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COVID 19 –Digital Payments & Business Continuity Published
- By Elite CIO
May 18, 2020
12
COVID 19 –Digital Payments & Business Continuity
Published by - Anand Agarwal, CIO- Capital Trust
COVID19 has brought unprecedentedtimes that have never seen before and all business continuity strategies failedas none accounted for work from Home as an option. Businesses who have beenproactively working on using the latest technologies for normal operations andextensively using digital technologies are relatively less impacted bythe COVID19 effect.
Business Continuity:
The adoption of technology andmigrating from man to machine is the success mantra now. A need of the hour is alsoto have well planned and regularly tested disaster recovery and businesscontinuity policy. With work from Home now going to be here, it’s alsoextremely important to have robust data security policies in place to preventorganisation from Hacking/Ransomware attacks/malware, etc.
Public clouds will play a majorrole in enabling organisations to focus more on their core areas and withtechnology management left to experts to deal with. All business-criticalapplications and mailing systems should be on the cloud and real-time replicationto DR site. Access to these applications should be restricted and onlypermitted to authorized users after multi-level user authentication.
The organisations whose setupsare running on cloud faced little challenges during this COVID19 lockdownand the only thing that was required was a laptop for all employees and fewadditional security measures to protect company information.
Easing payment routes forCustomers:
Since the lockdown, customerscould not visit the branches for depositing the payments/EMI/interest. Most ofthe MFIs in India still work on Cash collection mode and this has seriouslyimpacted their ability to survive in these COVID19 lockdowntimes.
The majority of these small tomid-size organisations have no provision even to collect payment throughdigital channels even if a set of customers willing to make payment using thesame. The need ofthe hour is to quickly enable digital channels of accepting payments and provide alternatives tocustomers to repay the money and at the same time keeping the safety&security of employees in consideration and following strict lockdownguidelines.
This will ensure that the operationsand accounts team continue to work on even in these difficult times and couldcontribute towards the revenue of the company.
In a span of 48 hours, organisationcan be on-boarded and enabled wherein customers using any online payment modelike Wallets, UPI, Credit Card, Debit Card, Net banking etc., they could paytheir outstanding amount. There will be all required checks in the system toverify the user through OTP etc. before he could make payments.
However, integration time foramore customised platform wherein digital payment setup is tightly integrated withorganisation lending/collection system may take time depending upon whether theorganisation has an in-house development team or dependent upon partners forintegration and development.
Going forward the Organisations need toplan to invest more towards cyber-security and automation systems. We are alreadyseeing in the spurt of cases related to security incidents. Mobile Appsare mostvulnerable unless properly secured.
Your views are welcome, please comment.