Banking: Customer Stories

BNZ wanted to find a better way to analyze monthly data that is used to provide management information to its branches across New Zealand. The bank found a solution using the business intelligence (BI) tools supported by Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, including Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel and Microsoft SQL Server PowerPivot for Microsoft SharePoint. With the self-service BI tools, BNZ expects to simplify and accelerate the delivery of information to branches while allowing its BI department to manage the distribution and publication of information with greater efficiency.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia, headquartered in Sydney, Australia, is the nation’s largest financial institution. CBA decided to deploy Microsoft Lync Server 2010 to see how it would integrate with other Microsoft solutions in its network and help make its workforce more productive. CBA deployed Microsoft Lync Server 2010 for instant messaging, presence, desktop sharing, and ad hoc collaboration and online conferencing capabilities. “The bank got one platform that we run all of our applications on. Putting Lync into that platform, it just worked. We’re able to link it with Office, SharePoint, and with our .NET applications. We’re able to use presence across all of those applications to be able to allow our people to collaborate on whatever piece of work that they’re working on at that point of time” – Mark Griffith, Head of Workplace Technologies, Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

Crédit Agricole S.A. is Europe’s leading banking group in terms of retail banking revenues. The bank has over 9,089 branches in France and operates in 70 countries with 161,800 employees worldwide. Using the improved conferencing capabilities in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Crédit Agricole plans to facilitate enhanced collaboration, helping financial experts share information more easily and make better business decisions. The company expects to reduce travel by ten to twenty percent and estimates that annual conferencing costs could decrease by €150,000 (U.S.$205,177) for just one subsidiary with 5,000 employees. For Crédit Agricole, these cost reductions are critical to support cost-control efforts motivated by the 2008 international financial crisis.

HML—which specialises in financial outsourcing for financial institutions in the U.K. and Ireland—needed to improve operational risk management to avoid unnecessary losses and bolster compliance. The firm relied on spreadsheets and disparate databases to analyse performance and risk, but recognised the need for a more rigorous approach. This led to Microsoft Certified Partner Stratex Systems delivering StratexPoint—a risk management, governance, and compliance solution designed to meet the demands of the executive team, as well as the expectations of the Financial Services Authority. StratexPoint is powered by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server technology and was central to supporting a “risk-led” transformation at HML, with an improved risk framework and new focus on key controls. As a result, the firm has significantly reduced operational losses, as well as its regulatory capital.

Investec Bank (Channel Islands)—a specialist provider of offshore private banking services—wanted to improve its core banking technology and manage its growing intermediary business more effectively. Vega Solutions replaced the bank’s previous banking system with a customised banking solution called Vision Online, based on Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft BizTalk Server. Investec has doubled its revenue since 2004 without needing any extra back-office staff since the software went live. In the meantime, Vega Solutions has provided further enhancements. This has included integration with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network using Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT, and online banking giving customers straight-through processing for payments.

Key Bank is one of the largest bank-based financial services companies in the United States, with U.S.$95 billion in assets. To boost efficiency at its branches, the bank implemented a new IT infrastructure built with the Microsoft Application Platform. With its new solution, KeyBank has streamlined mission-critical operations, increased system performance, maintained high levels of availability, improved customer service levels, and achieved greater flexibility and agility.

Kuveyt Türk needed to increase the flexibility, scalability, and transparency of its core banking system to speed the deployment of offerings that make use of the bank’s 5 terabytes of customer and financial data. To do so, the bank built a new mission-critical system with the Microsoft platform. As a result, the bank has boosted innovation, scalability, and performance—and reduced the time-to-market of customer-focused services.

Maybank Singapore offers customers a diverse range of financial services. With numerous lines of business offering a multitude of products to a large customer base, the bank wanted to improve how it served its customers by providing sales, marketing and services teams with accurate customer information while facilitating collaboration between business units. After a detailed review process, the bank selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM to support its drive towards continuously improving customer service. With a single view of all customer information, the bank has benefited from reduced operating costs and greater collaboration, leading to an improved service experience for its customers.

MKB Bank is a prominent, universal financial institution in the Hungarian banking sector. It is a leader in all customer segments for the completeness of the product portfolio, the standards of services and the intensity of customer relations. It is traditionally strong in the corporate and organizational market and project financing. At the same time, there is a growing presence in the public and SMB segments and in financial and capital market services. The main owner, BayernLB Group (headquartered in Munich) has assigned MKB Bank the role of a bridgehead in implementing its strategy in certain countries of the Central and Eastern European region. As part of that role, MKB Bank also acts as the owner of MKB Unionbank in Bulgaria and that of MKB Romexterra Bank in Romania. The share capital amounts to HUF 14.094 billion. In line with its strategy, MKB Bank has implemented an operational CRM and front-end solution, using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 platform, to provide a standard view of customers and integrated access to all channels of the sales campaigns. Therefore the solution boosts the efficiency of more than 1000 people in the entire sales network, also supporting management in measuring and motivating performance.

Nationwide Building Society in the United Kingdom (U.K.) is a major force in retail financial services, and maintains its competitive edge by continually seeking ways of improving customer services. As a founding member of the U.K.’s Faster Payments Service, Nationwide needed a solution to reduce the time taken for settlement of payments between customers’ accounts from three days to near real time. Microsoft Services mitigated the building society’s risk by taking on responsibility for the end-to-end delivery of the entire project. Not only were the requirements extensive and complex, but it also had to be delivered within a short timeframe. Microsoft Services took just 14 weeks to design and deliver the improved business-critical solution. Nationwide now has a secure, high-performing, and easily maintainable Faster Payments Service.

North Shore Credit Union (NSCU) is a Vancouver-based financial services organization that delivers banking, insurance and investment services. To achieve greater efficiencies and enhanced service delivery in a highly competitive marketplace, NSCU wanted to unify information for a number of databases and gain a more integrated view of its membership base. Working with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Temenos, NSCU deployed a comprehensive core banking platform running on Microsoft-based technologies. Today, NSCU is meeting its technology and industry challenges by improved data management and trend forecasting, all of which improves member service and gives them a clear competitive advantage.

PREMIER Bankcard, LLC (PREMIER) one of the largest VISA and MasterCard credit providers in the United States, needed to enhance scalability and performance for its business intelligence (BI) data warehouse and online transaction processing (OLTP) databases. “BI began as an area of research for us, but has become absolutely mission critical,” says Dan Zerfas, Vice President of Software Development at PREMIER. The company enhanced its BI infrastructure by upgrading its 17-terabyte data warehouse to Microsoft SQL Server™ 2008 Enterprise (64-bit), hosted on a server computer with 16 Intel® Itanium® 2 processors. PREMIER also upgraded its OLTP database to the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2008. The upgraded deployments provide a better view of the business, enterprise-grade scalability, maintenance without scheduled downtime, and easier database management.

Skandinavisk Data Center (SDC) helps small and medium-sized banks compete with larger ones by providing competitive IT services at an affordable price. To maintain its long-term viability, SDC is moving its core banking system from an IBM mainframe to the Microsoft Application Platform. By doing so, SDC can deliver 99.8 percent availability, increase agility, and provide high performance. In addition, the company can save more than DKK100 million (U.S.$16 million) in yearly operational costs.

Sun estimates that it reduced the time to deploy by 67 percent and the cost to deploy by 75 percent compared to the SaaS option. Cross-selling at Sun is up by close to 20 percent; the time to approve loans has been shortened by 80 percent; and Sun even gained a tool with which to speed the integration of acquisitions.

When the recession hit, Sun National Bank had the foresight to anticipate the inevitable recovery. Sun saw technology as a way to increase its competitive advantage ahead of better times. It wanted a centralized, enterprisewide customer relationship management (CRM) solution to strengthen existing relationships and capture new business. After considering options that included a popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) package, Sun chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Sun gained a flexible framework for CRM that it could customize and integrate easily with core systems. The results: Sun estimates that it reduced the time to deploy by 67 percent and the cost to deploy by 75 percent compared to the SaaS option. Cross-selling at Sun is up by close to 20 percent; the time to approve loans has been shortened by 80 percent; and Sun even gained a tool with which to speed the integration of acquisitions.

Oregon-based Umpqua Bank is known for its strategy of using its branches as customer-friendly sales sites. To extend that same inviting atmosphere to its Web site, Umpqua Bank adopted Voyager Consumer Banking from Fiserv—based on Microsoft® operating system and data management software—to create a personalized suite of online banking services for its 250,000 customers. Umpqua Bank now has the flexibility, scalability, availability, and cost-effectiveness that it needs to be innovative and competitive in the tough financial services market. Umpqua Bank expects to attract more customers and to double its online service usage to 40 percent within two years. It also expects maintenance costs to drop significantly due to consolidation of its online systems.