Bangalore: SKS Microfinances, a leading microfinance organisation, today launched a technology initiative by partnering with five IT majors to accelearate its goal of financial inclusion for the underserved.

It has tied up with Microsoft, HCL Infosystems, Wipro Infotech, Compulink and Tulip to create an IT infrastructure that would connect its 1500 urban and rural microfinacne branches, said Dr Vikram Akula, Founder and CEO of SKS.

The infrastructure would help in expanding outreach from its current base of 650 brances serving 17 lakh poor households to 1500 brances serving 40 lakh households by 2009. Compulink will develop a three-tier web application to develop highly scalable software application for internal systems and to complement web hosting services while Tulip IT would help support connectivity across all branches.

Wipro Infotech would host its data centre at Bangalore and act as a single contact point for SKS. SKS has partnered with HCL for Desktops, printers, multi-functional devices and UPs and with Wipro Infotech for laptops. It has signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft, said Vikram.

The new IT backbone is expected to be in place by July 2008. The deployment and testing phase will be through May. This initiative would reduce costs, enhance the speed of data, strengthen security, enable real-time data analysis and accelerate scaling and provide conveninient services to poor.

SKS has provided over $432 million and maintained loans outstanding of $182 mn in loans to over 1,450,000 women. SKS plans to disburse an additional Rs 5200 crore to clients in nearly 40,000 villages and slums in FY 2008-09 and plans to add new financial services.

Source : PTI