Customer Centric Approach

Customer suitability and appropriateness framework

The Bank’s clientele ranges from small and medium category clients with limited experience / knowledge of derivative products to large corporates having a highly sophisticated treasury system to take care of their foreign exchange exposures. The Bank offers a wide range of structured derivative products to its clients to enable them to mitigate various risks emanating out of an underlying exposure in their books. Some of the essential criteria upon which the products are offered to the customers are as under:

• Nature of the underlying exposure
• Risk profile of the client
• Hedge objective of the client
• Hedge cost
• Relevant regulatory guidelines, etc.

Based on the above, the Bank offers a variety of derivative products to its clients on the basis of the customer appropriateness and suitability policy. The objective of the policy is to enable right selling to the customer.

The current framework as per regulatory and internal guidelines covers assessing and classifying customers on key parameters such as product knowledge and understanding, experience in terms of number of years and volume of transactions done, risk management policy including MIS tracking / stop loss policy and delegation of powers and product classification into specific baskets based on complexity. Also, as per the framework, the products are classified, based on the cash-flow type, number of variables, pricing complexity and liquidity.

The customer classification and product classification put together form a deal matrix, which determines the sales process to be followed. It also covers the control mechanism of the process within the Bank and the reporting of risks / positions to the customer. The process is automated through an online platform, developed internally within the bank to enable online verification of the sales process to be followed and its validation by the back office.