India’s multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary conglomerate Muthoot Group has been expanding ever since it was founded 126 years ago in the southern Indian state of Kerala. The Group’s financial services arm, which is also the largest gold loan company in the country, presently operates more than 4,400 branches across 23 states in India.

To ensure secure and faster service delivery across different branches in the face of competition, the Group selected networking giant Juniper Networks’ (News - Alert) secure networking solution. As a result, it deployed Juniper’s SRX series services gateways and EX series Ethernet switches at its data centers and branches. According to Juniper, the IP based networking solution will allow Muthoot Group to process all loan applications in a secure and timely manner and deliver excellent customer service.

In a statement, Muthoot Group said that Juniper’s network will enable millions of its customers to process their loan applications quicker than before. Additionally, Juniper has also set up a virtual Muthoot Group branch at its Bangalore R&D center to simulate use of its services like in a physical branch

Although the financial details between the two have not been disclosed, Juniper said that the solution integrates banking services through a group of networked bank branches. Juniper’s networking architecture runs on the Junos operating system, which is a reliable, high-performance network operating system for routing, switching and security. It simplifies networking operations while reducing the cost of ownership, said the networking solutions provider.

Juniper said that its networking products and services are being used by organizations and governments across the world to meet growing business demands. However, due to an economic slowdown for the last few quarters, the company has been witnessing slower growth. The company said that federal and financial services sales were weak. Consequently, during first quarter 2013, Juniper said that growth in product revenues was marginal. Accordingly, the company also remains cautious about enterprise spending during the second quarter.