Banking & Financial Services White Paper
Service, revenue, efficiency: Delivering
value-added image solutions that work
Image and Payment Systems, NCR Corporation
As banks face unprecedented change and increased competition from non-financial sectors, they are focusing more and more on enhanced customer service as a means to increase profits and revenue. In this competitive environment, banks realize they need to reduce costs and improve information delivery to their increasingly demanding clients, who want increased quality and a wider variety of services. The challenge for banks is to service customers and differentiate themselves from the competition with methods that are more cost effective and time efficient.
While there may not be an exact formula for success, more and more banks are employing image-based technology as a core element of their strategy. Banks that use imaging solutions to provide new and enhanced customer services are realizing increased profitability and an enhanced reputation as progressive, customer-focused institutions.
As solution providers, vendors must support the banks by continuing to maintain and improve the efficiency of check processing systems as well as delivering enhanced customer service options. They need to respond to the banks' market-driven pressures and business objectives to enhance existing customer service and offer new service options.
The solution challenge
The banking industry could be viewed as the service provider for hundreds of individual organizations, each of which comprises a unique environment of needs and priorities in terms of management strategies and corporate directions. Given the diverse needs of different companies, imaging vendors cannot simply create a standard image item processing solution roadmap to generically suit the entire
market. Each bank is a market segment in its own right--a market segment of one. Given the business problems that the banking industry faces, the vendors must tailor their image-based solutions to provide the value that suits each bank's specific requirements.
Compatibility, flexibility,
scalability
An imaging solution should be compatible with an institution's current IT infrastructure. It must add value to, and enhance, the bank's current environment, while leveraging these systems for future use. The solution should interface seamlessly with existing host item processing environments without requiring the bank to purchase additional hardware and software.
The image processing solution should also have the flexibility banks need to change quickly. A flexible imaging solution should not only comply with industry-standard open systems technology--which means it offers a complete interface to mainframe check processing applications--but it should also address and adapt to each bank's specific processing needs.
Flexible image processing systems allow banks to follow the trend of standardizing their image processing systems on fewer platforms.When standardizing on fewer platforms, banks realize more utility from an individual platform through common training, support and user productivity. Ultimately, by operating with fewer platforms in a flexible solution, banks can reduce costs and quickly respond to rapidly changing customer environments.
Finally, an imaging solution should be scalable to address varying site sizes and strategies that are being created by the current wave of mergers and acquisitions. Rather than build around restrictive mainframe technology, a scalable system should be at the center of a modular, client-server architecture, which can be scaled to grow with changing image processing needs. While the system should be designed to address high volume and high velocity enterprisewide requirements, it should also scale down to accommodate a specific regional or departmental need.
What it gets down to is this: An imaging system should adapt to, rather than dictate, its users' item processing strategies.
The challenge of
implementation
The value-add of imaging comes from the relationship between technology, automation and productivity. Realizing the full potential of imaging requires that organizations pay attention to more than just the solutionthat a significant degree of emphasis be placed on the implementation variables. With the gradual maturing of imaging technology in live environments, vendors and users have had the opportunity to study production results and apply that learning toward operational optimization. What has become increasingly clear is the importance of both people and process in the successful implementation of imaging solutions. Consideration of hiring, training, retention and reward systems are paramount where people are concerned. Considerations of workflow, systems throughput, supplier management and quality are paramount where process is concerned. Operational advantages like improved quality, reduced training costs, increased productivity, improved flexibility and reduced operating costs are the rewards of this focus on people and process, thereby yielding the full potential of imaging technology and solutions.
The future of imaging
The image item processing solution a bank chooses today provides the platform for expanding its range of image-based customer services tomorrow. Check imaging systems have demonstrated the capacity to apply numerous services and efficiency advantages to specific niche applications in the item processing arena.
Solution-enhancing services that can help attract new customers, provide competitive differentiation and grow market share, include cash management disbursement services, lockbox services and statement rendering, to name a few. Efficiency-enhancing solutions that can improve the operational bottom line include POD (proof of deposit), reject repair, returns and ATM balancing.
In addition, image-based solutions should support branch delivery networks, Internet communications and on home computing. In the commercial environment, the solution should support cash management services that offer the customer a timely, complete, informative picture.
Not just pie in the sky
The expectations outlined above are realistic. When new technologies such as desktop imaging transports and advanced item imaging transport are incorporated into image processing systems, customer service is enhanced. Solutions such as image archive and delivery, proof of deposit, remittance processing, return item processing, reject repair and ATM balancing help banks offer the services their customers want. While banks benefit from flexible, scalable systems that are ready to meet present and future operational needs, customers benefit by choosing from flexible service options.
NCR brings a tradition of excellence in conventional item processing together with advanced imaging technology to offer a series of imaging solutions that are based on client-server architecture and that interface with industry-standard open systems.
|
![[LiveLink]](/file/36067/SIGCAT 97 - Conference on Convergence.ISO/Docs/webcd.gif "[LiveLink]"){kind=small}