Ideahub completes four years as the primary digital partner of HNB, Sri Lanka’s largest private-sector commercial bank. Since its appointment in 2019, ideahub has driven and supported the digital transformation of HNB’s retail business. The appointment in 2019 was the culmination of ideahub’s engagement with HNB since 2018, starting with the implementation of the primary customer touch points of the multi-award-winning bank. Their partnership with ideahub has helped HNB provide a unique and signature service to their customers which won the LankaPay Technnovation Award 2023 for the Bank of the Year for Excellence in Customer Convenience.
Symphony powers digitalisation of HNB
HNB’s retail banking segment operates on ideahub’s fully integrated, secure and easily customisable Symphony platform that amalgamates the domains of PayTech, Banktech, LifeTech and Reward Tech. The SOLO Digital Wallet, and the Internet and Mobile Banking platforms HNB customers use are all components of Symphony, uniquely tailored and branded for HNB. Now a robust and highly dependable platform, Symphony’s progress spans over 10 years with operational input from industry-leading customers in South Asia region and Australia, including HNB, Dialog Axiata and PiPay of Cambodia going into its development.
“Financial services industry is highly competitive. Customer orientation directly impacts revenue. Ideahub is completely aligned with our digitalization strategy and helps us stay in sync with our customers. Their strong technical competencies, innovative thinking, domain experience and solid development process help them to quickly translate our requirements into meaningful product features and stay true to our vision.” explained Chammika Weerasinghe – Assistant General Manager – Digital Business of HNB
Symphony is to HNB digital strategy like the final painting is to the concept in an artist’s mind, It has contributed to the steady growth of HNB’s retail banking business by making its operations faster, more secure, simpler and more reliable. This is clearly evident as more than 50% of Fixed Deposits are opened through the Digital Platform.
Shankar Dharmaratne, Head of Digital Services of HNB says “Unlike large technology companies and global products, boutique technology organisations such as Ideahub are ready to invest time and resources to grow with the customer. We needed a partner who will invest time and effort in our digital transformation journey and not a mere supplier”
A holistic platform for Banks, FinTech and Telcos
The applications in the symphony ecosystem cover primary aspects of business in the financial and telecom industries. The digital touchpoints enable users to access their accounts, purchase products from merchants, pay utility bills and connect to payment gateways such as credit and debit card services. They can chat with friends and send and receive digital gifts. Merchants can feature their product catalogues, and provide offers and discounts. The customer loyalty plugin available on Symphony is a unique and important feature that is not found in its international competition. Financial institutions can deliver line-of-business and added services to their retail customers and partner with Symphony, for a fraction of the cost of competitive products.
ConnectTech – Seamless Integration with SpiderCraft middleware
Symphony has pre-configured connectors to fuse with industry-standard interfaces and systems easily and speedily, providing a seamless user experience for all users on the platform. This is made possible by ideahub’s proprietary state-of-the-art integration middleware, SpiderCraft which helps Symphony Interoperate with business-critical new and legacy payment interfaces used by the client organisation.
SecureTech – Industry-standard security
At the core of the platform are security, identification, authentication, fraud management, role definition and permission management features. Symphony is compliant with the widely accepted PCI DSS security standard in the industry. The platform has been designed and implemented with enterprise-grade security standards in each tier of the architecture. The data at rest and transit are encrypted with the assistance of enterprise-grade Hardware Secure Modules.
Predictive capability and machine learning led revenue opportunities
Symphony’s capabilities of cross-functionality and coordination coupled with data mining and analytical tools help the client organisation garner revenue from multiple channels thereby improving top-line revenue growth
HNB broadening their reach to non-HNB banking customers by separating the banking and non-banking services on Symphony through the “digital layer” or “DL”. It is a great example of cross-functionality coordination. This separation in the architectural layer working between Symphony and the customer interfaces is invisible to the user. Maintaining the two groups on the same platform allows the bank to analyse user data across both groups- an advantage, in addition to cost efficiency and giving a seamless experience to the customers.
The machine learning capability of Symphony enables it to provide its users with an intuitive user-centric experience eliminating the frustrations they might usually encounter with other tech platforms.
Chaminda Ranasinghe, Founder and CEO of Ideahub says Symphony is not just for banks, but for any financial services organisation or telcos looking for their own, branded digital payment platform.
“We have developed Symphony over 10 years taking input from actual customers who use it daily in the South Asia region and Australia. The type of customisation we do literally isn’t skin deep. We delve into customers’ requirements and make the platform unique to them. If you experience Pi Pay and HNB SOLO, you won’t think that they are based on the same platform. We are able to deliver this digital transformation to a customer within months and not years and at a fraction of the cost of other products in the market, due to the fluid and reconfigurable nature of Symphony. We are not exaggerating when we say that the future is enabled with Symphony already!”
