How Fino Payments Bank Leveraged Technology Solutions from Hitachi for Financial Inclusion

CASE STUDY

• Fino Payments Bank, under the National Rural Financial Inclusion Plan (NRFIP), joined hands with Hitachi to provide scalable, sustainable and secure technological solutions to facilitate financial inclusion in the under-developed regions of India
• A total investment of USD 500K was made by Fino Payments Bank towards the adoption of technology
• 2 million customers’ accounts were protected over a span of 60 days

Overview

Fino Payments Bank is a reputed banking service provider that helps other banks and financial institutions provide banking services to the under privileged and the unreached populace of the rural and urban areas of India, under National Rural Financial Inclusion Plan (NRFIP).

The objective of NRFIP is to secure greater financial inclusion particularly among the low-income groups in the under-developed regions of India, to catalyse overall development of these regions.

Challenges

Fino Payments Bank had to embrace technology that can provide scalable and sustainable solutions for inclusive growth. The bank employed biometric technology to provide doorstep banking and launched a complete array of financial services such as micro loans, insurance, etc. to service customers in remote locations.
To implement technological solutions centrally, the bank faced infrastructural challenges due to poor facilities in rural regions like power cuts, connectivity issues etc.

Some of the other challenges included –

• Legal and regulatory compliance
• Brand and reputation damage
• Application/database server protection
• No privilege identity and access solution to monitor, detect, protect and audit privileged accounts
• No centralized tool for monitoring and management of incident logs of the bank’s security infrastructure

Solution

The bank’s endeavour has been to bring cost-effective technology solutions for businesses, banks and the Government, to reach out to every un-banked individual in the country.

The bank deliberately selected Hitachi due to their process based approach to manage large scale projects and acute understanding of IT security solutions which can be leveraged to optimise reach in all strata of the society for an inclusive and sustainable growth.

Hitachi’s solutions are in line with the guidelines provided by RBI (Information & Cyber Security Guideline) for overall security of the bank’s server, identity access management and incident response & management and forensics.

Fino Payments Bank invested USD 500K towards the technology adoption.

To implement wide-scale security framework Hitachi offered security solutions which encompassed the following architecture: –

• Installing comprehensive security capabilities, including anti-malware with web reputation, host-based firewall, IPS, integrity monitoring, log inspection, and globally trusted SSL certificates
• Implementing single platform for management of security controls and policies across multiple environments
• Hitachi employed endpoint security architecture to prevent client’s servers from ransomware, including attackers targeting known software vulnerabilities to inject malicious software, or file servers from being attacked over the network
• As the bank was under strict RBI compliances, Hitachi had to integrate Netiq IDAM (identity Access Management)
• Arcsight SIEM (Security Incident and Event Management Solution) was also provided for improving the authorization

Results

• Account protection of bank’s 2 million large customer base over a span of 60 days
• 20% Y-O-Y visibility and control of security incidents as a technical benefit
• Protection of the critical banking application and database servers from malware and ransomware attacks
• Secured banking application for remote locations of India, benefitting the masses to access banking facilities from anywhere without having to go the bank
• IDAM solution has provided a complete solution for monitoring, protect and auditing of the privileged accounts
• Easier loan procurement for the small entrepreneurs, farmers etc. as the documentation and formalities could be securely done online
• Reduced documentation work
• Providing secured channel for real time banking transactions
• Security incident and event management has given a complete visibility into the threats and security incidents in the bank’s IT landscape
• Helped the bank to get proactive alerts & notification of the incidents and take measures to immediately respond and mitigate the threats and risks, thereby safeguarding critical customer information