To expand its reach and quicken the delivery of its services across remote areas in the country, Mahindra Finance equipped its field task force with a mobile solution

Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd. (MMFSL), part of the Mahindra Group, is one of India’s leading non-banking finance companies focused on the rural and semi urban sector. It provides finance for utility vehicles, tractors and cars and has a network of 459 offices.

MMFSL was expanding rapidly across the Indian sub-continent, particularly to remote locations, rural villages and semi-urban towns. To facilitate this reach, the company needed to have new branches fully operational in quick time.

Lack of basic infrastructure at the new branches was posing as a significant roadblock. Vehicle dealers also needed financing information on time to compete effectively with other players. The company required a scalable IT infrastructure to support the growing number of branches and employees.

“Deploying mobile solutions was our biggest bet to address all the above issues,” says Suresh A Shanmugam, Head, Business Information Technology Solutions (BITS), Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Limited.

In the earlier legacy environment, dependency on local systems was low; all recorded data was captured in the database at the head office, written on compact discs (CDs) and sent to other locations as per branch requirements.  

Since the customer base of the company consisted mainly of farmers and transporters, with little or no exposure to technology, the mobile was the preferred medium to cater to their demands at their doorstep.

For meeting the business requirements, the new mobility infrastructure had to enable deployment of applications quickly and without any disruption to existing services.

The field task force needed to be connected to the company's system to gain access to the business support solutions and ensure that the monthly installments from the 1.3 million customers were collected when they were due. Shanmugam and his team set out to do just that. To empower rural remote services and do so in an effective manner, Shanmugam deployed e-Point of Sale (ePos) devices. These devices ran on open source software and provided access at the last mile, acting like a mini mobile branch. By using such mobile services and by deploying automated SMS solutions, business queries could be resolved much faster.

The business team's demand were clear: it wanted to process queries on a loan application and sanction the same within two days. This is now possible from all MMFSL-connected locations. The field force now extracts and captures information in
real time. Internal users can now check status of collections at any given point of time thereby enhancing their efficiency levels.

Around 80 percent of the company’s collection was done through cash which had its own problems. “By deploying this mobile service our executives now know the exact amount to be collected from the client and they can also provide a receipt anywhere and at anytime,” says Shanmugam. Other features of the mobile device system include biometric thumb impression, combined touch screen display for input and output, customer voice recording, RFID solution to trace the exact location of the  executive, customer signature capturing etc.

With the mobile solution in place, loans can now be disbursed quickly, often in less than two hours. Data duplicity at the back-end is eliminated. It has also resulted in best practices and compliance for the company to instill not only best process and procedures but also to comply with regulator/ trade bodies related to commerce trade and finance.