Today, the financial services industry is witnessing a significant uptick in embracing technology-driven transformation initiatives. These organizations encounter significant challenges such as cybersecurity risks, regulatory complexities, economic volatility, evolving customer expectations, and intense competition. Failure to address these business challenges can result in substantial financial losses and erosion of customer trust.

"Financial institutions are investing in modernization to gain a competitive edge, establish market differentiation and prepare themselves for new opportunities owing to digitization. As they evolve to navigate disruption and accelerate innovation, they need to build a new roadmap allowing them to drive efficiency in operating costs, increase security and regulatory control and focus on scalable growth opportunities,” says Suresh Jayanthi, Business Unit Executive, IBM Z, India & South Asia.

For many financial institutions lending is one of the biggest revenue drivers. With competition from smaller and nimbler fintechs, larger players are now actively harnessing the power of digital platforms and a hybrid cloud approach to better serve to evolving customer needs and enhance their market positioning.

One of the largest housing finance companies in India, LIC Housing Finance Limited (LIC HFL) embarked on a similar journey of business transformation as they realized the need to keep pace with their customer’s evolving requirements. The team at LIC HFL decided to revamp their approach to technology adoption to accelerate the pace of innovation, future-proof their business model, and increase agility to tackle business dynamics with a fast route to market, in a secure environment and accordance with local regulations.

Talking about the project Hitesh Talreja, Chief Manager IT, LIC HFL says, “Over the years, we have seen the industry evolve and reimagine the way technology drives business imperatives. We aim to implement a tech-powered transformation program which is open, scalable, and secure to deliver exceptional customer experiences, operational excellence, and solidify our leadership in the evolving financial landscape."

To address these requirements, LIC HFL decided to deploy IBM’s LinuxONE. The highly scalable Linux platform is designed to deliver scalability to support thousands of workloads in the footprint of a single system. It provides a secure environment which is cost and energy efficient, bringing together IBM’s leadership in security with the openness of the Linux operating system. The IT team of LIC HFL collaborated with IBM to implement a robust transformation plan involving the use of the latest hardware, software and services.

IBM worked with Pennant Technologies to deploy their Lending Factory application (a key element of this transformation project) for LIC HFL. Lending Factory helped LIC HFL to consolidate and operate their entire lending portfolio, launch new offers quickly, drive efficient operations and deliver distinctive experiences to their customers. To ensure compatibility the Lending Factory application underwent rigorous testing and benchmarking on IBM's LinuxONE platform.

Furthermore, they used the IBM WebSphere® Application Server on IBM LinuxONE, to deliver high-performing applications to support rapid change while saving costs and improving time to value. For the installation and implementation of all these technologies, they used IBM’s Expert Labs Services along with Technology Lifecycle Services for hardware support.

In addition to the benefits of performance, scalability and security, using the LinuxONE systems helped LIC HFL be more sustainable, with up to 50% cost savings on infrastructure power, cooling and floor space. Through application modernization on the scalable IBM LinuxONE platform, clients benefit from accelerated time-to-market which ensures faster product development.

According to Suresh Jayanthi, “A good server provides users with a flexible yet powerful infrastructure that helps ensure that businesses receive the performance, reliability, security, and processing power needed to address increasingly sophisticated and demanding application requirements. Therefore, we have invested to make our systems ready to leverage vast amounts of data, and provide deep, real-time insights for better business impact—all deployed within a secure and resilient cloud-ready environment.”

“IBM LinuxONE has helped in overall performance augmentation with the increasing workload and transactions. We have seen around 25-30% improvement in overall performance,” added Hitesh Talreja.

By embracing this tech-driven approach, LIC HFL is well-positioned to deliver superior services to meet customer expectations and drive sustainable growth to thrive in the increasingly competitive housing finance industry.