Building on its strength as one of the largest financial institutions in the Middle East, National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) has pioneered in driving its online banking channel to bolster personalised services to its large customer base as well as to attract potential customers. The bank has also put an advanced customer relationship system in place to enhance the speed and efficiency of services rendered while automating a number of traditionally manual processes. The bank has also completely automated its web publishing process by empowering various departments to create, manage and publish content. Quick deployment of fully scalable and dynamic web pages and sites together with automated business processes has resulted in a lower cost and time per transaction as well as higher customer retention, all part of NBK's new and competitive business strategy.

Established in 1952 as the first indigenous bank and the first joint stock company in Kuwait and the Gulf, with a capital of one million dinars, NBK saw its first tier equity grow to US $ 1.420 billion and its assets to US $ 14.6 billion by end 2001. It is the largest and most profitable publicly held company in Kuwait and among the top companies in the Middle East. . NBK has a strong local and international network, which includes branches, subsidiaries and representative offices in London, New York, Paris, Geneva, Bahrain, Beirut, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand. The bank also has ambitious regional expansion plans.

Establishing itself as the most profitable bank in the Arab world in 1999, NBK has been ranked among the top 300 banks in the world and the fourth among Arab banks. With the highest credit rating awarded to any bank in the Middle East by leading international credit rating agencies including Moody's, Standard & Poors and Capital International, NBK has been the recipient of several international awards, including: World's Best Smaller Bank, and Best Bank in the Middle East by Euromoney in 1994; Best Local Bank in the Middle East for two years in succession; and Best Bank in Kuwait for seven consecutive years.

Ushering in a new era

Having attained new heights in profitability, credit rating and financial services, the biggest challenge set before NBK is now to introduce the latest banking technologies to enhance its leadership position in commercial banking and other financial services

In its efforts towards meeting the challenges of introducing customer-friendly and cost-effective banking technologies, NBK has set new standards for retail banking in the region by leading the way with new products, services and technology-driven distribution channels.

As early as 1997, when Internet hype was at its peak, NBK was building its Internet strategy. "We saw this as an integral part of our delivery channel strategy and never as a stand-alone initiative. We wanted to understand the platform as well as see what our customers wanted when they used this channel," said Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, NATIONAL BANK OF KUWAIT.

In the initial stages, the bank didn't expect customers to migrate to the new delivery channel in droves. But as the popularity of the new medium grew, it became more a part of the bank's customer retention strategy and is now an integral part of the company's growth strategy.

The bank has already made significant efforts in creating awareness and overcoming concerns about Internet security and the most important of these was probably the launch of the Visa Internet-only shopping card in late 1999.

"This was closely followed with the introduction of our payment gateway services, which provided merchants with the ability to provide online payment mechanisms on their websites", continued Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, National Bank of Kuwait.

Today, the efficiency of NBK's services is unrivalled, including round-the-clock on-line banking, built on Microsoft's technology platform. In addition, the bank is building a host of other online services by establishing agreements with leading Kuwaiti and regional vendors to offer products on its site.

NBK's Internet initiatives have now extended to its website where the focus is to streamline publishing of content and providing visitors with personalized and targeted content of interest. "We realized the value of the website to interact and market products and services to existing and potential customers. To meet this challenge we need a platform and a solution that would enable us to deliver personalized and targeted content of value to specific and groups of customers."

After looking at several content management packages, we decided to use Microsoft's Content Management Server and integrate it with the Commerce Server to achieve our objective. A combination of the product's ease of use, support for fast deployment, local support and compatibility with existing infrastructure placed Microsoft's solution top of the list. The personalization capabilities of Commerce Server 2000 and its easy integration with our data warehouse was a key decisive factor in selecting this particular solution", said Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, National Bank of Kuwait.

The bank has also done away with the need for dedicated manpower and time resources to manage and publish web content. With each department now being able to create, manage and publish its own content, the corporate website can be updated regularly with no delays. Apart from improving the timeliness and relevance of content hosted on the website, the bank's e-business department is now able to rapidly deploy, highly scalable and dynamic web pages and sites. Furthermore, the bank can now deliver targeted content of interest to its site visitors and use its website to communicate and market products and services to strategic customers.

Opting for the best technology

When selecting their technology infrastructure, NBK opted for the Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 for communication, Microsoft DNA Server for host connectivity, Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 for online transactions, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 for database requirements and Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS) to manage and automate web-publishing functions.

Working closely with Microsoft consultants, NBK in-house development team developed and implemented the solution. A key part of the initial project was skills transfer, to ensure that the bank's IT team was proficient in optimizing Microsoft's tools and technologies to the maximum.

"The process of skills transfer was important since our team started from a minimal Microsoft knowledge base. Microsoft Consultants worked hand in hand with our team to ensure that they could develop quickly and effectively on the platform Our ITP personnel are now high performance group well versed in Microsoft technologies required to develop any future applications" added Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, National Bank of Kuwait.

"After conducting a thorough audit of the bank's existing online processes, MCS created a comprehensive proposal that detailed infrastructure guidelines, overall application architecture, web pages workflow and design and data modeling methodologies. Using this as a roadmap, the NBK and MCS teams worked together towards fully deploying the solution," Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, National Bank of Kuwait.

"Microsoft's Distributed inter-Networking Architecture (DNA) has enabled us to separate presentation, business logic and data from each other while allowing our development groups to share code across multiple applications and functions," said, Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, National Bank of Kuwait.

Microsoft Visual Studio was deployed by the bank to serve as the development platform for the its in-house software development projects. "We are sharing code across multiple applications and functions, resulting in reduced development times and lower maintenance costs".

Using Microsoft technology, NBK developed its Rapid Applications Development (RAD) program to further shorten development lead time and improve the quality and timelines of internally developed software applications," said Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, National Bank of Kuwait.

In order to further enhance its online service arm with personalized customer experience and customized marketing opportunity NBK has recently deployed Microsoft's Content Management Server 2000. The bank is now able to effectively manage content contribution from various departments by empowering them to create, manage, and publish their own content. NBK is also able to deliver personalized content for multiple audiences, be it existing customers, first-time visitors or non-NBK customers.

"Using CMS we have done away with all the bottlenecks associated with manually updating the website. Changes and updates can now be made instantaneously using CMS's built-in workflow, which has been customized to match our existing internal approval processes. Also, by empowering individual departments to manage content on the website, CMS has made it much easier for individual departments to communicate with customers directly, which in turn will strengthen the relationship between the bank and its partners and customers. Another advantage of using CMS is that customers can register with www.NBK.Com and create their own NBK home page and subscribe for special service, such as sports and weather updates."

Elaborating on the benefits of using Microsoft Commerce Server for the bank's online solution, Golnar Mahmoudi said that it would allow the bank to capture invaluable data on customers on an ongoing basis.

"This data will be captured in a manner that can be easily integrated and updated with the existing data on our database. Such information will play a very important role for our cross selling and customer acquisition initiatives. Also we can now schedule and manage marketing and advertising campaigns that are targeted towards specific users.

"Another critical function in which Microsoft's Content Management Server assisted us was in the area of site development. We are now able to build and deploy manageable and scalable web pages within the shortest timeframe as well as develop enterprise level web applications quickly and effectively," added Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, National Bank of Kuwait.

Microsoft's platform for online banking enables NBK to take advantage of a low cost of entry, when compared to other technology platforms. "We were able to purchase relatively low end Microsoft NT servers initially, and subsequently scale up our infrastructure at a later date. Also as Microsoft technology skills are more readily available in the region, our development and subsequent support costs are substantially lower."

Flexible architecture, simple solutions

While introducing new technologies, NBK opted for a single environment, which seamlessly integrates with existing systems as well as future additions. During the development of its online services platform, the in-house development team introduced a three-tier architecture based on the Microsoft DNA architecture.

By separating the presentation, host and business logic 'middleware' layer, NBK's developers were able to isolate changes in the host (mainframe) from changes to the online systems. In effect, this meant that new processes and functions could be added without having to revert to time-consuming and difficult host development.

"We can also make changes to presentation and the business logic layers without having to write code on the host - a great example of this is the Arabic interface recently introduced on online banking. This was just presentation layer and minor middleware development with no recourse to the host," said Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, National Bank of Kuwait.

Utilising Microsoft's DNA architecture, development processes and tools has allowed the delivery of flexible solutions through the separation of the application layers and code re-use. Currently, NBK is successfully re-using middleware code across their online banking for PC and WAP, and the NBK Mobile (Short Messaging) systems. The flexibility of technology allows the presentation layer to be changed at any time. NBK started with the introduction of the Internet services, then added WAP services and Arabic offerings. Additional modules are in the pipeline.

Multiple Service Delivery Channels

For delivery of its banking services, NBK has adopted a multiple channel strategy in order to provide make its services available anyplace, at any time, and eventually, from any device. The bank encourages customers to use a combination of channels that are most suitable and convenient to them. Clearly the current architecture allows the bank to deliver common functions and processes across multiple channels.

"The next logical stage is of course to make these services available to our customers on any device, which is something that we are working towards. As a bank we encourage customers to use a combination channels that are most suitable and convenient to them. Clearly the architecture that we have deployed allows us to deliver common functions and processes across multiple channel", said Golnar Mahmoudi, Head of e-business, National Bank of Kuwait.