IBS Journal December 2015
To infinity and Beyond
Australia-based Avoka Technologies is firmly in the digital banking space with its mul- ti-channel onboarding platform but this was not always the case. From rather different beginnings, it has made strong progress of late within banks across three continents.
In the digital banking sector, it is not unusual to find specialist suppliers that have managed to successfully reinvent themselves. This is true of Australia-based Avoka Technologies. It started as a Business Process Management (BPM) specialist, then became an Adobe partner, but has been gaining momentum in its home market, the UK and US in the last few years with its platform for multi-channel onboarding, Avoka Transact for Financial Services. As the digital banking sector has
evolved, so vendors have moved in. Some are start-ups, some are traditional banking application providers that have broadened their offerings, and others are from differ- ent niches that have found this to be a nat- ural shift. Avoka falls firmly into the latter category. Set up in 2002, Adobe acquired the
BPM platform that Avoka had been work- ing with in 2005 and this brought the first shift for the Australian company. It came to focus on the point where PDF forms technology and BPM came together, with a realisation that this was an interesting combination for more complex signing up processes in areas such as government and financial services. The interactive PDF documents provided a good user inter- face, encapsulated business logic, and had a self-contained data model. ‘They were almost the forerunner of today’s modern apps and were great in customer-facing scenarios,’ says Avoka CEO and co-founder, Phil Copeland. ‘They worked really well out- side of the firewall.’ ‘We took all of the things that were
really important about those interactive PDF forms into XML,’ says Copeland. This was in part influenced by the arrival in 2010 of Apple’s iPad and the lack of support for Adobe technology on the device. Since
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then, ‘the market has come to us’, particu- larly in the last year, he says. He reflects back on a conversation with
the CEO of Westpac, Brian Harper, a year ago. Harper was clear that the prime dif- ferentiator for acquiring business would be the customer experience. Amazon and one-click shopping have changed percep- tions and expectations, says Copeland. ‘But banks suffer from the problem that they can’t just go out and buy an e-commerce platform like a retailer can to enable one- click shopping.’ Many of the largest banks have taken
the traditional route of throwing the digi- tal banking challenge over to massed ranks of developers and then hard-coding solu- tions, which then prove to be time-con- suming to change and implement. Copeland says that in one large bank,
Avoka was given the task, as a proof of con- cept, of redeveloping an existing applica- tion that had taken the bank around 300 man-days to develop. It was for a low- end lending product and Avoka took 13 days to build its solution, which had more functionality than the bank’s equivalent. Copeland claims that this ability stems from being able to automatically gener- ate a lot of the underlying code that sits behind the Avoka Transact user interface, for standard requirements such as identity verification. The need for agility was a lesson from one of the supplier’s earlier customers, Westpac. Around two and a half years ago, the bank sought a solution to allow it to react much faster in its insurance business to natural disasters. After Australia was hit by a couple of these, its call centre had been swamped and, before the next sea- son, it wanted to give customers the ability to lodge claims via their mobile phones.
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To have gone through an internal IT pro- cess would have taken far too long where- as Avoka took a couple of weeks to do the analysis and build the claims process, Copeland says. The mobile phone became the most popular means of submitting claims and Avoka subsequently provided an automated link to the bank’s back office mainframe system. Another customer in Australia is Mac-
quarie Bank, with the supplier also current- ly working with one of the other top four banks and hopeful of gaining a contract here shortly. It also works with smaller insti- tutions, such as Beyond Bank in Austral- ia, which has mutual ownership and 49 branches (see below for the bank’s take on this).
Speaking to IBS Journal, Nick May,
Beyond Bank’s GM, corporate services, describes Avoka as ‘less of an IT supplier more of a business partner’. ‘We never have to chase the Avoka team, it is usually the other way around! They are collaborative and proactive,’ he states. In terms of the back office, Copeland’s
advice to banks is not to become too hung up on the integration at the outset but to treat this as a separate challenge from the customer experience one. This has been the case, for instance, at Los Angeles-based City National Bank, where a front-end for wealth management will have links to around 15 systems in the bank’s back office. While the initial inroads in digital bank-
ing were in Australia, Avoka has moved from here and, in the last quarter, sales in the US exceeded those in its domestic mar- ket. While it still sells in other sectors, 80% of its business is in financial services. Citibank has become a notable cus- tomer, initially for an employee onboard-
focus: digital banking
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