Banks face the challenge of determining their Most Valuable Customers especially in the Personal Banking business, where the transaction and customer base is high while the amounts involved may be low. The situation is further compounded when a customer walks in through the door to be serviced by the front office staff, not knowing the relationship that the customer enjoys with the bank. It has become a further challenge to understand customer behavior and patterns, especially when a customer maintains multiple accounts in different banks, leading to the problem of low customer loyalty. The situation further complicates itself as the banks are unable to track customer spend and earnings. Banks would find further difficulty in determining the cost of customer acquisition and retentions. Thus, the banks are unable to get an “Overall View” of the customer. In certain scenarios, the usage of Heterogeneous Applications and Platforms further adds to the woes. Poor Customer Risk Assessment is another area where Banks are unable to correlate the existing information to the customer-supplied information as the existing information may already be obsolete. The competition in the personal banking space is driving the profits further down making it all the more necessary to have a better Business Intelligence and Risk Assessment tool with the Bank. Thus, it becomes imperative to deliver a Customer and Profit Centric Tool to engage and manage customers in the Personal Banking business.

The approach to this situation is making the customer see value in spending through the bank and thus route the customer’s finances through the bank to the extent possible. Thus, the customer needs to be offered opportunities to spend through information feed and promotions.

COMPUSOL Info-X is a middleware solution that integrates the existing Database infrastructure of the bank, into a Data-warehouse. Custom presentation layers and business rules are developed and deployed, ensuring higher integration with the Bank’s IT infrastructure. COMPUSOL offers the data feed integration through Reuters, the world’s premier source for news and financial information in stock, commodities, currencies and futures from exchanges worldwide. The solution is secured using PKI based digital certification from COMPUSOL. The Clients are digitally certified and the Server looks for the same to authenticate and encrypt data during transfer. It also ensures non-repudiation and data-integrity thus enjoying higher confidence levels from all stakeholders.

Customer Sub-system: The Customer Sub-system includes the PKI enabled light Client, Registration and Personalization Pages, Application/Transaction Pages. The customer will be able to update his personal information and the channel content by updating his registration pages. The customer is authenticated by digital certificates and offered role-based securities. The Transaction module captures his Digital certificates to include his digital signatures thus managing non-repudiation.

User Sub-system: The User Sub-system is intended for use by executives and Credit Department. This constitutes the heart of the system. It includes the Business Intelligence tools for Customer Snap-shot and Analysis, Product Analysis, Credit Risk Analysis and Profitability Analysis and market trends. The Promotions and Schemes are configured and managed through this sub-system. It includes systems such as reminder and alarms for Credit Card dues, Insurance premiums, loans and advances etc. Reports include Customer Net-worth calculations with Financial and Non-Financial Assets and Liabilities, Wallet Share Analysis, Profitability Tier and Contributions, Psychographics profiling including Income and expenditure patterns based on groups and trends, Income-Debt Ratios, Customer Score-carding etc.

Front-Office Sub-system: The Front-Office is intended for use by the front-office operators in the branches. Upon being provided by any single account number of the customer, the front office sub-system mines for data pertaining to the customer's relationships and track-record with the bank. It includes the Credit Risk Assessment and Advisor - product positioning and sales recording solution to enable the front-office to cross/up-sell products and services and record the customer response against the same. This can be used to generate the sales history and to determine customer and product trends. Call-centers can also use the Front-office Sub-system for Customer Management.

Admin Sub-system: The Admin sub-system is intended to setup and manage the system.

• Valued Customer status
• Make available Portfolio and Investment Management information in near real-time
  
• Single window portfolio and finance management for the Customer through a trusted party
  
• Personalized service and information delivery for better decision-making
  
• Improved Banking Relationships – no forms to fill with repeat data!

• Determine “Valued Customers”
  
• Improved Customer and Profit Centric Banking Relationship Management
  
• Determine cost of customer acquisition and retention
  
• Detailed Business Intelligence covering Customer Psychographics Profile, Relationships, Marketing
  
• Detailed Risk Assessment and Scorecard

The solution architecture is based on Windows DNA Framework. The architecture focuses on high Fault Tolerance, Transaction reliability and solution scalability, the virtual wish-list for a mission critical enterprise solution. The architecture uses SOAP/XML along with MQ technologies for availability and EAI within the banking IT infrastructure. Loosely coupled component based architecture allows components to easily integrate and manage. The solution uses the multi-threading model; providing multi-user transaction processing seamlessly. The key architectural advantages of the proposed solution include:

• The solution architecture is based on Windows DNA framework, which leverage state-of-the art SOAP/XML-COM+ technologies in conjunction with the Microsoft Transaction Server support
  

• The Component-based solution ensure longer product life cycle and reduce obsolescence. It provides higher scalability and change management
  

• Asynchronous communication using MQ and XML gives high Fault Tolerance & Error Handling and reliability
  

• PKI based security to ensure high data integrity, authentication, non-repudiation and encryption
  

• SOAP-XML-Web Services solution in line with state-of-art standards, ensuring longer product life
  

• Advanced Document Object Model for providing greater control and interactivity
  

• Component Services for Scalable, Flexible and Balanced Transaction Services
  

• Integration Architecture for access to all structured data stores

• Universal Data Access

• The component based solution adhere to

  • Cross-Platform
  • Binary compatibility
  • Location transparency
  • Code reusability

• Internet Banking
• Cash Management System
• Payment Gateway & Merchant Server
• E-security
• EAI and EDI
• B2B and Enterprise Solutions
• Software Development & Services
• Quality Assurance and control
• Process Definition
• Software Engineering Services

• Citibank
• IBM
• Microsoft
• Siemens Information Systems
• The Sutherland Group
• Sony Software
• Phoenix Global Solutions