IBS Journal December 2015


ing solution, which went live in the US in mid-July 2015 and with customer-facing applications to follow. Avoka presented at Citibank’s Citi


Mobile Challenge day in London earli- er this year. The Challenge is for develop- ers to demonstrate their solutions built on top of the bank’s digital platform. Citibank launched the initiative in EMEA in Febru- ary 2015 and Avoka presented at the Lon- don day. In total, teams from 18 countries pre-


sented 77 working prototypes to Citi exec- utives and technology influencers at four demo days in April in Jerusalem, London, Nairobi and Warsaw. Avoka was awarded ‘most innovative customer engagement solution’. Also in the US, Avoka is working with


a ‘top ten bank’ on a solution for current account opening and it also has Millenni- um Trust as a customer. Millennium Trust provides custody solutions to institutions, advisors and individuals. A couple of years ago Avoka started to


provide a solution for automatic rollover of retirement plans, typically to move ex-em- ployees from company plans to individu- al retirement accounts, with the workload peaking at year-end. Millennium Trust was using paper forms and manual workflows and worked with Avoka to create a mul- ti-channel ‘smartform’, with a claimed 75% reduction in workload. Avoka is also talking to a number of


large banks in the UK and Copeland hopes to conclude business with at least one of these in the next three to six months. Investec is a UK customer, having


signed in September 2014 and going live with a wealth management onboarding solution in mid-November. Avoka is self-funded to date and has


around 90 staff. The UK and US offices have been added since the move into digital banking. The company has a fairly strong services team, says Copeland, but this isn’t going to scale so, over time, the company will need to work with partners, including the large integrators. One potential partner is PwC, which was a co-sponsor of the Citi- bank Challenge. Avoka has met others through its par-


ticipation at the Finovate events (it demon- strated 90 second credit card opening at Finovate Spring 2015, bringing its third consecutive ‘best of show’ award). Implementations are onsite or there is the option of deployment via Amazon’s cloud offering. Typically, Avoka Trans- act is not a long-term store of data, says Copeland, with the data tending to pass


through it to other systems, so this eases the acceptance of cloud-based use. So in more or less its third iteration,


Avoka seems to be riding the wave of dig- ital banking. As with all companies of its size that are in a popular niche, it remains to be seen whether it will stay independ- ent. Its focus to date on English-speaking countries is purely one of convenience, so there is no reason why it should not further broaden its geographical coverage, par- ticularly if it builds a partner network.


Customer view: Beyond Bank Adelaide-based Beyond Bank started working with Avoka a couple of years ago and ‘did not picture where we’d ended up’, recalls Nick May, GM, corporate services at the bank. To begin with, the remit was to replace the old PDFs for various internal forms with newer ones, but ‘we were quickly convinced that a lot more could be done’, particularly on the customer-facing side to improve customer experience. ‘We were doing a number of projects


around digital banking and Avoka fitted well with other projects,’ May says. ‘Its inte- gration capabilities are a strength.’ Beyond Bank was an early adopter of


the Avoka offering in the banking space – at the time, most takers were the utility companies and government organisations. ‘It was a challenging project,’ May


recalls. ‘The platform itself was quite easy to implement – it took us around five days – but the main challenge was internal as everyone across the business departments wanted to have an input into the work- flows and processes.’ Avoka is integrated with the bank’s


core platform, supplied by a domestic ven- dor Data Action, the loan origination and internet banking systems (also provided by Data Action). ‘Avoka and Data Action worked together to create the seamless integration,’ May comments. The solution is also integrated with the


address validation system (this was done on Avoka’s side and built into the forms) and the identity verification solution (also built into the Avoka platform so that the verification can be done online, ‘then and there’). The new online customer onboarding


platform was launched in February 2015 to target new customer segments. Avo- ka’s forms support retail banking products such as car loans, home loans and credit cards. All new membership forms are done in Avoka.


© IBS Intelligence 2015


Among new products is a salary pack-


age, which attracted 10,000 brand new takers ‘in one fell swoop’ shortly after it was launched, says May. It is available across all channels – branch, mobile, tablet and desktop and there is a ‘look and feel’ con- sistency across the board. ‘An excellent fea- ture in it is that you can save the applica- tion form and come back to it later, regard- less of what device you have started it in,’ he says. Branches remains an important chan-


nel, however, as many people still visit them, he adds. The bank has a network of 50 branches, and whilst there are no plans to downsize, the offices are under- going a revamp. The layout has been redesigned to make them ‘more open and collaborative’. The staff are now more sell- ers than tellers. Those branches that are ‘highly transactional’ had the self-service machines – teller cash recyclers (TCRs) installed in them. Furthermore, the bank has partnered


with Glory Global Solutions, a secure cash management provider, to introduce the first teller-assisted service – called Teller Infinity – into the bank’s branch in Adelaide. Referred to locally as ‘Gloria’, TellerIn-


finity merges many of the transactions per- formed by a teller, online and via an ATM, into one in-store device. This staff can lend a hand as well as consult account details to alert users to other services, products and promotions. Beyond Bank has also partnered with


a South Australian football club, Port Ade- laide Football Club, and is now its official bank. This, says May, is a great channel to promote the bank’s offerings. ‘We have 70 different customer forms


at Beyond Bank and ideally we’d like to replace all of them with Avoka,’ May states. ‘There are so many requests from the stakeholders about this product that we are inundated internally!’ The bank is also seeing a lot of interest


from other banks and mutuals, he adds. ‘There is not much alternative. Some CRMs and loan origination systems have some forms built in, but what we have is all the bells and whistles, which is unique.’ The bank is also in the process of


implementing the Microsoft Dynamics CRM, with the go-live imminent. The pilot site includes a few branches, but by Febru- ary 2016 all 200 staff across 48 branches of Beyond Bank will be using the system. On the way out is the Prosper CRM product supplied by a domestic vendor, Prosper Business Solutions. Tanya Andreasyan & Martin Whybrow


www.ibsintelligence.com 35


focus: digital banking


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