A Fortune 50 Bank required Loyalty Marketing systems for their debit cards program along with significant changes in their existing program for credit cards.

A large worldwide Financial Institution set-up a debit card pilot in Bangalore, India. The basic business proposition was to test the marketing and financial viability of opening up a mass base through a remote-access-only savings account product and then cross-selling various funds and fee based products through a carefully crafted life stage marketing program.

Remote access was through ATM centers, touch screen kiosks, Internet banking, debit card machines and phone banking. Internet banking was a key remote access tool, because of low transaction service costs and for the ability of the channel to put the customer in charge. The initial Internet banking offerings were Information retrieval (Statements, Account Balance, etc), and Intranet-relationship Account transfers. Customer research quickly revealed that customers wanted a comprehensive range of services, and payment of Utility Bills figured high in their wish lists. Releasing a full-function Utility Bills payment system would also result in competitive advantage and enhance the technology profile. However, Utility Payment options had to be rolled out across all access points - touch screens, phone banking etc, simultaneously.

The architecture of the Utility Bills payment module addressed unique process challenges: every utility had its own unique business processes. Cellular, pager and telephone utilities were computerized and could accept data transfer at a central point into the billing systems.

The Government run electricity and water utilities had manual, decentralized billing systems across 100+ billing centers in a single city. If the payment was submitted to the wrong billing center, there was no automatic re-directing of the data/payment to the right center. The customer could even face disconnection of services. Therefore, the front-end system design incorporated:

Technology Used

• Application Development: Java, JSP, C
• Web Server: Weblogic 5.1
• Database: Oracle 8i
• Operating System: Sun Solaris 2.7

The back-end was flexible enough to fit in with the different process of the utilities. Plus, there had to be complete information and financial integrity, across access channels. The system incorporated a central utility creation and maintenance module. Parameters were stored centrally, and accessed by a variety of front-end devices. Customer-side finance's were passed online, while the Utility-side finance's were passed in a batch mode. Utilities also had the facility to access their transaction details, online.

This project was targeted at the department that serviced very high net worth individuals. These individuals have investments across a wide range of products across a wide range of geographical locations. They also normally have a complex holding pattern. Due to the large number of products offered, the department decided not to get into the business of developing and maintaining product processors. Instead, they use the processors developed by the Consumer banking unit or the corporate banking unit. This has resulted in a scenario where customer's accounts are booked on different product processors, which are heterogeneous and geographically separated. It is, therefore, very difficult for Service Officers to service clients quickly and effectively. The web based customer integrator provides all information relating to customer entitlements and customer financial information in one place through a simple browser interface.

This project involved the development of a Mutual Funds Sales Tool that would assist the Mutual funds Sales Force in analyzing customer needs, making investment recommendations, providing information about various funds and creating a recommended portfolio of Investments for the customer. The existing process for this was entirely manual where a customer's profiling (based on predetermined parameters) was done by hand and information about various funds had to be located from various journals or scanning through multiple websites. A final recommendation, if any, also would be a free-formatted list put together from all these sources. The Mutual Funds Sales System developed has the following features:

Building a comprehensive document management system for Citibank Investments EMEA which saves search time, reduces wastage and manages a complex documentation environment.

Customer Requirements:

This project involved the development of a system to create and manage a centralized searchable database of documents for the Citibank EMEA Investments Region. The Citibank Investments Analysis and Product team is centralized in London for the Europe, Middle East and Asia Region. This team was responsible for making available the various documents available related to Fund houses and the Mutual Funds Markets in general, such as, prospectus, annual reports, market research reports, fund fact sheets, etc., to the various sales teams in each of the countries in these regions. The sheer volume of the documents and the varied sources made it necessary to have a centralized archive available which could be accessed by the various countries instead of their having to be distributed or obtained independently.

Consulting and designing systems and processes for a large internet brokerage business in India

The Company operates in the retail equity brokerage market with complete reliance on remote access channels for its customers. Currently, customers use the Internet to access their account and to trade; The Company also plans to roll out access through touch screen kiosks, IVR systems and phone. Sound IT enabled back office processes are key to business operations. They leveraged our extensive IT and process management skills towards the following deliverables