Being a microfinance company, Equitas handles customers that belong
to the lower income group. The company, which was established in
December 2007 currently offers microfinance to people from the
urban and semi-urban areas of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Andhra
Pradesh.
As with any financial services company, a large volume of paperwork
was generated daily at Equitas. The greatest challenge faced by the
company was verifying the accuracy of the data given the manual
document creation and processing mechanisms. Manual checking of
application forms also meant lower employee productivity levels.
This led to delays in responding to customer requirements, and had
a negative effect on the overall customer experience.
“Our business had started scaling up only within a few months
of setting up. The challenge for the IT department was to adopt a
solution that could match up to the growing scale of the business
without any additional costs,” says H Mahalingam, CTO,
Equitas Micro Finance India.
Faster Loan Processing
To overcome the above challenge, the organization adopted a DMS
from Newgen Software, comprising a document management software and
optical mark recognition scanners. Mahalingam explains that scaling
up the operations without additional costs meant increasing the
throughput without increasing the number of seats in back office
operations. Implementing the DMS has allowed Equitas to exactly do
so. Prior to the implementation, every loan document-processing
operator processed up to 80 documents in a single shift per
day.
After implementing the solution, the company has achieved a
three-fold increase in productivity. The same operator processes up
to 250 documents per day in a single shift. As a requirement, while
only around 75 percent of the data is captured through the DMS, the
organization has been able to achieve almost 100 percent data
accuracy for its loan documents.
Equitas also achieved a reduction in cost and space
requirements. The organization had to store documents of each
customer for auditing and other compliance requirements of banks
and external auditors. Storing physical documents of 1 million
customers would required a massive increase in space requirements.
Having the documents in digital form has allowed the company to
save storage space costs of up to a few lakh rupees per
quarter.