Judged by:

Chris Skinner, CEO, Balatro, and co-founder,Shaping Tomorrow (chairman of judging panel)

Dan Barnes, financial systems editor, The Banker

PJ Digiammarino, head of global IT customer services, Barclays Capital

Bob Fuller, head of IT strategy, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein

Roberto Rivera, Intelligent Growth

Ralph Silva, senior analyst, TowerGroup Europe

Suresh Viswanathan, senior vice-president, Citigroup

Wijnand de Kruijff, deputy CIO, ING Direct NV

Clive Whincup, CIO, Banca Popolare di Milano

Bo Harald, executive vice-president, Nordea

Parveen Bansal, business analyst, TowerGroup

APPLICATION OF THE YEAR:

Winner – RBS

Royal Bank of Scotland Financial Market’s RBSopenvu hit all the right buttons for judges in this category. The service was put together by a combined team from the bank’s business and technology divisions. It reaches across customer relationship management (CRM), management and information systems, internal channel-based communication systems, research and the trading portal, achieving improved efficiency and cost reduction through the integration of systems. Since integration is never an easy task, this made the project all the more impressive for our panel. As a customer-facing portal, RBSopenvu genuinely provides clients with a single access point globally, fulfilling the bank’s objectives of deepening client relationships through a customer-centric model while increasing efficiency. Comments from peers in other banks showed support (and envy) of the project that the judges believed were clearly deserved.

Highly commended – Citigroup

Also highly praised was Citigroup Global Transaction Services’ CitiDirect Online Banking for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The concept is that of simplifying the various products supplied to the SME market (cash management, securities services and trade finance) via a highly secure, web-based platform. As a download, corporate customers regarded the solution as easy to install, thus increasing the likelihood of uptake. This simplicity clearly helps when reaching out to the emerging markets, for example eastern Europe – the level of customer satisfaction there, 89%, is indicative of this.

INNOVATION OF THE YEAR

Winner – NCR

Financial crime is a growth business and reducing this cost has become a top priority, particularly where it is affecting consumer confidence. The automated teller machine (ATM) is easily the most trusted electronic channel that banks employ and the rise in criminal attempts to defraud the public via this channel has prompted NCR to invest in further R&D. Criminals have begun to use a wide variety of devices attached to ATMs to obtain data, cards or cash. The NCR Intelligent Fraud Detection system combats this through capacitive sensing technology with newly developed algorithms to eliminate false alarms and adapt to a changing environment. The technology is a non-contact detection system sensitive to the presence of metals, non-metals, solids, and liquids, which it detects through alterations in an electrostatic field. As ATMs are exposed to the elements, this technology can often be triggered by changes in the weather or contact with other foreign bodies. The NCR Intelligent Fraud Detection has been developed to counter this and allows the system to differentiate between natural changes in the environment and devices that are being placed on or in the machine. It is innovative, valuable and benefits both customer and bank.

Highly commended – UBS

A growing need for electronic equity cash order routing led UBS to develop its Direct Strategy Access (DSA) for trading. The platform was developed with the concept of a manufacturing plant in mind, as a model for straight-through processing (STP). The bank saw the quality and reliability of execution as the key to client satisfaction, and efficiency as the route to effective product pricing so it sought to emulate the methods employed in a factory. An infrastructure was created, consisting of an execution network built on proprietary Mini Order Processing technology (highly scalable and with intelligent failover – that is, automatically switching to back-up operation when necessary), a data warehouse to allow reporting on processes and a risk management tool, all of which are connected to a single on-screen view. The DSA was created using components that already existed in the bank, and through collaboration with teams from countries around the globe, from Australia to North America. Overall, the product has saved millions of dollars and increased the processing volume of strategies from hundreds to thousands with electronic delivery reducing errors and execution time. Most importantly, it has been adopted by clients – making up a sizeable chunk of revenues for UBS Equities.

NETWORKING INITIATIVE OF THE YEAR Winner – BT Networking is the backbone of transaction processing, and its smooth running is crucial. When upgrading or replacing a network for card transactions, there is a huge number of external stakeholders who would notice any disruption. BT demonstrated it was capable of carrying out such a complex operation over a vast geographical area while maintaining an availability rate over and above that of the card provider. Improved response times (reducing those of one country to a fifth of that previously achieved), enhanced redundancy, reduced costs and additional scalability all added up to a winning formula. The project went one better, though, through the utilisation of regional broadband global area network (RBGan) satellite technology to remove any reliance on existing telecoms networks in remote or developing areas.

Highly commended – Arcontech

The judges saw value in the use of Arcontech CityVision StarNets where customers have begun to interconnect their Starnets to facilitate cheap, secure and fast data-sharing. The product has been the subject of many upgrades and innovations recently, including enhanced integration, which allows highly secure mobile trading via a standard mobile phone rather than a PDA or laptop. The practicality of the service, combined with the potential to allow new business models to develop, was well received.

OUTSOURCING PROJECT OF THE YEAR

Winner – State Bank of India

State Bank of India (SBI) had a requirement for an entire network infrastructure project to migrate thousands of branches from a distributed data infrastructure to a centralised database. The programme was outsourced to Datacraft India to build and maintain a private integrated network, SBI Connect, which could carry traffic such as data, voice and video. This enabled a number of applications to be used by branches and outlets over a single network. The newly developed core banking, trade finance and foreign office applications all use SBI Connect, as do the various customer channels (such as ATMs and online banking) that previously used diverse communication routes. The bank is already making optimum use of the network via creation of new e-mail and knowledge management applications and believes it to be the backbone of IT development over the next few years, generating a return on investment.

Highly commended –Siemens Business Services

Working with National Savings & Investments (NS&I), Siemens has taken on the role of transforming back office, treasury and customer channels to cope with the demands of modern business. A great deal of planning was done to ensure that no aspect of this, from core systems replacement to increased availability of customer channels, had a negative impact on the customer or business user. The rigour with which this took place ensured that service was always maintained, no key performance indicators or service level agreements were missed and that NS&I achieved its goal of a single customer view with potential for enhanced product design and marketing.

ROI OF THE YEAR

Winner – Platform Computing

Return on investment (ROI) is often difficult to measure for technologies but the straightforwardness of Platform Computing’s story for its Platform Symphony product made it a perfect fit for this award. Platform Symphony increased server utilisation by more than 60% and reduced the compute-cycle costs for one customer by 20%, saving $1m in a year, with five times that amount expected for 2004. Using basic servers, the grid system has replaced an expensive and heavily supported system. This has allowed the bank to move on to architecture of commoditised hardware. By providing an ability to reserve resources, Platform has managed to bridge an issue that often inhibits centralisation of assets – namely server hugging, by which managers try to retain hardware as support.

Highly commended – Barclays

Barclays’ International Bank DNA was created to drive customer centricity in an offshore sales team. Following the restrictiveness of certain regulatory and internal pressures, the bank had to address its management of customer information so that its marketing and sales teams could manage their leads effectively. The IT development division constructed a CRM system in just 12 weeks and it has since generated an ROI of more than 5600% in five months. Additional improvements are expected to cost less than 10% of the construction costs and were due to be delivered by the time The Banker went to press.

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