Digitisation has the potential to promote sustainable business practices. For a bank, it offers opportunities to build efficiencies and enable prudent use of resources while minimising the impact on the environment. ICICI Bank has been a pioneer in digitisation and adoption of emerging technologies. Our initiatives encompass digital re-engineering of our operations that provide us an opportunity to manage our environmental footprint while creating superior and delightful banking experiences for our customers.
A significant impact of focussing on digitisation for customers has been saving paper. Banking activities like account opening, loan processing and regular banking transactions are gradually being shifted to the digital platform. The Bank continuously encourages customers to adopt digital channels to fulfill their banking requirements. Our customer-facing digitisation efforts include a host of initiatives like digital sourcing, reduction of paper-based application forms, elimination of paper-based transaction advice slips and encouraging customers to adopt digital account statements. Over 88% of our savings account transactions in fiscal 2020 were done through digital channels, which included internet, mobile, point of sale (POS), touch banking, phone banking and debit card e-commerce transactions. We are an industry leader in digital sourcing of products. We pioneered the usage of tablets to facilitate account opening in India.
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We have leveraged technology and data analytics to develop a bouquet of digital lending products that has made credit accessible and affordable for our customers. The Bank has digitised the process end-to-end enabling instant disbursement to pre-approved customers. Thus, by leveraging technology, the Bank has achieved multiple objectives of offering customers seamless services efficiently while contributing to the environment by reducing consumption of paper.
In March 2020, the Bank launched ‘ICICIStack’, a comprehensive digital banking service and APIs (Application Programme Interface) to ensure uninterrupted banking services to both customers and non-customers. ICICIStack caters to the entire lifecycle of a gamut of customers and includes digital account opening, loan solutions, payment solutions, investments and care solutions. This platform demonstrates the power of digitisation to provide uninterrupted banking services to our customers even during the disruptions in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
* Percentage share based on number of customers. Digital includes ‘insta’ and digitally sourced customers with physical KYC.
The Bank continuously focusses on improving processes that reduce efforts for the employees and customers. This spans various activities at the branches and central operations.
We have been successful at encouraging a large number of our customers in adopting e-statements through consistent communication and awareness programmes. Through these efforts, we have seen a 36% reduction in physical statements for our liability products since fiscal 2017. We have achieved a 47% reduction for physical credit card statements and a 61% decline in the number of physical letters sent to credit card customers to register change in their address from fiscal 2018. Our customers are also increasingly adopting digital modes for receiving income tax certificates and PIN for cards. These areas involved high usage of paper earlier.
We have also migrated 100% of notifications for trade and remittances transactions to digital channels. We have eliminated paper-based advice slips for our corporate customers by effectively leveraging our digital platforms. In addition, we have ensured that most of our ATMs across the country are paperless.
Digitisation of core operations at the Bank encompass multiple internal workflows. We have pioneered robotic process automations in the financial services industry in India. The number of automated processes has more than trebled in the last four years.
We are also continuously re-engineering our processes to increase adoption of emerging technologies to facilitate faster, superior and paperless disbursal of loans, digital sourcing and on-boarding of customers.