Uptake and customer experiences
IBIS Management claims that every month more than a billion dollars in transactions flow through its systems around the world. It claims around a dozen users of the payments suite. Hakrin Bank is a Suriname-based commercial bank which signed for the Payment Processing Suite in the spring of 2007, along with Topaz Trace. It was hoped that these products would permit the bank to screen and profile all banking transactions and suspicious behaviour in real-time, ensuring compliance with international regulatory requirements and best practice. The behavioural profiling function of the Topaz Trace solution was also to provide Hakrin Bank with an overview of each customer’s activities and relationships with other parties in the financial system. At the time of signing, Hakrin Bank had over 250 staff in its head office and seven branches. More recent takers include Antigua Commercial Bank, which went live in 2009, and Postspaarbank, a state-owned savings and loans institution in the Netherlands Antilles, which also took Topaz Banking. The partnership between Top Systems and IBIS meant that an online, real-time interface between the systems would be produced at the bank. The projects were to run in parallel. This was in 2009, with the projects expected to run into 2010. Implementation at the aforementioned BCB started
around October 2009, and Mike Coye, deputy CFO of the bank, hoped the project would last about four months. BCB had decided on a new system for reasons of efficiency, particularly in the processing of wires and drafts in its branch network. Coye expected the cheque processing module also to make a significant impact in terms of efficiency. As well as automating payment processing, all of BCB would be brought onto Swift. While it took some time to formally select the Alchemy platform, Coye stated that ‘we didn’t find that many other options’, and BCB did not look closely at other systems. The main alternative was for BCB to build a system itself, to complement its in-house core system. But there were a number of reasons why Alchemy was chosen. ‘We recognised IBIS’s expertise with Swift and straight-through processing,’ said Coye. Secondly, ‘we had to justify the cost’. IBIS has also gained a couple of wins in St Lucia. By 2006, implementing a new payments system had become a major priority for Bank of St Lucia (BoSL). Alchemy was ultimately selected, with a major reason for the decision being the fact that it could provide straight-through processing with Core Director, BoSL’s core banking solution from US vendor, Jack Henry. Chantal Norville, assistant manager of information management and technology services at BoSL, believed this knocked a considerable length of time off the implementation project. The modules taken by BoSL were for sending and
receiving wire transfers, managers’ cheques, drafts, inter- bank settlements and standing orders, all interfacing with the compliance module which was taken at the same time. There were slight delays with the first phase of the implementation. An increase in the scope of the project in turn led to a larger budget than initially envisaged. ‘We weren’t totally clear on the extent of the hardware we had to have,’ Norville stated, and BoSL also went beyond the licensing previously agreed and quickly had to extend that. It seems that the workload was also underestimated. ‘We had to do some extended hours, and had to be very creative in doing additional work remotely.’ However, IBIS remained supportive, to the extent that ‘while we found there were increased costs related to changes in processing, or in written formats, we were able to manage those costs because we found other ways around it’ with the vendor. In March 2010, BoSL professed itself satisfied with the Alchemy platform. The two main benefits cited were the comfort and security derived from the automated watchlist checking (including OFAC and the Bank of England’s lists), and the STP of payments. The automated due diligence and watchlist checking, ‘really strengthens our position as an international bank’, said Joanna Charles, assistant general manager at the bank. Wire transfer turnaround times had dropped from half an hour to about ten minutes before the cash appeared in the recipient’s account, while other instruments, such as inter-bank settlements, were taking ‘a lot less time’, since as a result of the project ‘our internal processes have improved tremendously’. The number of transactions the bank handled was able to increase, with Norville estimating that BoSL now processed over 5000 a month. ‘We’re finding a lot more customers coming in and doing transactions with us, and we’ve had cost-benefit analyses showing that we’re making great returns on our implementations.’ A second St Lucia signing came from First National Bank St Lucia in early 2008. This selected the Alchemy Payment Processing Suite to completely streamline and automate its entire operations on one centralised platform. More recent takers have included Commonwealth Bank in the Bahamas, which took Alchemy for internet banking and payment processing, and Intercommercial Bank in Trinidad, which selected Alchemy for mobile as well as internet banking and payment processing. Commonwealth Bank went live in March 2014.
Payment Systems & Suppliers Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
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