ASSISTED CUSTOMER SERVICE INNOVATION

Winner: Wirtec with DigitaLink

Wirtec’s solution dealt with a problem that bothers both banks and their customers: speed of customer service. Using Anoto digital pen and paper technology, it allows information written onto documents in the front office of a bank to be transmitted wirelessly to a server that creates an image of them that can be viewed by a member of back office staff to be approved or perform corrections, saving any faxing, phone calls or rekeying. This still allows the customer to walk away with the original written copy and sends an electronic copy of the document to the customer’s e-mail address, thus adding security to the process without adding any inconvenience. The customer does not have to change their behaviour. Time savings on processing a loan, for example, could be a significant asset in customer strategy.

Highly commended: Inkstreams with Mobile Mortgage Application & Approval

CASH MANAGEMENT INNOVATION

Winner: Banco Itaú with SAP currency management and optimisation

To show their commitment to innovation and delivery, in this year’s awards the judges refused to see a good entry fail if they felt the categories let the entry down. In this case, a category was created to ensure that what was a genuinely good cash management solution from Banco Itaú did not fall foul of lacking a retail category for it to stand in. Banco Itaú faced a challenge. Its vast network of 22,000 ATMs was proving hard to stock efficiently: too little stock and customers are disadvantaged; overstock and face costly carrying charges, costly fees that the central bank imposes on commercial banks with high cash balances and the increased potential for robbery that high levels of cash brings (witness the £26m and £54m warehouse robberies in the UK in recent years). The bank, already an SAP user, became interested in the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimisation module. Never having been implemented by a bank before, the module was customised by SAP and the bank to consider cash a raw material. The supply chain – from customer to branch to management – that was created allowed the bank to order cash as and when needed, removing the inefficiency in a single move.

CORE BANKINGSYSTEMS INNOVATION

Winner: Grupo Santander with Partenon

There was little doubt of the winner for this year. Santander has established itself as an equity analyst’s headache by confounding expectations that it would come close to achieving the £350m savings that it claimed it could make via technology cost reduction when taking over UK bank Abbey. The Partenon core banking system that it now uses contains all applications for retail and business banking and is easily deployed because it is portal-based. The ability of the platform to be rolled out easily to new business areas could cut costs dramatically for Grupo Santander in most merger and acquisition (M&A) situations, accelerating its ability to consolidate others. Given the drive toward an open European banking market and with further cross-border M&A activity expected, Santander has come to the field well prepared.

Highly commended: HP with Project StarSHAKTI (with Finacle from Infosys)

FRAUDULENT ACTION & ID PREVENTION INNOVATION

Winner: NCR with Solidcore for APTRA

Having taken the Innovation of the Year award in 2005, NCR did not disappoint the judges this year. With the ATM still the most trusted of automated electronic channels, the company has continued its battle against criminals that would undermine this status. The threat of electronic invasion inspired its Solidcore for APRA product. Taking on board threats as varied as virus, compliance and risk issues, the system keeps a measure of all executable codes in a system and, through constant checks, eliminates the threat of any alien code being run in the ATM. Through reducing the need for patch updates and getting to the heart of the issue in fraud, whether perpetrated by internal or external parties, this was the best all-round challenge to the criminal fraternity we saw.

Highly commended: Digital Resolve with Fraud Analyst

HIGH NET WORTH INDIVIDUAL SERVICES INNOVATION

Winner: Deutsche Bank AG with CoSMOS

Developed for brokerage and holistic advisory processes, CoSMOS (common system for multi-channel online services) is a platform utilising a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that gives 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week service in the high net worth area. It provides a single, consistent view of customer data and, for those who view the SOA as a cost-reduction tool, has kept its running costs constant while users and clients grew by a factor of 10. The system processes more than one million transactions a day with 90% of requests completed within one second. It is active in 770 branches in use by 10,000 advisers. The figures were impressive and judges considered the successful implementation of this type of architecture worthy of note.

NEW CHANNEL INNOVATION

Winner: Wincor Nixdorf and Barclays with Barclays Kiosk

The level of different technologies used to make this project work was noticeable, as were the chances taken on a challenging business model: developing the ATM channel beyond the current functionality to reduce transactions carried out with personnel. Many experienced solution providers have attempted to do this but rarely have any hit upon success. However, Wincor Nixdorf’s technology allowed Barclays to extend the services open to its customers to include online account registration, money transfer, bill payment (including future dated), third-party payment, and direct debit and standing order management from an ATM. The cost per transaction for an automated transaction is a matter of pence rather than pounds in comparison with a teller-based transaction. The bank is expecting cost reductions of about £3.5m a year and preliminary results have been promising.

Highly commended: Bankinter with Mobile Broker

NEW PRODUCT INNOVATION

Winner: Samba Financial Group with IPO shares subscription STP via internet/phone/ATM

Samba has enabled its customers to access share purchasing whenever it is participating in an initial public offering (IPO) via telephone, ATM or its internet banking site. The roll-out for the project (six weeks for telephone and internet, eight weeks for the ATM network) was clearly well managed and well accepted by the customers. In one of Saudi Arabia’s largest IPOs to date, 54% of shares subscription that came from Samba customers were carried out via remote channels. As the processing of the system is fully automated, manual processing costs in the front and back office are eliminated. This is timely and promising – it has tapped into the growth toward IPOs in Saudi Arabia by exploiting technology that customers are familiar with and likely to take advantage of.

Highly commended: Welcome Real-time with The UBL (Chip) Credit Card

PAYMENTS INNOVATION

Winner: China Construction Bank with dual currency credit cards

In order to deal with the specific issue in Chinese currency of the renminbi not being a settlement currency, cards must be able to cope with currency for transfer with sales from outside China as well as those made internally. The solution for China Construction Bank (CCB) was to create a card that held two separate accounts, for example one in renminbi and the other in US dollars. CCB says it is the first of the four largest banks in China (Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China being the other three) to satisfy the requirements of the dual-currency issue. The card also offers a financial limit beyond which a PIN is necessary to authorise transactions, a security precaution that is still not seen globally.

Highly commended: Watsons/Chinatrust with Visa Wave Contactless Offline Transaction Project

PLEASE ENTER YOUR DETAILS TO WATCH THIS VIDEO

All fields are mandatory

The Banker is a service from the Financial Times. The Financial Times Ltd takes your privacy seriously.

Choose how you want us to contact you.

Invites and Offers from The Banker

Receive exclusive personalised event invitations, carefully curated offers and promotions from The Banker



For more information about how we use your data, please refer to our privacy and cookie policies.

Terms and conditions

Join our community

The Banker on Twitter