Murthy Veeraghanta
The quality of childhood that we spend often determines how we grow up to be as an individual. During grade school, as a Boy Scout, Murthy Veeraghanta learned lessons that he carries with him till date. Its motto: “Be prepared” holds ever true and helps him hope for the best and prepare for the worst even today. The second lesson that ‘one under-prepared scout was enough to undermine the patrol’ made him realize that success follows preparation and hard work. This holds for competitive organizations like VSoft which he later founded in the year 1996 and he made it a point to provide the employees with the necessary resources and guidance to measure up to varied situations that they would come across. So that no one stays under-prepared and the complete organization is on the same page.
Formative Years
While in post-graduation, Murthy witnessed the advent and growing popularity of computers in every sector of the economy. In 1986, he got an opportunity to work in the US for Tata Burroughs in the domain of Banking & Finance. Over the next five years, he honed his skills and passion in this sphere and later got an opportunity to put to use the knowledge and experience gained to identify the new business opportunities in the sector.
He sensed that technology could be effectively used to make the operations in banking more efficient and cost-effective and identified a major opportunity in disrupting the traditional form of cheque processing. He worked towards enriching and making the operations of banks and credit unions in the US more efficient by moving their cheque processing operations onto the PC. This opportunity, over time, led to the inception and development of VSoft Corporation and placed him in the path to where he is today, in the sphere of Banking Technology.
For All banking Needs – VSoft Solutions
With a customer base of over 1,600 financial institutions around the world, ranging from large multinational banks to community-owned credit unions; from large private and public sector banks to Co-operative banks, VSoft has built a reputation of being the preferred partner to Banking and Financial Institutions for technology solutions. It offers Core Banking, Digital Banking, Data Management, Outsourced and Payments-Processing solutions that improve service, reduce cost, and maximize efficiency for financial institutions worldwide. It is also at the forefront of providing solutions in financial inclusion outreach.
An overview of some of its key products is as under:
Payment Systems – On View Payment Suite – VSoft’s flagship product, On View Cheque Truncation Solution, enables online cheque clearance by using the electronic image of the cheque for clearing, instead of physical cheque.VSoft also provides ACH, Wires, Mandate Management, Switching and card-based services.
Core Banking Product – Wings CBS – It focuses on emerging economies that are aggressively promoting and enforcing centralized core banking solutions in the Banking sector. This product provides accurate customer information and insight on customer expectations based on predictive analytics on his habits along with meeting the entire spectrum of modern banking operations.
Digital Banking Product – Arya – An artificial intelligence solution using Chatbot technology, it is aimed to garner a fair share of the online banking business.
Financial Inclusion – Roots – It is designed to help digitalize Primary level Credit Cooperatives, to enable farmers to avail the benefits of the financial system transparently and efficiently.
Vantage Data Management Products Suite – Vantage is VSoft’s product framework which aims to connect disparate systems and make data management easy. It consists of :
Vantage Point SSO
Vantage Atlas
Vantage Watch
Vantage Blocks
Vantage Index
Vantage Post
Expansion in Managed Services – VSoft’s managed services portfolio consists of Core Banking, Cheque Truncation, Contact Center, Digital Banking and payment processing, ATM switching for cards and Mandate management.
Tackling Challenges with Teamwork and Passion
Describing what drives him to work so hard, Murthy says, “Designing for Process Efficiencies has always been the passion with me. Gaining the trust of Banks and Corporates, which serve Credit Unions, has been a focus with me, and through the years, has transformed into the focus of VSoft. Efficient and cost-effective processing of transactions worth billions of dollars has been a flair with me, and the challenges involved in this have been a motivator to me.”
His road to success has seen him take up challenges right from the initial days with the first big one in form of a bid in a tender floated by the Reserve Bank of India for running cheque clearings for India. As an ambitious start-up, It needed to take advantage of the opportunity, despite a severe shortage of resources and stiff competition. The following three days saw the team of five build a Proof of Concept (POC) for the demo with everyone firing on all cylinders around the clock. Though his team could not win the tender it learnt an important lesson that everyone carried over the course of their careers – “Teams are built on collective effort and trust; secondly that it was far more important for success to work as a team that we believe in, than to strive as an individual for success.” Two decades on, VSoft stands out proudly as one of the largest services providers for cheque processing in India.
The Stalwart’s Views on Current Scenario
The finance industry is rapidly changing. India’s banking sector is expected to become the third-largest in the world by 2050. In today’s era, that is led by information technology, banking is rapidly changing and customers have already moved away from banking at branches to banking using smartphones and other personal electronic devices. The change doesn’t end here. Customers expect banks to be even more customer-centric and consequently, Banks need to adapt and invest in the latest technologies to stay relevant.
So far the industry has been focusing on paperless environments with electronic cheques, electronic fund transfers, mobile banking, and ATMs. However, the future would involve AI and deep machine learning, personalized services, stronger cyber-security, robotic process automation, and block-chain based payments ecosystem. Vsoft is investing in these technologies so that its clients are prepared for the future.
Noticing the growing reserve of start-ups in the industry, Murthy’s word for them is, “My advice to them would be to not dive in headfirst but gain the necessary domain knowledge, take time to identify the business potentials and have a clear roadmap.”
Working on the Future
For the current financial year, Mr Murthy is targeting revenues upward of Rs.300 crores and looking to increase the employee headcount from 1,400 to 2,000. Vsoft is planning to expand its operations to new territories to cover the Far East, Middle East, and Africa. It aims to add 5-6 commercial and international banks to its client base every year. It is expanding its product suite to provide banks with high end parameterized solutions that utilize the potentials of AI, deep machine learning, big data analytics along with enhanced cybersecurity.
