MUMBAI: To help women work from home, the country's largest private lender, ICICI Bank, has deployed face recognition technology and extended a secure network that provides access to the core banking servers from its employees' laptops.
This is the first time any bank has opened up its core banking system for remote access by employees and takes the "work from home" concept to a different level. It enables almost every non-customer-facing task to be done from home for extended periods of time.
Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson of State Bank of India, the country's largest bank, said they are working on systems where remote relationship managers can work from home. "We have to get our operations in place to enable call recording and to maintain quality and security."
Launching the iWork@Home on the eve of International Women's Day, Chanda Kochhar, MD & CEO of ICICI Bank, said an internal survey showed women leave the organization largely for maternity duties, to attend to childcare, or because of long commutes. "To ensure that women do not leave the workforce, we decided to put in place a stronger support system," she said. There are already 50 women trying out the iWork@Home project and the bank has received 125 requests. The bank expects to have around 500 women working from home soon. "One employee who had put in her resignation has decided to withdraw it because of this facility," said Kochhar.
Around 30% of ICICI's 73,000 employees are women.
