Consolidation has also resulted in reduction of revenue leakage and cost, while increasing ease of technical support and maintenance at branches.

With Finacle’s agile and future proof technology, the bank today has over 22,500 concurrent users. The solution’s scalability has also enabled the bank’s scalability to be the best in the country with the number of peak transactions at 3.5 million.

Finacle core banking platform also provides the bank with exceptional agility for product innovation and improved flexibility of operations. With seamless integration of delivery channels such as ATM and internet banking solutions, PNB is able to provide 24X7 services to customers at a reduced transaction cost.

Sun SPARC enterprise M series and energy efficient Chip Multi-Threading (CMT) systems running the Solaris Operating System delivered higher performance and scalability, enabling PNB’s architecture to scale seamlessly from catering to 500 branches to more than 4600 branches across the nation. Periodic consolidation of servers and storage by Sun Professional Services also delivered important benefits – optimizing compute and storage utilization, reducing power, cooling and space costs significantly over a period of time.

Sun technologies also ensured continuous availability of the banking platform with the Disaster Recovery Site established by the bank and as part of test drills, the Bank has successfully operated out of its alternative datacentre (DRS).

PNB’s choice of the Oracle Database has provided the bank’s IT infrastructure with robustness, management features, security and scalability as well as performance requirements to service 3.5 million transactions and 22500 concurrent users – a significant achievement in the Indian banking industry. In addition, the Oracle Database will help PNB take control of its enterprise information, gain better business insight, and quickly and confidently adapt to an increasingly changing competitive environment.

With secure, highly available and scalable grids of low-cost servers and storage, Oracle customers can tackle the most demanding transaction processing, data warehousing, business intelligence and content management applications.

The 100% implementation of Finacle Core Banking Solution shall enable PNB to further reduce operational costs and revenue leakage while improving productivity of branches, introduction of new and innovative products and visibility of business. The anywhere anytime banking facility will enable the bank to offer products for every segment of the customer.

On the landmark achievement of 100% CBS, Dr. K. C Chakrabarty - Chairman and Managing Director of Punjab National Bank said “The challenges of the financial sector can be met with the total connectivity and the centralisation of the banking operations. It not only ensures standardisation of products, but also enables quick launch of the new and innovative financial products ensuring sufficient lead time to market it. Vast majority of our population are still denied easy access to banking and the technology driven Financial inclusion initiative will bridge the gap. The core banking solution offers seamless platform for integrating various such initiatives and also reduces the cost of transaction, thereby offering financial products at an affordable cost. The achievement of 100% CBS is the beginning of our efforts in this direction. The contribution of our technology partners enabled us to achieve the milestone ahead of the time schedule.”

Mr. Haragopal M, Head - Finacle, Infosys Technologies Ltd., said on the occasion, “I congratulate Punjab National Bank on setting this unique standard in the Indian banking industry. Our long-standing and progressive partnership also highlights Finacle’s leadership in large scale banking transformation, the solution’s future proof technology and powerful capabilities. India is a strategic market for Finacle and we look forward to closely collaborating with Punjab National Bank for their future growth plans.”

Commenting on this achievement, Mr. T. Srinivasan, Vice President, Technology Sales, Oracle India said, “It gives me immense pleasure to see our relationship with PNB, of almost a decade, reach this stage of achievement. We have worked closely with the bank to provide an IT infrastructure through Oracle Database that will enable the bank to support its customers 24x7.” He added, “In addition, our database is easy to deploy and manage and will provide PNB with high availability of data.

Highlighting the need for banks to transform business functions by leveraging agile next generation technologies, Mr. Anil Valluri, Vice President and Managing Director- India GEM, Sun Microsystems said, “We congratulate PNB on completion of this milestone and we are privileged to be part of this project. This represents a giant stride for the Indian banking industry in its road to adoption of technology. In order to meet rapidly changing business demands, banks need enterprise-wide tools that can eliminate obstacles, meet the challenge of new markets, and ultimately lead to a healthy competitive position. With over two decades of technology experience, Sun Microsystems has been a leading provider of mission critical technologies and services to the Banking industry and our customers are marquee names in the Indian banking industry. The deployment of Sun’s flexible and efficient infrastructure has helped PNB in the implementation of the core banking solution at a rapid pace.”

For further information, please contact:

VCCPL

Manpreet Singh

Email: Manpreet@vccpl.com