Solution Provider Helps Credit Union Boost Operational ...



Overview

Country or Region: Canada

Industry: Professional Services

Customer Profile

Canada-based Fincentric™ designs and develops core retail banking and customer value management software solutions for financial institutions worldwide.

Business Situation

Fincentric™ designs innovative, customer-centered retail core banking and value management solutions for financial institutions wanting to provide a personalized banking experience.

Solution

Built on Microsoft® technologies, Wealthview Banking is a flexible and customizable core banking system that allows financial institutions to deliver integrated banking applications to their customers.

Benefits

■ 50 percent reduction in overtime

■ Enhanced system reliability

■ Better customer experience

■ Dynamic Microsoft partnership

| | |“We’ve embraced Windows Server 2003 because its deployment features dramatically lower the total cost of ownership for our customers.”

Craig Murchie, Technology Specialist, Fincentric Corporation

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| | | |Fincentric™ Corporation develops customizable software solutions for financial institutions in over |

| | | |25 countries. Built on Microsoft® software, Wealthview Banking™, the company’s core retail banking |

| | | |system, helps banks and credit unions improve customer satisfaction and retention through a more |

| | | |personalized, full-service banking experience. Microsoft technologies help lower the total cost of |

| | | |ownership for Fincentric customers by enabling remote deployment of upgrades, offering easy |

| | | |integration with common desktop applications, and providing better system reliability for banking |

| | | |customers. Stanford Federal Credit Union, a Fincentric customer serving approximately 44,000 members |

| | | |of the Stanford University community, has been able to reduce its operational overtime by half due to|

| | | |the increased efficiency of Wealthview Banking 3.6. |

| | | | |

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Situation

Headquartered in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, with 119 employees worldwide, Fincentric™ Corporation develops software solutions for the global financial services industry. Since 1984, the company’s products have kept pace with the industry’s rapidly changing regulations and technological advancements to help mid-tier financial institutions worldwide maintain a competitive advantage.

A Microsoft® Certified Gold Partner, Fincentric helps financial institutions, including banks and credit unions, to heighten their responsiveness to customers and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their banking systems. Financial institutions, such as credit unions, must be able to efficiently gather business information about their members and use this knowledge to create products and services to better meet member needs. Unless banking systems are flexible and easily customizable, analysis of members’ financial records and subsequent product creation and implementation can be costly.

Stanford Federal Credit Union (SFCU), with 110 employees and approximately 44,000 members, and a Fincentric customer since 1999, had used an early version of Wealthview Banking™ since August 2002. SFCU is a financial institution with a particularly high number of technology-savvy members. In fact, the credit union has been conducting business on the Internet since 1986, and was the first U.S. financial institution to perform a transaction on the Internet.

While the core software layer of Wealthview Banking, which is based on Microsoft technologies, is the same, each customer in different countries served by Fincentric has an additional software layer customized for that region’s specific demands and requirements. The version of Wealthview Banking that was being used by SFCU required that certain U.S.-related functionality be customized and retrofitted into the core software each time new regulations arose. Upgrading to a more current version of the software would greatly minimize the need for customization.

“Our key focus in terms of managing our customers is to maintain an ongoing conversation so that we can make sure they get the value they deserve,” says Christene Best, Vice President of Sales and Customer Service at Fincentric. “There were more features and functionality in our current product, and we believed that SFCU would benefit from the advancements. We determined the best way to meet the credit union’s needs was to migrate SFCU to Wealthview Banking 3.6.”

Solution

Wealthview Banking optimizes an organization’s infrastructure and streamlines business processes by eliminating unnecessary steps for sales, customer service, and IT staff. Built on Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, Wealthview Banking helps a credit union gather and analyze member data by creating a master record for each member. Members’ accounts and products are linked to their record, and sales and service representatives can view each member’s information (including asset and liability account balances) on a single screen to help them quickly determine the member’s potential needs. These records are stored in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000™ database that enables the institution to analyze customer data through familiar desktop applications such as the Microsoft Office System.

Member data, including total net worth, is analyzed, giving the institution a complete view of its members’ banking behavior. With this information, the bank or credit union can use the Wealthview Banking Designer™ application to configure new products and services to fit its members’ financial needs without performing any customized development. Wealthview Banking Designer is a powerful companion program used to create definitions for various components of Wealthview Banking, including products and services, transaction codes, interest calculation methods, as well as to implement unique business rules. Extending the capabilities of the Designer application, the Wealthview Banking Developer Kit™ lets institutions add new functionality, including creating interfaces to external systems or creating entirely new financial applications.

Wealthview Banking accommodates integrated delivery channels including branch, ATM, online banking, and wireless access. Real-time transaction processing, which is enabled by an online transaction-processing engine managed by a SQL Server 2000 database, provides members with reliable, up-to-date information across all the delivery channels.

Running on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system with Internet Information Services version 6.0, Wealthview Banking improves security of the core banking system through enhanced authorization features that are employed when a customer connects to the system through a Web-based interface. In addition, the integrated use of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 helps administrators better identify and manage potential database issues before they become a problem for users.

Andrew Voorhies, Technology Operations Manager at SFCU, explains the credit union’s decision to migrate to the current environment. “In response to a recommendation by Fincentric, we upgraded to Wealthview Banking 3.6 in order to stay current with the company’s technological advancements. User-testing had already proven the acceptance of the new environment, and that, combined with our past experience of the company’s professionalism, encouraged SFCU to go ahead with the upgrade.”

The SFCU upgrade to Wealthview Banking 3.6 let the credit union take advantage of built-in U.S.-related regulatory compliance functionality, eliminating the need to customize code and integrate it with the core software each time existing U.S. regulations changed or new regulations arose. The application’s enhanced flexibility allowed SFCU to integrate and use more of their proprietary e-commerce models. It also allowed them to take advantage of new Wealthview Banking features such as indirect lending that simplified the production of management reports and management of the SFCU Indirect Lending Program portfolio. The upgrade also refined the process SFCU used to purge stale or obsolete transaction information, thereby improving transaction processing timeframes. SFCU conducts approximately 701,000 combined electronic and teller transactions each month using Wealthview Banking 3.6; approximately 95 percent of these transactions are completely electronic.

Subsequent upgrades to the Wealthview Banking system were simplified through a strategy based on providing core fixes and additional functionality through the delivery of service packs. These service packs are deployed to many workstations simultaneously using application services in Windows Server 2003. Windows Server 2003 allows for easy, remote deployment of banking platform upgrades by using the Group Policy Software Installation feature of Active Directory®. Active Directory is a directory service used to manage identities and relationships within a network environment. Group Policy is a Windows Server 2003 feature used by administrators to define options for managing the configuration of servers, workstations, and groups of users.

“There was much more hands-on work with the old platform,” explains Voorhies. “The new version of Wealthview Banking lets us take advantage of Microsoft Windows® Installer packaging functionality in Windows Server 2003, and coupled with the NetOctopus software distribution application we can now more effectively deploy upgrades remotely and en masse. This significantly lightens the workload of our IT staff.”

Benefits

Wealthview Banking enables Fincentric customers (banks and credit unions) to maintain regulatory compliance, ensure the reliability of customer-facing Web-based banking systems, and minimize costs associated with its core retail banking system. It also lets banks and credit unions gather valuable business information in order to better serve their customers by providing them with the products and services they need.

The company’s strong partnership with Microsoft helps them continue to provide advanced banking systems that meet customer needs. The Fincentric infrastructure and the advanced features made possible through Microsoft technologies are in keeping with the credit union’s commitment to providing efficient, innovative, and effective tools to its staff and members.

50 Percent Reduction in Overtime

Wealthview Banking 3.6, built on Microsoft technologies, has helped SFCU reduce its overtime expenses by 50 percent by streamlining the process for rolling out upgrades to the core banking system. They can now be deployed remotely to individual employee workstations. “Wealthview Banking has helped simplify IT operations to the extent that overtime is less than half of what it was in the pre-Wealthview Banking 3.6 environment,” says Sam Tuohey, Chief Technology Officer at SFCU.

Reflecting on another important area of time-savings, Voorhies adds, “The ability to use data that’s available through SQL Server queries and writing reports is a great benefit of the Fincentric/Microsoft combination. SQL Server in particular is easy to use and gives us better insight into our member base.” The SFCU member database runs on one production server, and currently occupies 40 gigabytes of data space.

Enhanced System Reliability

The Fincentric solution also uses Microsoft technologies to provide better management capabilities for the SFCU IT staff. Crisis management has been reduced to almost nothing with the integration of new features in Wealthview Banking 3.6. “Improper access to the system or potential concerns with operations are reduced to very minimal or even non-existent because the software lets us know when there’s a potential problem,” says Voorhies. “System alerts allow us to be more proactive and deal with issues before they affect our members.”

Tuohey adds, “It’s extremely important for us to make sure that our internal applications, as well as any online communications to our members, are accurate and timely. A significant reason for migrating to the current environment was to improve our reliability and stability—to make sure that reports and statements are accurate and that the confidence our members have in us is as high as it can possibly be.”

Streamlined, Innovative Enterprise Operations

“We’ve embraced Windows Server 2003 because its deployment features dramatically lower the total cost of ownership for our customers. Now, our customers can rollout upgrades remotely instead of having to send a person to each workstation,” says Craig Murchie, Fincentric Technology Specialist.

Streamlined deployment lets Fincentric account managers, who maintain ongoing conversations with each customer, determine their customers’ needs and schedule upgrades or fixes accordingly. Remote deployment of these upgrades through the service pack strategy means a seamless experience for the banking members of Fincentric customers. “Fincentric solutions appeal to customer-centric financial institutions who seek a lower TCO, are innovative, and want to customize their banking system to meet market demand,” says Best.

If a financial institution modifies an existing product, it can often take several months to implement. Fincentric estimates that the combination of the Wealthview Banking infrastructure and features enabled by Microsoft technologies reduces this development and deployment time from months to weeks.

Better Service for Credit Union Members

SFCU uses various analytical tools, including the SQL Server 2000 SQL Query Analyzer, a graphical tool that allows a user to create queries and other SQL scripts in order to draw information from the SQL Server 2000 database in which member information is stored. Access to this data helps the credit union to better understand its members in order to provide them with the services that fit their financial lives. Using the Wealthview Banking Designer application, SFCU can create the products and services its members need. “From this data, we developed our own study models and took some direct surveys. The Wealthview Banking Designer application allowed us to easily create and revise products and services for a range of our members based on the information we uncovered,” says Voorhies.

Dynamic Microsoft Partnership

Strong support from Microsoft has helped Fincentric build core retail banking solutions used by financial institution worldwide. “We’ve invested a lot of time in learning Microsoft technologies, and it’s paying off,” says Murchie, “Because Microsoft is continually improving its environment, we always experience positive changes.”

As a Microsoft partner, Fincentric has access to technical expertise from Microsoft product groups and solution architecture guidance. “Last year, we sent a team to Microsoft to use the labs to do performance testing on Wealthview Banking,” says Murchie. “We were able to gain a tremendous amount of insight due to that experience and the level of expertise Microsoft provided.”

Future Plans

In the works at Fincentric is a project aimed at further extending the capabilities of the Wealthview Banking suite. The company has created a prototype that exposes online functionality through a service oriented architecture (SOA) interface based on Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET 2003, a development system for building applications for Microsoft Windows and the Web. Fincentric has delivered the prototype to SFCU for evaluation. This continued movement toward Web services and the use of XML, the universal language of Internet data exchange, will further simplify the development process and make it even easier for Fincentric products to communicate across environments and operating systems.

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.

 

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

windowsserversystem

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| |Software and Services

■ Products

− Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003

− Microsoft Operations Manager 2000

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 |Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

■ Technologies

− Microsoft Active Directory

− Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 | |

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Active Directory, Visual Basic, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published November 2005 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about Fincentric Corporation products and services, call (800) 667-1185 or visit the Web site at:

“Fincentric solutions appeal to customer-centric financial institutions that seek a lower TCO, are innovative and want to customize their banking system to meet market demand.”

Christene Best, Vice President of Sales and Customer Service, Fincentric Corporation

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“Wealthview Banking has helped simplify IT operations to the extent that overtime is less than half of what it was in the pre-Wealthview Banking 3.6 environment.”

Sam Tuohey, Chief Technology Officer, Stanford Federal Credit Union | |

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