Branch Transformation Project Winner:
Bank of the Philippine Islands with BPI Express
Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) acquired Prudential Bank in the Philippines in August 2005 and used the acquisition to rebrand and rethink branch operations by creating BPI Express, branches with a new look, smaller footprint, fewer staff and costing only 5m pesos. As a result, 19 new branches were introduced in Manila, Cebu and Davao by August 2006, which had generated more than 5000 new account openings with deposits totalling 540m pesos or 114m pesos per branch per year by December. In addition, the project moved customers from traditional channels to alternative channels, with four out of every five transactions performed without a teller being involved.
Commended: Deutsche Bank with the rollout of eBranch. Deutsche Bank used Citrix to create a thin client roll-out of eBranch across its 24,000 users in 1300 European locations. The eBranch provides 450 applications from the centralised service systems to all Deutsche Bank’s retail operations across Europe, including Postbank, and allowed a reduction of 1000 servers and the servicing of just two data centres, compared with 1300 server locations previously. The judges were impressed by the scale of the project, and the fact that it was achieved on time and within budget.
Commended: Banco Itaú with a strategic corporate dashboard. Banco Itaú, one of the largest private banks in Brazil, integrated Cognos Business Intelligence Suite with Microsoft .Net developed solutions in house to provide a strategic corporate dashboard of key performance indicators on bank performance. The result was a 60% reduction in operational risk, and the dashboard is used by more than 3000 users across the bank network every day. The judges liked the fact that the bank had an enterprise-wide operational framework that gave it a strategic advantage.
Marketing Project Winner:
Infrasoft Technologies with OMNIEnterprise: Islamic Banking
The European Islamic Investment Bank (EIIB), which commenced trading in April 2006, is the first sharia-compliant investment bank approved by the Financial Services Authority in the UK. It chose Infrasoft Technologies to provide its core banking system and as a result, Infrasoft developed and delivered the first end-to-end Islamic investment banking solution in Europe, OMNIEnterprise: Islamic Banking. The project includes all dealer screens, accounting engines, balancing and profit and loss, as well as SWIFT integration. The judges felt this was not only a significant project but also innovative, with the delivery of the first ever sharia-compliant islamic banking solution for the investment markets.
Internet Project Winner:
Zopa with real-time matching of borrowers and lenders
Zopa has used technology to provide a more efficient marketing model and has been operating for more than two years as an ‘eBay’ for loans. It has more than 140,000 active users exchanging millions of pounds between lenders and borrowers. Zopa’s technology delivers real-time matching of borrowers and lenders. For example, borrowers can get a deal through Zopa where a £5000 three-year loan is available for 5.9% APR compared with 10.9% offered by other large UK banks, and does so in a very robust risk-management environment. The judges were particularly impressed that Zopa switched from ‘non-commercial’ to ‘regulated’ credit agreements in June 2006 and can operate with just 25 staff.
Commended: ICBC with online service redevelopment. ICBC redeveloped large parts of its online services in the past two years, and supports all traditional counter services, including remittances and deposits and loans online, as well as various transaction function such as bill payments, online Forex and securities. The take-up of its online services increased rapidly as a result, and the judges noted that the customer base had grown by 63% with more than eight million new online accounts in 2006.
Commended: BBVA Banco Provincial with a range of online accounts. BBVA launched a range of new online accounts targeted at three client segments: individual customers, VIP customers and small firms. The fact that each of these segments grew significantly in their online usage during 2006 was of particular importance in awarding this commendation with, for example, online internet business user numbers doubling month over month in early 2007.
New Channels Project Winner:
Caja Madrid with Caja Madrid TV Banking Network
Caja Madrid launched a new channel for banking in Spain based on Windows Media Centre for XP and Vista, DSL Television and Terrestrial Digital TV. The service is the Caja Madrid TV Banking Network, which is available online and through television sets. The service provides access to all bank data and transaction services, as well as news, stock market information and, in the near future, video services. Caja Madrid estimates it will have 7.5 million users by 2010 for this home banking service.
Customer Experience Project Winner:
ABN AMRO Real with a range of projects
ABN AMRO Real engaged in a range of projects to improve customer experience through 2006, from reducing queuing in branches and using mobile technologies to providing online video service channels, mobile banking services and automated call answering services to improve the customer contact with Avaya. The results included a 17% improvement in customer waiting times in branches and a 15% improvement in answered calls per day. The combination of the projects that focused on improving the customer experience demonstrated a real customer focus that the judges appreciated.
Commended: Scotiabank and Avaya with re-engineered operations. In 2006, Scotiabank worked with Avaya to re-engineer its commercial banking operations from a decentralised operation across all branches with localised relationship managers and support staff, to six business centres. The results were not only an improvement in service but also an estimated $28.5m cost saving over five years.
Core Banking Project Winner:
Zafin Labs with miRevenue
Constrained by its legacy core banking applications and unable to launch new products quickly, HDFC Bank found it difficult to track and service profitable versus unprofitable customers. In 2006, it implemented the miRevenue product suite from Zafin Labs. Going live within five months of HDFC drawing up its detailed business requirements, the miRevenue solution reduced time to market for new retail products from months to days, and reduced daily, monthly and quarterly processing times by more than 400% on average.
Zafin Labbs CEO Al Karim Somji says: “The miRevenue product suite, a robust and scalable solution, has provided HDFC Bank with sustainable differentiators to innovate and provide their customers with superior and customised products and services.”
“We expect the core banking transformation to gain momentum in the coming years with banks following the model of moving to a centralised product and pricing platform to support customer-centric strategies.”
Commended: Fuzhou City Commercial Bank with a new core system. Fuzhou City Commercial Bank developed a new core system using IBM AIX servers and Oracle’s 9i database with middleware BEA Tuxedo and WebLogic. The Banker’s Technology Awards commendation adds to a growing list of prestigious awards for this project and recognises the complexity of changing the bank’s complete core systems, including general ledgers, deposits and loans, foreign exchanges, payments, cards and all other core services during the course of 2006.
Customer Facing Project Winner:
Standard Bank with a revised debit card issue model
Standard Bank had two issues to resolve. The first was the length of time to produce a debit card: the old debit card issue model meant that the customer was left unattended for more than 10 minutes in the branch. The second was the opportunity to defraud when PINs were mailed to customers by post or via the branch. Standard Bank’s solution was a card issuing pack bulk ordered and delivered to branches for instant debit card issuing and secure one-time PIN generation via the interactive voice recognition (IVR) system and SMS text messaging. The results generated a reduction of capital and maintenance expenditure of R20m ($3m) per year and a reduction in staffing costs of R30m per year.
Commended: Respond with CHARMS2. Bradford & Bingley in the UK decided to replace its customer complaint handling system in March 2006. It partnered with Respond (recently acquired by CDC Software) and the new system went live in December. The introduction of the new Respond solution, named CHARMS2 (Complaints Handling and Resolution Management System) and based on Respond’s Centerpoint and Handler applications, delivered a 15% improvement in complaints resolution in the first three weeks. It also reduced error rates from manual input from 10% to 2% in lending and from 16% to 8% in savings within the first two months of implementation. The judges appreciated the project was still in its infancy but recognised that these improvements were substantial so early in the project’s implementation.
Commended: Dexia Bank with its mobile banking service. Dexia is the first bank in Europe to truly go mobile, deploying a fully functional mobile banking service with 700 of its retail and business bankers during 2006. The system operates over Citrix thin client services integrated with UMTS wireless services into the mobile banker’s PC, PDA or mobile telephone. The judges liked the idea of the branch of tomorrow being in the banker’s PDA and commended Dexia for its innovative approach to future banking.
Back-Office Project Winner:
Cap Gemini and HVB with operations merger
Cap Gemini worked with HVB to integrate the newly merged Tiriac Bank in Romania to the HVB Romania operations in 2006. This meant transitioning 540,000 customers and 68 branches to merge with HVB’s own 14 branches with 50,000 customers all within 10 months. The operation meant a complete re-engineering of processes to complete a complex legal, organisational and technical merger. The results achieved impressed the judges: revenues increased 15.6% while costs stayed constant, the cost-income ratio decreased by 6.7% and staff cost reduced 7.1%.
Commended: Infosys for three major implementations. Infosys completed three major implementations during 2006, with Finacle replacing core banking operations for Punjab National Bank and Centurion Bank of Punjab, and SWIFT integration combined with AML, STP and OFAC-compliance for State Bank of India in overseas offices. The competence shown in these deliveries warranted Infosys gaining a commendation for its excellence in delivery.
Commended: Moody’s with Moody’s KMV. Believed to be the first ever effort to make and apply correlation estimates for small and medium-sized enterprises, Moody’s, in partnership with SunTrust Bank in the US, launched Moody’s KMV during 2006 to develop a leading-edge model to assess correlations in credit quality between all the SMEs in SunTrust’s lending book. The system collates data from 750,000 financial statements related to 160,000 US firms to provide geographical, behavioural and analytical ratings of company credit ratings.
Architecture Project Winner:
Voca with Voca Payment Platform
Voca built a core processing platform from scratch with an implementation that consisted of 40 separate IT projects taking five years to complete, using BEA’s WebLogic Server 8.1. The project was completed within its £100m budget and saves about £200m annually for UK banks. On completion, the Voca Payment Platform also surpassed expectations, handling more than 165 million transactions in a normal processing window of four hours.
Voca CEO Marion King says: “Voca is delighted to win the Architecture Project award for the Voca Payment Platform and to receive industry recognition for our leading technology. This is a testament to the world-class team of software and infrastructure architects in our team, who demonstrated not only great talent and innovation, but also remarkable tenacity and enthusiasm throughout the programme.”
