EasyPoint 57i (ASAN) delivers cost-effective automated teller machine (ATM) convenience to largely untapped non-urban areas, as well as urban areas such as corporate offices and factories, malls and branch extensions. ASAN (the Hindu word for easy) is the first ATM designed to meet Indian infrastructural challenges, and its small size and low running costs offer banks a low total cost of ownership, safeguarding their investment even in locations with relatively low transaction volumes.
ASAN supports wireless connectivity through GPRS and CDMA communication technologies for areas with poor conventional telecommunications connectivity. It is designed to withstand deployment in non-air conditioned and dusty environments as would be present in rural areas. It also has an integrated UPS (uninterrupted power supply) and can be programmed to switch on or off if 24-hour service is not required.
As well as giving banks the opportunity to apply new business models and reaching a greater part of the population by placing ATMs in previously unviable locations, the EP57i is also suitable for deployment in branch locations, thereby reducing teller workload. It offers reduced costs, improved efficiency and the release of branch personnel from processing basic cash withdrawal transactions to spend more time with customers in the promotion of more profitable products and services.
Highly Commended: Diebold
With its Opteva Self-Service terminal range, Diebold has focused on improving the operational aspects of the ATM network. This includes installation, daily maintenance and balancing by bank personnel; service (supplies and cash replenishment, and repairs); and ease of adding new functionality. Diebold has also improved the design, to maintain interface consistency across the range and enhance customers’ feeling of relative security when using it. It has improved the ergonomics while conforming to all accessibility guidelines. Especially significant is a new operator interface using a 10.4 inches LCD display and full Qwerty keyboard with integrated pointing device. It has a web look and feel interface; full graphical communication of terminal status and follow-on repair actions; mpeg video bank operator servicing instructions; customisable messages to bank operators, and when IP-connected, real-time communication for reporting balancing details and terminal status information. This represents a quantum leap forward in the methodology of interfacing with the ATM, both for Diebold service technicians and for bank operations staff.
Wealth Management Online Solution
Winner: Capgemini (formerly Cap Gemini Ernst & Young)
Noting the growing trend of high net worth individuals to use financial advisers to get personalised advice, Capgemini, consulting for Thomson Financial, has developed an online collaborative solution to enable scalable touchpoints and reduce cost per customer. Capgemini’s innovative Wealth Management Online solution is a highly integrated and collaborative front-end solution, offering advisors and clients a holistic, aggregated view to a full spectrum of client financial data, sophisticated financial tools and information, as well as online broker/adviser collaboration capabilities and access to other full service offerings across multiple delivery channels.
Using the solution financial advisers can, now and in the future, create and access external financial plans, co-browse and collaborate with clients online and, at desktop, dynamically review account performance, share files, chat, conduct online surveys, synch/download to tethered devices, and also make automatic recommendations of products and services. It can make on-the-fly conversion and adjustment of language, market data, and exchange access. It also allows the financial institutions to easily customise and create several client-facing sites and while maintaining brand consistency.
By enabling Merrill Lynch to consolidate multiple sites to a single site that delivers segmented content and features, consistent look and feel across user groups the solution is projected to result in a 30% reduction of total cost of ownership. The client-centric model presents and exploits cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, thereby with clients offers financial advisers the ability to increase revenue. Based on flexible architecture and using web services for integration it offers ease of development and deployment of future projects designed around this CORE solution.
Branch Automation
Winner: Alogent Corporation
Alogent’s Extensible Deposit Automation (EDA) Solutions, including Sierra Xpedite® at points of presentment and Sierra® Xchange™ as a payments processing engine, offers banks the ability to modernise and streamline their central cheque processing operations to keep down the fixed costs of cheque processing (in the light of the rapidly diminishing volumes of cheques being written). It offers substantial cost savings by eliminating the need for manual processing and transportation of cheques.
EDA uses advanced image and data-processing technology to capture, validate, correct, manage and distribute all customer payments and deposits. It removes manual effort of processing, clearing and settlement. EDA is an all-in-one transaction capture, proofing and posting business process that allows for the flexible capture of codelines, images and amounts at the first point of deposit. It eliminates touchpoints, and thus offers greater processing efficiencies, improved availability of high-quality information and reduced risk of errors and write-offs. It has demonstrated an exponential increase in quality, processing speed and profit, while reducing manual effort, paper and costs.
Online Services
Winner: BT Exact
The innovative use of multi-media application was selected to highlight the opportunity that innovative technology presents. Ask Avril is an online multimedia application in the form of an avatar – a virtual character used to represent human beings – presenting a friendly animated face that greets the organisation’s website customers, asks how it can be of assistance and provides verbal answers to the website’s frequently asked questions (FAQs). The solution was developed by BT Exact for Newcastle Building Society, which wanted to offer online customers a more interactive and informative experience with the ultimate aim of improving sales of a particular mortgage product. Ask Avril is designed to respond to FAQs relating to Newcastle’s Offset Mortgage in much the same way that a human would during face-to-face interaction.
Created using Pulse Veepers’ virtual character creation software, it is a relatively cheap solution. Ask Avril is designed on BT Exact’s Radical Multimedia Lab research on graphical realism, facial expression, eye gaze, gesture recognition and expression. A key benefit is the relatively simple hardware required to make it run: all it requires is a PC, a graphics card and Internet Explorer. A customer satisfaction survey found that 51% thought that Ask Avril was better than normal text pages, and 60% were happy with the speed of operation.
Customer Relationship Management
Winner: SPSS
SPSS PredictiveMarketing offers clear value for banks looking to improve effectiveness of outbound campaigns – usually a costly exercise. It helps a bank’s marketing department to predict individual customer behaviour, needs, risks and profitability, and deploy this knowledge to determine the most effective action at each outbound customer contact (direct mail, e-mail, outbound calling and branches) and across multiple campaigns.
The software determines whom to send offers to, which offers to send, when to send them and through which channels. It accounts for individual preferences to choose campaigns that offer both high value to the company and a high likelihood of customer acceptance.
With the ability to maximise campaign returns by 25%-50% SPSS has gained an impressive client list. A unified view of the customer ensures the optimisation and orchestration of customer contacts across multiple channels. Typical benefits include reduced direct mail costs by 30-40%; reduced customer attrition by 15%; additional revenues; implementation time of less than three months; and fast ROI (less than a year).
Designed for ease of use by business and marketing users, instead of statisticians, it enables business users to calculate the real-world impact of campaign decisions on costs and revenues both before and after campaigns are executed. The use of PredictiveMarketing for campaigns at one client site, Natexis Assurances, which included a direct mailing followed up with phone calls, cut the campaign size by 46%, while increasing number of policies sold by 55%, as it only selected the customers most likely to make higher investments. Actual returns generated increased by 109% and resulted in E1.6m in additional revenue on a single campaign alone.
Mobile
Winner: Infosys Technologies
Finacle’s Mobile Payments is an innovative solution that provides banks with a cost effective and reliable model to offer customers micro payment service in a secure manner using mobile phones. Cash-based micro payments can be replaced, without the need for a debit or credit card. The solution provides banks with a cost effective and reliable model for micro payments using SMS and generates fee income by charging merchants, without the need to connect to an intermediary such as Visa or MasterCard.
The solution can handle any micro payment. The real time two-way alerts provide the necessary confirmations for the transactions. It also provides a facility for customers to view transactions on the internet. Zero dependency on the type of mobile phone required for accessing this service enables banks to launch this service across a wide cross-section of mobile users. Supported on Microsoft .NET and J2EE technologies, this flexible solution is designed to intelligently handle network failures and transaction integrity issues and also offers security by means of a mobile PIN for transactions and limits for transactions. Importantly, Infosys is working to provide a facility for an ASP to host this solution providing mobile payment facility to customers across multiple banks which will be crucial for greater acceptance.
Core Banking
Winner: i-flex solutions
Judges highlighted a general lack of genuine innovation in core banking and were surprised by the surprising lack of web-focused core banking innovation. FLEXCUBE from i-flex was chosen more for its capability to add value to a financial service institution than for its innovation. The FLEXCUBE core banking product suite offers a scalable, highly integrated universal banking solution by creating modules that stand alone and integrate on a lean hardware framework, with the ability to support multi-bank, multi-currency and multi-channel operations using a widely recognised data model that can incorporate changes in technology and banking standards. It is designed to achieve a high degree of automation using straight-through processing and its database-centric approach allows a single window of access to customer information across all channels. Other innovative functionality includes ability of multi-line, inline exposure tracking for customers across businesses and geographic regions. New functionality added over the past year includes enabling the financial institution to bill or charge based on the service provided to the customer: charges levied can be differentiated at individual customer level and/or at transaction level. The user interface has also been redesigned to improve user productivity.
Highly Commended: Financial Objects
Financial Objects’ activebank was selected as runner-up for its innovative use of web services and the Microsoft .Net platform. activebank is a robust and functionally rich core banking application constructed from reusable software components, running in a scalable XML framework deployed on the Microsoft platform. Utilising XML WebServices on .NET, activebank supports existing and future delivery channels, offers good connectivity and integration and addresses the needs of a banking institution’s front and back core system requirements. activebank is modular and deployment to the branch network is achieved with a zero footprint on the desktop enabling system changes to be quickly made available to each and every employee in the institution. activebank uses the Windows platform combined with cost-effective server technologies based around Intel processors. Running on industry-standard commodity hardware, it can scale in a predictable linear fashion both up and out. Although the application is hosted in a Microsoft-environment, it fully supports Oracle database-technology running on Unix as an alternative to MicrosoftSQLServer. The user interface is developed using MicrosoftASP.NET and offers improved navigation and workflow, and the menu structures are fully customisable for screens across the system.
Smart Card Services
Winner: ACI Worldwide
ACI Smart Chip Manager is a useful modular solution addressing an immediate business need. It enables issuers to migrate to EMV or any other smart card scheme. ACI Smart Chip Manager will issue and manage the smart cards and can also update application parameters including EMV risk parameters in the field and personalise any type of smart card and post issue new applications to multiple application card schemes. It enables data collated on the smart card chip to be analysed by a bank’s CRM systems. A number of EMEA banks and processors have licensed SCM for card and application management systems as part of their migration to EMV, including Standard Bank Group, South Africa, and Emporiki Bank, Greece. ACI is also part of a consortium in Hong Kong, led by PCCW Business eSolutions Ltd, for the roll out of multi-application smart ID cards (SMARTICS). A major benefit of ACI Smart Chip Manager is that it is technology agnostic and can thereby support all chip technology today and in the future. This helps to isolate technology issues from business issues. The ACI Smart Chip Manager can be purchased as an end-to-end solution, or in modules for specific use:
- Card and Application Management – to issue, manage and handle the data preparation of smart cards
- Application Parameter Management – provides the ability to define risk profiles per card product, facilitate loading cardholder financial risk profiles during card issuance and change profiles in the field
- Card Personalisation Management – will make smart card personalisation transparent and easy to operate.
Highly Commended: Welcome Real Time
Welcome Real Time’s XLS is a payment enhancement software that adds customer-centric enhancements to EMV cards and terminals. XLS has been designed to enable banks and merchants to use information made available through the EMV infrastructure as a loyalty tool to increase sales and usage. Its primary innovative functionality is its ability to run multiple different programs simultaneously on the one card. In effect, it creates a means for a wide range of stakeholders to create or participate in incentive programs designed to influence or acknowledge customers’ purchasing behaviours. It enables multiple campaigns to be set by the bank or the merchant, to offer rewards according to a customer’s value. XLS makes the card attractive to consumers, who are rewarded for their spending patterns, and gives retailers a reason to invest in smart card readers by drawing customers back using a reliable, automated loyalty program.
