ICICI Bank 2006 Annual Report Download - page 39

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38
Business Overview
The Bank conducted its annual employee survey to facilitate continuous engagement with employees,
enabling them to voice their views and opinions on various aspects of the organisation and help arrive at
meaningful, actionable conclusions for organisational strategy. The Bank has been able to create thought
leaders at various levels across the organisation to participate in policy making, employee communication
and perspective building.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
ICICI Bank is a pioneer in adopting and implementing the latest technology in banking. We have deployed
state-of-the-art technology across various channels to provide convenient access to services to our
customers. We have integrated processes from customer touch point to back-office operations in a
seamless manner with the aid of technology. We continue to be in the forefront of using technology to
offer enhanced products and services.
We have expanded our reach significantly by leveraging technology across various channels like internet
banking, ATMs, point of sales, call centre, interactive voice response and branch offices. In fiscal 2006,
we re-designed our internet banking site and received very encouraging feedback from our customers.
We expanded our ATM network to over 2,200 ATMs and our ATMs support transactions for our customers
and also customers networked with National Financial Switch (NFS), Mastercard International and Visa
International. We deployed new emerging call centre technologies like Voice Over Internet Protocol and
set up our third call centre facility at Thane near Mumbai. We significantly enhanced our interactive voice
response system and mobile banking systems to offer more value added service.
During fiscal 2006, we migrated to a new credit card system with a scalable technology architecture that
will enable us to handle higher volumes and provide new transaction capabilities to our customers. Our
payment gateway was also revamped to provide us additional capabilities for servicing both customers
and merchants.
Technology is a critical element of our strategy for international expansion. During fiscal 2006, our core
banking application was implemented with an enhanced graphical user interface in Hong Kong and Sri
Lanka. A new US dollar clearing system was also successfully deployed in Hong Kong. Further, technology
operations of our overseas operations have been outsourced to specialised teams in India. This has
helped us in reducing additional investments by leveraging our existing infrastructure and has helped us
gain economies of scale and reduce costs.
Our data centre at Mumbai was strengthened with additional servers so as to further improve the availability
of applications. In an effort to maintain robust and reliable disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity
capabilities, we have scaled the infrastructure at our DR sites and carried out DR drills to check readiness.
We were successful in keeping our systems and ATMs available during the floods in Mumbai. We were
among the first players to implement newer data telecommunication and migrate from traditional lease
line and dial up connections to fully redundant Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) backbone. We
have implemented encryption solution and software tools on all personal computers to provide data
encryption. We continue to focus on security of customer data.
We continue to experiment with a number of emerging technologies and are working closely with
technology partners to provide innovative solutions to our customers. We believe that our commitment
to technology will help us to maintain our innovative edge. Going forward, we are excited about using
technology to realize the full potential of rural India.
KEY GROUP COMPANIES
ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company
ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company (ICICI Prudential Life) continued to maintain its market leadership
among private sector life insurance companies with a retail market share of 30% in the private sector in
fiscal 2006 (on weighted received premium basis). Life insurance companies worldwide make losses in
the initial years, in view of business set-up and customer acquisition costs in the initial years as well as
reserving for actuarial liability. While the growing operations of ICICI Prudential Life had a negative impact