Continuing our focus on 2023 Trends in the Information Management space, we sat down with Antony Anand, Head of Digital Business and Sales at Crown Records Management India, to give us his take on what he sees as the major drivers of change throughout India. 
How do you see the current business environment in India and what’s changing?
“In India these are exciting times with a growing economy and a stable government that is trying to make doing business easier – and is determined to leverage human capital.
“This involves plans to speed up transport links between the different regions of the country and to bring digital transformation to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, allowing citizens to access digital services such as digital banking.
“We work with a lot of banks, and this is hugely important to them – and changing the way they think about records management.”
Is there any legislation driving change, too?
“The Government of India and the Reserve Bank of India have rolled out a project for Digital Banking Units (DPU) in October 2022.
“They have asked all the scheduled and commercial banks to create a separate entity, to serve the public through digital banking channels.
“This means customers can either use a self-service mode or go to a kiosk with someone who can assist them to access banking products. Anything a person wants to consume from the banking sector can be done digitally. The government wants it to be 100% paperless.”
How is it making a difference to records management?
“Well, it’s accelerating the move to digital from every direction – for ourselves and our clients.
“In terms of our business we store 7 million boxes of records in India and probably 5 million of those consist of account opening forms and related documents, such as proof of address. Now, those documents are simply not going to be generated on paper anymore. All new banking customers will be registered digitally.
“Consumers can open an account using Video KYC which uses artificial intelligence to map the points of your face and iris to make sure you are who you say you are, linking to Citizen ID records. It also uses geolocation to see if you are in a set radius of where you bank. There is no paper involved.
“We can all see that the future in India is digital, which is good news for businesses. But it also means they must wake up now and think about how to reduce their reliance on paper – and how to start the digital transformation journey.”
How has Crown changed?
“We saw these changes in the market coming and were ahead of the game, so we have been working for a long time now on providing digital solutions and digital consultancy.
“As a company we are growing in double digits every year through physical storage, that’s still happening, but we are also pushing ahead with digital solutions for our clients, and we can see that demand is rising.”
Is it creating demands for new services? What are the on-trend services for 2023?
“A good example is a digital process for onboarding employees, which allows the submission of documents online and uses digital signatures. This reduces the paper required by 100 pages to just five.
“We can also help customers with their KYC, providing a central repository for all their digital documents with all financial institutions. We have 325 banks in India so that’s good news.
“This is a service which is selling like hot cakes because it enables banks to access the central repository, consume the data and instantly provide banking services to their customers, reducing the number of hours the process takes.
“We are also building multiple workflow solutions which incorporate digital signatures. This will significantly reduce paper and logistics around document management.
“A good example is our client Carlsberg where we are supporting the sales and marketing team whose job is to acquire new outlets to supply their stock across India.
“Every new merchant requires a new paper document, sometimes up to 100 a day, but we are in the process of digitising the entire system.”
If you’d like to learn more about the evolving 2023 Trends in Information Management, download our 2023 Trends Guide today.
