Introduction
There has been a sharp growth in remittance of money from non-resident Indians to family, friends or relatives living in India, since 1991. These remittances have exceeded foreign direct investment in the recent years, and have been valued at 66.1 billion compared to $46.84 billion as FDI in 2012-13.
With its ability to handle event flows and micro processes with ease, AmperAXP proved to be a reliable choice for an authorized online Electronic Money Exchange provider, to build a system to help people remit money to India.
The Challenge
Service providers including banks charge up to 5% in hidden costs for transferring money across borders, excluding the transaction fee, conversion fee and exchange fee that are levied for a remittance. This raised the demand for easy reliable platforms providing better service with minimum fee for a remittance. Being a major player in the FOREX market the customer required a highly secure system that adhered to the intricate government regulations involved in currency exchange and transfer.
The solution involved multiple complex and inter-linked processes that when executed successfully, resulted in the money remitting in the target account. This maze of processes included interaction with external interfaces that tracked remitters involved in money laundering, blacklisted remitters, frequent offenders. Escalation scenarios like currency fluctuations, revisions in Government regulations, changes in bank transaction format details and missing or invalid transaction IDs were required to be handled in this one unified solution.
The Solution
The online money transfer system was designed and developed on AmperAXP. It has more than 30 different processes as micro services and event monitoring procedures interlinked with each other with integration with external systems.
The procedures involved in the system:
- The portal allows the source (Non Resident Indian) to register their details along with their foreign bank details.
- On successful registration, the source books a transaction by giving the target’s (Resident Indian) bank account details, address, and the amount to be transferred. A unique transaction ID is assigned for the remittance. This has to be referred in the comments section of the bank transfer.
- Parallel background checks to trace money laundering and other defaulters starts automatically when a remittance is initiated. When no flags are raised in these checks the money is transferred to the target’s bank account
Some of the escalation scenarios:
- The bank or the branch of both the source and target may not be registered in the list of banks that the customer’s bank does business with
- Invalid or missing transaction id in the transaction details. A separate complex process of filtering and refining to arrive at the exact details of the remittance is initiated.
- The target’s bank or branch may not support electronic money transfers. These details of all banks are kept current through interfacing with the Indian Federal Bank (Reserve Bank of India).
- Currency fluctuations. External triggers and event monitoring help the system monitor minuet fluctuations in currency values. A procedure is followed if there is a 5% rise in the foreign currency value, compared to the value at the time of registering the remittance.
The escalation scenarios are critical and involve human intervention which are tracked by several internal workflows. The rupee value is transferred to the target bank in India when the escalations are resolved.
The Benefits
- The solution was highly effective as AmperAXP integrated several processes as micro services, which are independent validations, verifications, transfers, etc., into a unified system, but independent on each of the threads.
- Each of the data applications, event applications as well as workflow applications are part of holistically one solution.
- Very complex processes interfacing with multiple external aspects were easily handled using the dynamic features of AmperAXP.
- With large transaction data, analytics module played a crucial role in providing vital information about projecting the ‘seasons’ of money transfer so as to plan the FOREX purchase better for the company.
AmperAXP’s real-time dashboards provided the managers of transaction map so as to initiate any kind of currency watch or transaction watch.