ICICI Bank 2005 Annual Report Download - page 42

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40
Fiscal 2005 saw a reversal in the interest rate environment. The government bond markets witnessed
significant volatility in yields. The balance sheet management function managed interest rate sensitivity to
limit the negative impact of rising yields by reducing the duration of the government securities portfolio
held for compliance with statutory liquidity reserve (SLR) norms. The focus of our proprietary trading
operations was to maximise profits from positions across key markets including corporate bonds,
government securities, interest-rate swap, equity and foreign exchange markets. The adverse fixed
income market conditions led to lower gains from the proprietary trading operations. However the Bank
continued to capitalise on opportunities in the equity markets, realising gains on its equity portfolio
acquired by way of project finance and debt restructuring as well as trading operations.
In line with the expansion of international business of the bank, the treasury also expanded its functioning
across the Bank’s international branches. A treasury function was set up at Bahrain for supporting the
operations of the Bahrain branch, in addition to the operations at the Singapore branch and the Offshore
Banking Unit at Mumbai.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
ICICI Bank has been a pioneer in revolutionising and reshaping the way banking is done in India, through
the deployment of technology on a large scale across our operations. We have created technology-based
channels with high levels of functionality for our customers to access our services, and deployed
technology across our internal processes and back-office operations. We continue to be in the forefront of
using technology as a business enabler and for gaining competitive advantage.
We continue to develop and enhance our channel infrastructure. We were the first bank to connect to the
National Financial Switch (NFS). We have also leveraged our ATM network to enable more transactions,
such as donations for tsunami relief and online mobile telephone balance top-up facilities to our
customers. We significantly enhanced our call centre technology to facilitate more convenient customer
access. Our customers can now use their debit and credit card numbers to access their banking and credit
card accounts directly through our Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. We have installed separate
numbers for different types of customers and product lines to provide quicker access to our phone
banking representatives. Taking forward our strategy to offer multi-channel access and enhanced
functionality to our customers, we have added new services on mobile banking for various deposit, credit
card and demat accounts. We have also tied up with a leading telecom services provider for payment of
mobile phone bills through SMS. We have also tied up with the Indian Railways and a private sector airline
to provide online ticketing to our customers.
During fiscal 2005, we implemented major enhancements to our customer relationship management
(CRM) and credit card systems. These will enable us to handle higher volumes and provide newer
transaction capabilities to our customers. Our payment gateway has also been revamped to provide us
additional capabilities for servicing both customers and merchants. Our transaction volumes have
increased rapidly over the past year.
Our off-site data centre outside Mumbai has been strengthened to further improve the availability of
applications and security of customer data. We have been among the leading players to have implemented
newer data telecommunication and data compression technologies which have helped improve the
efficiency of our Wide Area Network. We continue to focus closely on customer data security. We have
improved the security around online transactions to guard against unauthorised activity and external
attacks. A new methodology for second factor authentication for funds transfers to third parties, above
threshold limits, on the internet, has been introduced in addition to the requirement of a transaction
password.
Business Overview
Dickenson Tel: 022-2625 2282