Congratulations to the winners and highly commended entrants in the ACI Excellence Awards 2011
ACI has announced the results of the 2011 ACI Excellence Awards, and we would like to congratulate our winners:
• Absa Bank in South Africa, in the Meeting Market Needs category, for the use of BASE24® and BASE24-eps® to improve access to banking
• HDFC Bank in India, in the Creativity category, for using ACI Proactive Risk Manager™ for revenue generation
• Union Bank of India in the Payments Transformation category for customer empowerment using BASE24
• Coast Capital Savings in Canada, who won the Judges’ Special Recognition Award for reduced debit fraud losses using ACI Proactive Risk Manager for Enterprise Risk
And our highly commended entrants:
• The BENEFIT Company in Bahrain for the use of ACI Commerce Gateway™ for the National Payment Gateway
• MasterCard in the U.S. for the use of BASE24-eps to implement the Transaction Filtering Rules component
• UBS Card Center for the launch of prepaid cards in Switzerland using ACI Issuer™
• Qatar for enabling IPO subscription on ATMs using BASE24
We received an excellent set of entries this year and the judging was particularly difficult. We saw firsthand that our customers around the world are amongst the best there are when it comes to innovation and excellence, and we are delighted to be able to recognize these organizations and celebrate their successes.
We wanted to share overviews of the successful projects:
ABSA Bank, Using Technology to Improve Access to Banking
CashSend™, built using ACI’s BASE24® and BASE24-eps® solutions, allows ABSA customers to electronically transfer funds remotely via ATM, cell phone or online banking to anyone with an active cell phone number, even if they don’t have a bank account. The recipient is then able to withdraw cash, without needing a card or a bank account, from more than 5,000 ABSA ATMs.
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CashSend can be used where recipients need cash urgently in the absence of a bank account and or/a bank card such as to a family member in another part of the country, even in emergency instances where the card could be damaged, lost or stolen. It provides a 24/7 banking experience and improves operations by allowing low value transactions (withdrawals) to be performed on self-service channels (ATMs) rather than in-branch. ACI products were integral in transporting the transaction message from the device (ATM /SSK) to BASE24-eps as well as the ensuring that the validation rules were applied for CashSend transactions.
When activated, CashSend automatically generates and sends access codes to the elected recipient’s cell phone. The sender also has the option of selecting a secret six digit code known only to the sender and receiver – this functionality ensures that the transaction is secured and free of potential compromise. The function also has the intelligence to be deactivated remotely for a selected time frame, in the event of ATM crime being perpetrated.
Pravesh Mahadeo, Head Self Service Channel from Absa Bank said, “Financial inclusion remains a huge challenge facing many South Africans. With CashSend™ we have been able to bring banking to the masses. ACI’s BASE24 and BASE24-eps underpin this project and we are delighted that we have been recognized in these awards.”
HDFC Bank, ACI Proactive Risk Manager™ Innovation – Revenue Generation
HDFC Bank’s Risk Control Unit hit upon the idea of generating revenue through cross sell opportunities using ACI Proactive Risk Manager™ for Enterprise Risk. The team recognized that customers were very happy to receive transaction verification calls. Sensing a potential business opportunity on high value sales, the unit used the verification phone call to offer customers the opportunity to convert transactions into in monthly instalments, which generated revenue for the payment business.
As well as providing consistent, reliable potential fraud detection and prevention, this innovation using Proactive Risk Manager has helped bring in a steady stream of income to the payment business of the bank. The key concept is that an alert generated by Proactive Risk Manager has been converted into a lead through active cross sell efforts by the bank’s Risk Control Unit. The entire cross sell effort is powered by the bank’s business intelligence practice and marketing process.
Using a combination of the bank’s internal marketing program and alerts generated by the Proactive Risk Manager system, the bank also managed to generate leads for cross selling other third party product through this initiative. The bank’s data warehouse backbone and customer relationship management methodology enables various cross sell initiatives.
HDFC Bank was the first in the region to introduce the innovative concept of sending alerts as an outcome of rule based on-line card transaction risk and potential fraud monitoring practices and explores cross sell opportunities at the same time. The bank was able to reduce potential fraud losses, which continue to be the primary objective, as well as contributing significantly to the incremental revenue generation. The alert distribution mechanism helped the team to cater to different segments and profiles of the customers based on geography and behavior. This has helped the unit to reduce its operational costs without impacting fraud incidences.
Munish Mittal, Executive Vice President, IT from HDFC Bank said, “At HDFC Bank we believe in using enabling technology to provide value added products and services to our customers, as well as to build the business and achieve product leadership through innovation. Proactive Risk Manager gave us the opportunity to achieve revenue generation as an additional objective.”
Union Bank of India - Customer Empowerment
Today, banks are judged on customer centricity and their ability to efficiently serve customers needs. Union Bank of India wanted to bring true empowerment and freedom to customers. Union Bank customers can now create their own access to all alternate delivery channels such as online banking, mobile banking and phone banking without the need to approach the bank for help.
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The bank wanted to empower customers through their debit cards, which are powered by ACI’s BASE24® solution. Ready kit debit cards are provided to customers instantly when they open an account, enabling customers to generate or reset passwords and PINs themselves, and access an array of other services.
The effectiveness of this project is amply demonstrated by the Cashless campus project done by Union Bank for a University, where more than 100,000 students opened accounts with the bank, created their own internet banking access using BASE24 validation of their debit cards and conducted half a million online transactions in less than six months.
This implementation has changed the profile of Union Bank of India. It is now looked at as being one of the most customer centric banks in the region, while being a leader in technology amongst peers. In just 18 months, 150,000 customers started using internet banking with this system. Union Bank’s mobile banking transactions have registered 100% growth in a short time period.
With six million cards, Union Bank used to get approximately 500 requests for new PINs every day. Now, customer grievances over delays in getting internet banking access, passwords and ATM PINs have almost disappeared. Self generation of passwords and ATM PINs has proved to be a benefit to both the bank and its customers.
Lalit Sinha, General Manager, Alternate Delivery Channels & New Initiative Department from Union Bank of India said, “Our customers now have complete freedom from paper applications, mailed PINs, and the wait associated with them. Password generations and dispatches have become a thing of the past. BASE24 played a pivotal role in all of these new implementations and, without it, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve everything we have done.”
Coast Capital Savings Credit Union, Implementation of ACI Proactive Risk Manager
In 2009, credit unions’ debit fraud losses increased by more than 200% over the previous year. With such a surge in fraud activity and with fraud losses increasing substantially, Coast Capital Savings (CCS) needed to respond quickly and decisively.
The entire project, from requirements gathering to go-live took less than four months, and was completed six weeks ahead of schedule and below budget. CCS was able to develop a strategy that allowed it to go live with ACI Proactive Risk Manager™ during the testing phase of the project. This translated into a fraud loss reduction of nearly 40 percent compared to the previous three months. The savings resulting from Proactive Risk Manager allowed CCS to recover the project costs in only six months.
The benefits of Proactive Risk Manager have extended far beyond the walls of CCS. By being able to more proactively identify and prevent debit fraud, CCS is able to notify other credit unions and Interac of potential breaches, allowing them to take the necessary action to protect themselves and their customers.
The result is a literal savings of millions of dollars. Also, because of the instantaneous nature of Proactive Risk Manager reporting, CCS has been able to alert local police authorities of ‘frauds in progress’ resulting in multiple arrests. CCS is now in the process of implementing Proactive Risk Manager for Real-Time and expects to reduce fraud by a further 20 percent.
The ACI solutions team was able to walk the CCS project team through a clear roadmap for the implementation in its environment, highlighting key milestones, dependencies and potential hurdles as well as where work could be done in parallel.
Marc Trepanier, Manager, Fraud Prevention at Coast Capital Savings said, “In the nine months after implementing ACI Proactive Risk Manager we reduced our organization’s debit fraud losses by more than 43 percent. We have also been able to proactively identify and prevent fraud on average 10 times faster. We are very proud of the work we have done, and are delighted to be recognized by the judges for this project.”
Highly commended
The BENEFIT Company, The National Payment Gateway for Debit and Credit Cards
The National Payment Gateway (NPG) project delivered a solution to expand e-Payment acquiring services to a wider set of banks in Bahrain. The shared service is used by 10 e-Acquirers out of the 26 commercial banks in Bahrain, and at the same time enabling all the 26 banks as certified debit cards issuers on the National Payment Gateway. The service provides acquiring services for BENEFIT cards and, optionally, for MasterCard and VISA cards in e-Payment transactions. Although Bahrain only has two POS acquirers for VISA/MasterCard and BENEFIT, the NPG model is flexible, commercially attractive and viable to the other banks for e-Payments. The BENEFIT Company chose to use ACI Worldwide and ACI Commerce Gateway™ for this project.
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There was a local market demand for card usage in different online channels, which was expensive for the banks to deploy as it required a lot of complex implementation, certifications and security controls. In addition, the market was looking for a cheaper cost for transaction processing, and the banks were unable to offer this due to the associated risk and cost. Only one bank was able to offer a gateway service and major banks were hesitant to buy the service due to the high transaction fees and the delay in the settlement and clearing process. All member banks (26 commercial banks) wanted to offer the service to their major clients, and asked for a shared service to be provided by an independent, trusted, not-for-profit body.
The BENEFIT Company is able to process the electronic transactions of different cards schemes: VISA/MasterCard /Amex/JCB and BENEFIT cards. They are also secured with international standards deployments such as: SecureCode, Verified by VISA (3D secured), and ISO 270001, with PIN-based transactions for all local debit cards. There hasn’t been one fraud case reported since January 2006.
Mr. Abdulwahid Janahi, CEO at The BENEFIT Company said, “By using ACI Commerce Gateway, we are able to provide all member banks with support for multiple e-channels such as the internet, kiosk, IVR, call centers and mobile. Every bank is now an independent acquirer for all BENEFIT debit cards by default and can add VISA/MasterCard as an option. We greatly value the partnership we have with ACI and are pleased to be recognized in these awards.”
MasterCard, Transaction Filtering Rules Component
MasterCard had two business opportunities that needed to be addressed by its transaction filtering rules project. The first was configurable entrance criteria to identify transactions that must be scored for fraud in real time – based on merchant category code (MCC), amount, acquiring country etc., and combinations of those values (e.g. all transactions for over 500USD coming from outside the US). The second business opportunity was configurable card usage restrictions – this blocks transactions coming from specific MCCs, merchants and countries.
The need for configurable card usage restrictions had been identified after researching various business rules that MasterCard customer organizations needed to follow as part of transaction pre-screening logic. BASE24-eps® was configured to provide a mechanism that would allow restrictive use of cards based on a combination of certain values received in the transaction request (MCC, merchant ID, acquiring country, e-commerce transactions etc.).
The Transaction Filtering Rules component allows the bank to configure complex filters that match transactions based on combinations of values from transaction requests and return codes that determine how the system should act upon those transactions. The filtering is implemented in a way that allows the parameters to be changed easily so new rules can be placed into production very quickly. Since the implementation filtering is available on 18 data items and savings of 200,000 USD a year have been achieved through focused usage of the fraud detection system.
Alex Inovenkov, Senior Consultant, IPS BASE24-eps from MasterCard said, “We are constantly looking for ways to develop the service for our customers and realized that providing them with an easy way of configuring complex filtering would enable a more appropriate application of the real time rules system; as well as the ability to easily apply card program specific rules, such as geographic or MCC limitations, in a prescreening process. Working with ACI’s BASE24-eps solution we were able to implement comprehensive transaction filtering rules configurable by the customer. This has enabled us to take on new card program rules very quickly and enabled more focused use of the real time fraud engine. We were very happy for our success to be recognized in ACI’s Excellence Awards.”
UBS Card Center, Launch of Prepaid Card in Switzerland
UBS Card Center undertook this project to ensure it issued the first mainstream prepaid card in the Swiss market, and also provided customers with SMS alerting functionality.
With the strong flexibility that ACI Issuer offers, UBS CC was able to open a prepaid product with a great deal of flexibility: different pricing models for different segments (students, employees); the ability to charge different fees for different segments for various services (e.g. replacement card, replacement PIN); different insurances for different segments; the ability to suppress the cash advance fees for domestic transactions; and with a bonus program with a cash back reward bi-yearly.
Coupled with this was the flexibility ACI Interchange provided. ACI Interchange enabled UBS CC to differentiate surcharge at individual customer level and allow a free top-up if paid via electronic channel and charge if paid via paper.
ACI Issuer also allowed the bank to provide information to pre-paid customers about their current balance via text messages. The interface that ACI Issuer provides could be seamlessly integrated with the messaging gateway over a web-service and is fully scalable. As almost everything could be parameterized and was available off the shelf, the project costs were minimum and the time to market from conception to implementation was less than one and half months.
Paul Hess, Executive Vice President, UBS Card Center said, “The ability to launch prepaid cards to expand our existing credit card portfolio was very important to us, and we are very pleased to receive this recognition through the ACI Excellence Awards program. ACI Issuer is able to handle all types of card products in a single instance and this flexibility made it an obvious choice for this project, and enables us to meet the changing demands of the market.”
Qatar National Bank, IPO subscription on ATMs
Qatar National Bank (QNB) wanted to enable customers to subscribe to an Initial Public Offering (IPO) through QNB ATMs. The customer would have to pre-register for this service and payments would be made online using QNB debit cards, enabled by BASE24®.
During the IPO season, customers swarmed branches to subscribe to IPOs. This would affect general banking operations, and the bank needed an alternative solution to ease the flood of IPO subscriptions. As a remedy to this situation, they decided to introduce IPO services on QNB ATMs.
After selecting the IPO subscription, the customer is notified with a list of IPO companies that are available. After selecting an IPO company, the customer has to select a National ID (NID) that is registered under their card. After selecting the NID and the IPO company, the customer enters the number of shares they want to buy.
After validating the number of shares, the customer will select theirs from the account and the transaction will be forwarded to the bank host from BASE24. The bank host will calculate the amount based on the number of shares values sent by BASE24 and will reply back.
The transaction confirmation is displayed on the ATM screen, which has the IPO transaction details and the transaction amount asking the user whether he wants to continue with the transaction. By selecting yes, BASE24 will send the transaction to the bank host for payment. If the transaction is approved, the ATM will print a receipt containing the transaction details for the customer.
Adel Al-Malki, General Manager of Information Technology at Qatar National Bank said, “The average time to issue an IPO subscription for a customer in branches used to take about thirty minutes. Now, using an ATM with BASE24 it takes around one minute for the entire process. ACI’s solution provided the technology needed to give our customers the ability to purchase IPOs though our ATMs. This innovation helps streamline our banking operations and improve customer service and we were pleased to enter it into the ACI Excellence Awards.”