Known locally as ‘Grameen Koota,’ meaning ‘rural group’ in the native language of Kannada, CreditAccess Grameen (CA Grameen) is a Microfinance Institution (MFI) and Non-Banking Finance Company (NBFC) in rural India.

64% of India’s population—170 to 180 million households—live in rural villages,¹ many tending small farms of one to two acres and barely making a living. CA Grameen set out to connect Indian villagers with small amounts of credit that would empower them to improve the quality of life for their families.

99% of CA Grameen's borrowers are communities of women who, in supporting their families, are driving the growth of the overall rural economy. Rather than collateral, CA Grameen's microloans are secured through trust established by local borrowers in a community pledge. This trust evolves for each customer based on their ongoing relationship with CA Grameen—often spanning years, as many customers have taken and repaid multiple loans.

By 2018, CA Grameen could not keep up with demand. Staff were still using manual processes, and their 2.5 million borrowers routinely experienced long delays. New loans could take 10 days to process.

CA Grameen CTO Sudesh Puthran saw the company’s process bottlenecks as the perfect opportunity to modernize IT operations—including end-to-end digitization for loan administration tasks—and support future growth.

^{1 Rural population – India, The World Bank, 2024}

Unlocking digital loan processing

Together, CA Grameen and Kyndryl established a single, integrated team to manage operations and support the digital transformation.

The team explored digital banking options and selected Temenos as the core platform with the necessary software modules for defining the digital loan processing workflows. The team sized, implemented and managed the virtual infrastructure to quickly expand and contract based on workload thresholds.

The team expanded network bandwidth to 10 Gbps, providing the headroom needed to move large amounts of application data within the banking platform as the business continued to grow.

To unlock fully digital loan processing, the team built an enterprise service bus (ESB) to integrate data on CA Grameen's wireless network from the fleet of mobile devices used by loan officers to run loan-related applications in thousands of branch offices and in the field.

Finally, the team established a disaster recovery solution that can automatically shift production operations as needed between a Kyndryl datacenter and another provider’s datacenter in southern India to maintain the resiliency essential to daily field operations.