"XELERATE caters to 8 of the top 10 banks in India" 

 K. Nanda Kumar, Founder, President & CEO, Suntec Business Solutions

Suntec Business Solutions has an impressive customer base globally and work with world’s leading telcos and financial institutions like HSBC, ING, Mashreq, Cable One and others. SunTec’s technology-agnostic product suite XELERATE empowers clients to create real-time personalised offerings to improve profitability and customer experience while optimising customer lifetime value. In an exclusive interview with Pravin Prashant, Consulting Editor, VARINDIA, K. Nanda  Kumar talks about XELERATE market, customers and future plans for the product. Excerpts of the interview:   

Majority of XELERATE customers are banks or telecom service providers. What additional features do you provide to your customers? 
Our customers are mainly spread between banking and telecom domain with a slight bias towards banking. In today’s competitive environment, creating customer value is key not only to growth of the companies but also their survival. More importantly so, for financial services firms, adopting the right revenue management solution would mean  greater customer-centricity by creating innovative products and pricing strategies, capturing new revenue streams and optimizing digital channels – all the while proactively managing risk, maximizing operational agility and instituting margin controls. 

The customers of the ‘everything now generation’ demand quick and efficient services – real- time and personalised. Delays in launching such services or offers will lead to revenue loss and almost immediate customer churn. Users will migrate to the communications service provider (CSP) providing the broadest, best-priced and the most reliable range of services.

SunTec’s marque technology agnostic product suite enables CSPs to respond faster to the end-user consumption patterns while making more accurate service pricing decisions to deliver an enhanced connected digital lifestyle. Few of the intrinsic features that differentiates Xelerate from its counterparts include End to End offer management, real time analytics, risk mitigation through optimized business processes, Deal Value management and Risk mitigation through optimized business processes.

Who are your customers of XELERATE products in India as well as globally? Specify reasons why these customers use XELERATE solutions? 
Xelerate caters to 8 of the top 10 banks in India and the product is used by around 40 clients spread across 60 countries with around 300 million end customers. The reason why customers choose Xelerate over competition is: Enhanced customer life-time value with end-to-end experience;  orchestration; Reduced time to market with easily configurable rules and business process flows for offer simulation, creation and approvals; reduced revenue leakage risk with commitment and deal performance tracking; informed decision-making with real-time revenue management dashboards for key success metrics; and increased profitability with improved visibility of the deal through SOA architecture for easy collaboration with downstream and upstream banks. 

XELERATE serves more than 300 million end users in 60 countries across the globe. Reason for XELERATE success? 
Customer centric innovation is key to the success of any product offering and that’s exactly what we have attempted to address through Xelerate.
If you look at the case of CSPs, limited flexibility of existing legacy systems makes it difficult to seamlessly integrate with partner systems across OTT and VAS players to meet the increasing demand for new digital services. This causes revenue loss as well as increased customer churn putting communication service providers at a competitive disadvantage.

SunTec's Xelerate Digital Services is capable of seamlessly integrating with their existing system alongside other systems like CRM and ERP, reducing implementation costs and facilitating faster time-to- market.

Xelerate's powerful transaction processing engine can handle huge volumes of data with little or no investment in additional hardware. Its real-time data analytics feature helps CSPs build a 360-degree view, providing real-time information to customers and partners. This will also help CSPs provide personalised, context-based offers to customers, enhancing their connected digital lifestyle.

How have you integrated all the features in a single product, be it customer relation, analytics, customer loyalty, security and authentication as well as payments? What are the additional features you are planning to integrate in the next version of the product? 
Our product development is an involved process where inputs are constantly fed in from multiple sources – our own trackers in the market, analyst communities, from our clients as well as our understanding of where the industry is headed. We follow an agile method of development where releases are tested extensively before reaching the market. All components of our product are homegrown and therefore integration within the product is easy and in-built. For integration with other products we have ready-made APIs which can be directly implemented. Our next version of the product will have a much enhanced analytics engine powering the reports and insights 

How does XELERATE help in reducing time to market and also plugging revenue leakage. Please explain? 
Xelerate facilitates reduced time to market with easily configurable rules and business process flows for offer simulation, creation and approvals. The product catalog allows storing the business product which is separated from the technical product. Therefore editing and creating variations become extremely easy and can be done by the business instead of reaching out to IT. Similarly, offers can also be created very easily and once created, the onboarding and fulfillment happens within our system in an automated manner. No need to hard code anything. We have reduced product launch time to a matter of hours for corporations who were taking at least 3 months to launch. 

How big is the market for XELERATE products in India and globally and who are your competitors?  
The market for Xelerate products is quite attractive in India and globally. This is proven by the fact that we have continued to show healthy YoY revenue growth. Also, we continue to innovate our product constantly and therefore always remain at the cutting edge of technology. Recent innovations in the IoT market specifically within utilities and smart cities have opened up new doors for us as well. Some of the main competitors for SunTec are: Elitecore, Zafin Labs, Oracle Financial services, Fiserv, Openet and Redknee, etc.