Chinatrust Commercial Bank and technology partner won this award for successfully implementing a new self-service strategy in the Taiwanese banking sector. The bank became the first lender in the country to deploy cash recycling ATMs on a large scale basis in off premise locations. The new system includes a monitoring and management function and allows information exchange and maintenance coordination without sending any staff down to the machines.

The project implementation allows Chinatrust to deliver value-added services to customers from multiple ATM capabilities with higher transaction volume capacity. It has also resulted in lower operational costs from reduction in manpower management, and in a decrease in operation loading and cash inventory turnover.

Taishin Bank and technology partners Octon and Intumit won this award for the innovative upgrade of the Taiwan bank’s computer telephony integrated (CTI) system in 2008. The project was initiated as the prior CTI system was incapable of sufficiently handling the increasing demands associated with dynamic market changes.

Aside from the performance improvement and enhanced security of the CTI system, the project also enabled several service upgrades to create a customer service knowledge management system. The other upgrades include a new voice mail and call back system, wherein clients can leave a message for agents when the lines are busy. The new system also permits the integration of creative marketing efforts onto the platform, for example, the provision of automatic credit card installment payments from the interactive voice response (IVR) system, hence speeding up up the card application process.

Japan’s Jibun Bank and technology partner Oracle Financial Services Software have been awarded for implementing the best core banking project in Asia Pacific in 2008. The bank and the vendor also received an Honourable Special Mention for “Most Innovative Entry”.

Jibun Bank is a joint venture between Japanese telecommunication company KDDI and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. The core banking project was initiated to realise the vision of turning the lender into a virtual bank with the mobile phone as the primary channel. Given the unique business model of the Japanese institution, the implementation team had to innovate, re-engineer and custom build core application processes to suit operations to the mobile phone while keeping ease of transaction and robust security as key priorities. With the implementation of this technology, Jibun Bank managed to acquire 500,000 accounts in just eight months.

Kotak Mahindra Bank and technology partner Oracle Financial Services Software won this award for developing a group-wide CRM application that tracks all customer interactions. The new system integrates data across all segments of the group in a single instance. Internal unique identifiers were drawn up in order to minimise duplication and organise the data effectively.

With the new system, the bank has been able to reduce its service and support costs, and improve customer service from lower call drop rates and better call centre quality and response times. Specialised marketing campaigns conducted in 2008 were successful, with one third of the customer base reached by the campaigns. The system also boosted the cross selling ratio by leveraging synergies across various customer segments.

Alliance Bank Malaysia and technology partner SAS Institute won this award for developing a comprehensive data warehousing and analysis solution for application across the whole financial institution. The new system provides a single view of the customer and allows the bank to enhance customer segmentation to enables targeted marketing and improved risk management.

The new system is easily scalable for bigger volumes and has the ability to include more solution components to create additional subject-oriented data marts for specific projects. Despite a difficult year for the financial services industry, the bank showed double digit growth of assets under management in 2008. Also, more customers were holding more products of the bank, due to an outstanding improvement in the cross-selling abilities.

ICICI Bank and technology partner Infosys Technologies won this award for the establishment of an innovative and customer-friendly direct banking platform. Customers can do banking—from opening an account to transferring funds—online and can have a complete view of all accounts on a single dashboard. The new system operates smoothly with the bank’s existing ATM, mobile and call centre systems.

From the soft launch of the direct banking service, ICICI received 50-70 applications for account opening every day. The average bank balance of deposits opened was 25% higher than the average bank balance of the conventional bank customer, and uptime availability was maintained at 99.5%.

Malaysia’s Alliance Bank and technology partner IBM won this specially created for effective enterprise banking transformation. The bank has upgraded capacity dramatically. For the past three years, IT transformation allowed the number of branches, privilege banking centres, and electronic lobby capabilities to increase substantially. In terms of efficiency, the branch resource and processes have been optimised by shortening customers’ queue time and increasing over-the-counter transactions without increasing head count in branches. Standards for application integration have also been introduced to reduce the cycle of deployment for future interfaces. With the implementation of technology, Alliance’s profit before tax improved by $246.98 million from March 2006 to March 2008.

In a short span of 2.5 years, Alliance Bank also introduced a host of new Alliance Online services. Implementations allowed the bank to upgrade the loyalty system, enable customers to make purchases through merchants' websites, provide more bill payments service and launch the Premium Debit MasterCard.

Best Retail Payment Project Award 2009
Winning bank – Citibank (China)
Winning bank – China UnionPay Data Services

Citi China and technology partner China UnionPay Data Services (CUP Data) won this award for outstanding system integration of the bank’s debit card technology infrastructure with that of the solutions provider. This partnership was created from the strategic plan to set up debit card processing and customer information systems within China. The collaboration results in the development of an online interface for exchange of real-time account information and transaction settlement processes.

The application provides a powerful channel for customers to access the Citibank retail payment services. The collaborative approach allows Citi China to enhance banking experience and convenience by providing customers with access to ATM and POS facilities as well as mobile payment capabilities. Through this implementation, Citi China was able to deliver the debit card to its customers and introduce mobile payment services, which was the first for a foreign bank in China, besides increasing customer satisfaction, loyalty and cross-selling prospects for the bank.

Bank of Communications and technology partner FICO won this award for the development of the first enterprise decision management project in China that involves a holistic integration of the entire credit card lifecycle. It comprises three applications covering different lifecycle stages: Capstone Decision Accelerator (CDA) deals with origination, TRIAD for account management and Model Builder for model and strategy development.

The CDA provides risk management department with a real-time, automated credit card origination function by deploying credit scoring, policies and rules, while TRIAD enables the bank to develop and implement the entire strategic management actions for the multiple decision areas of credit card operations in great speed and accuracy. Advanced set of modeling technologies also allows the lender to predict profit-related factors including risk and customer profitability. The system brought increased revenue, higher efficiency and effectiveness in account origination and management, improvement in overall customer relationship managements, reduction in non-performing loan and collection costs.

Kasikornbank (KBank) and technology partner Progress Software were given this award for building a centralised processing centre for the bank’s international trade business, replacing the former disparate system. The new system provided the Thai with a competitive edge in trade finance by establishing a Spoke (previously called International Trade center) in a particular customer's office to provide full trade finance services, pre-checking export documents, and document preparation services.

At present, KBank is the only bank in Asia with its system directly integrated with DHL's. In terms of capacity upgrade, the bank currently has the highest numbers of fully International Trade service centres covering every 20 km in Bangkok and Metropolitans. With the new system, KBank is able to continuously increase productivity and financial result without recruiting more staff, and it also became the first bank in Thailand to set service level agreement. This project has also been used as a model by the Thai government for the national IT transformation implementation.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and technology partner SmartStream Technologies won this award for implementing a smart and robust integrated confirmation platform. The real time integrated platform within the system communicates to all the required reconciliation and electronic platforms on real time basis. The system proactively highlights discrepancies to ease investigation for pre-emptive solutions.

The project implementation helped RBS to improve its match rates and reduce the number of errors (exceptions). The enterprise control mechanism allows the bank to manage its growing transaction volumes. In addition, the platform also displays statistical KPI and Key Risk Indicators related to the transaction processes. The integrated capability means that the system can support RBS’s Global Banking & Markets Global FX Business with multiple offices across five continents.

From left to right: Philip Strause, international resource director, The Asian Banker, Takeo Tohara, president, Jibun Bank Corporations, Yutaka Kawajiri, sales director, Oracle Financial Services, and Alex Escucha, chairman, IT Implementation Awards panel of judges, and first vice president, China Banking Corp., Philippines