Taken from Gnanapriya C and Puneet Gupta’s online paper on relevance of mobile based information services in India:
Infosys mobility solutions with a strong Indian context:
1. Insurance for Rural India
One of the more significant challenges that organizations face, including those in the insurance sectors, is the ability to serve the client base in small towns and in rural areas where it is not practical to extend the company’s presence by setting up physical infrastructures. Many of these places are not well served even from an internet connectivity perspective. Surprisingly even the remotest of these areas are today being served by mobile networks. We have been working on creating technology platforms that enable creation of solutions that leverage a low cost mobile device that a local, employed by the company as its representative, can use to provide several services which were hitherto possible only when a customer were to visit the nearest office in one of the towns. The field representative can use her/his mobile phone to access services like getting customer information, receiving alerts related to due dates for renewals and updation of premium payments received, just to give a few examples. Thus by using a low cost mobile device, the field agent can provide all critical services even in areas where setting up of basic internet infrastructure can be a challenge. Advanced synchronization techniques supporting both SMS and wireless data technologies offered by GPRS as well as CDMA networks, ensure that the cost per transaction can be kept extremely low.
2. Microfinance
MicroFinance is a solution provides a finance company providing micro-loans to help their field agents to track their customers, their credit limits, loans and payments. The situation involves a credit company providing “micro” loans where the loan amounts are very small. Therefore the cost of transaction per loan sanctioned or payment made should be extremely low. With the MicroFinance application, data is available with the finance company’s agent to monitor his clients’ loans and their payments. Transactions are offline and data is synchronized with backend server at a later time or when connectivity is available.
The key attributes of the solution is the way the technology solution deals with factors like:
- Non-availability of network connection
- Cost of network connectivity (air-time) to access data
- Security of confidential data transmitted/received over the air
- Speed of transactions
- Data loss and recovery
3. Application of mobile real time data for dairy professionalsBased on TruSync, Infosys mobile synchronization platform, this solution is aimed at enabling field force of a dairy organization to enable us of mobile device like PDAs to provide nutrition, animal diet and wellness services as well as vaccination services to farmers who have no other effective mechanism to scientifically deal with animal care to increase net yields. The solution strength lays in the ability of underlying technology platform to deal with the complexities of the wireless connectivity infrastructure. The technology enables the application to work in offline situations when connectivity is not available or when the cost of connectivity is high. The technology involves opportunistic pre-fetching of data and by masking the disconnectedness from the end application by fetching the data from the local database, masking the actual state of connectedness from the end application. The solution is also aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of such mobile solutions both from technology and cost perspectives.