Amit Vyas

A core challenge for clients offering services in Asia is the varied regulatory landscape – each asks for funds segregation in a unique way. We solved this by leveraging the virtual account proposition for receiving, sending, and settling funds.

Each counterparty (or, in the case of fintech companies, their clients) gets a unique virtual account. When the counterparty sends funds to the bank’s customers, the funds are reflected in their virtual account, and likewise, when the payment is made out or settled, it is drawn from their virtual account.

This ensures a running balance for each counterparty or a client of the bank’s customer, thus providing fund segregation and reconciliation at the individual counterparty level. For example, this ensures compliance with Singapore requirements (PSA) as well as requirements of other regulators like MY and IN.

A key point to note is that these accounts are virtual, meaning that the client is holding only one account with the bank, but it appears as if there are millions of accounts, each dedicated to their counterparty or their customer. Thus we ensure full compliance to regulatory needs, freeing up significant liquidity and management overheads.

This platform solves a critical challenge for corporate working capital management, facilitating faster closure of outstanding account receivables and allowing businesses to book the next order faster with minimal operational effort.

Specific regulated markets limit the returns on balances in a corporate’s account. However, other markets do not place any such restrictions. By linking such diverse markets together, corporates can be rewarded for holding balances with a particular financial institution by increasing the returns in unregulated markets. This helped the bank simultaneously increase balances in regulated markets like China by over 20% and unregulated markets like Singapore and Hong Kong.

ATMs are replenished through regular routes. The armored car carrying cash goes from an ATM to an ATM, which leads to significant wastage of resources and increases the surplus cash lying in the ATMs.

By analyzing the data and ATM usage pattern and integrating this with GPS technology, we started smart pre-emptive or just-in-time replenishment. For example, in Tokyo, Roppongi is a nightlife hub packed on Fridays. We discovered that the Roppongi ATM ran out of cash by 11 PM but would be replenished only the next day, while the Gotanda ATM, which was rarely used, was still replenished each day as it fell on the fixed route.

Thus, we established real-time monitoring of ATMs. The software started creating custom routes for more effective ATM replenishment, including placing ATMs like Roppongi ATM on multiple routes for repeated replenishment on Fridays.

I developed this platform early in my career. However, I enjoyed working on it and I still take pride in the fact that we launched the first such platform in India, targeting overseas Indians who wanted to send gifts to their family members back home. The idea came from my boss in the passing, but we picked it up and made it real.

While working with the newspaper on automation, we saw that they prepared multiple bromides used in printing, which could get stuck in the printing machine and get damaged. This gave us an idea to scan the bromides and then further develop a software that would take these scanned copies, read the text, and convert it into HTML files with proper referencing such that it could appear as an online newspaper. This project was developed before we had database-driven newspapers.