Banking and Finance

The Goal/The Advantage/The Benefits/The Approach/The Financial Advantage

Do you need to improve revenues? Can customers differentiate between you and your nearest competitor? Banks moving to an on demand operating model find they need fewer resources to deliver greater value. Spend less time managing the branch. More time building relationships. Less time developing products. More time selling them. With the insight to target the right customer sets. At the right times.

Financial institutions face tremendous operational efficiency and productivity gains if they can utilize processes to enhance collaboration and improve the information flow across internal business units.

Electronic means of storing and transmitting data allow financial institutions to offer information access to customers and partners, driving down costs, increasing profits, and providing a vital competitive edge. The financial industry also has large numbers of mobile knowledge workers, including bankers, traders, brokers and consultants, who need access to key resources and applications. Providing access to key resources and applications that they need from wherever they are is essential, but deploying and maintaining a network-layer VPN is often impractical. AccessAnwyhere allows you to meet those demands and realize new opportunities in the ever-changing finance environment.

Use secure remote access to gain a competitive edge

Count on AccessAnywhere for Financial Institutions to help gain competitive advantages:

• AccessAnywhere is a recognized expert in designing, deploying and supporting remote access technologies that are of global scale.
  
  
• We can pull everything together to speed deployment-- the host platform installs at the data center in as little as one day. Plus no software or hardware installation is required at the remote location.
  
  
• Build a trusted environment where information can be exchanged securely among bankers, traders, brokers and consultants.
  
  
• Ensure that information is easily accessible to the right people, while maintaining and improving the security of data and assisting you to comply with privacy regulations in the The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
  
  
• Protect your customers confidential financial information

• Provide instant remote access to comprehensive customer information to streamline services such as funds transfer, new check orders, statement requests and problem resolution.
  
  
• Leverage customer knowledge from your database to help ensure targeted cross- and up-selling opportunities while your meeting with your customer remotely.
  
  
• Allow remote agents to focus on high-value prospects, log and track action items, customize one-to-one customer consultations, tailor quotes and otherwise shorten sales cycles.
  

Business Efficiency: More flexibility, less complexity

AccessAnywhere provides your employees with a common, unified and simplified point of remote access to enterprise information, applications and expertise.

• Remote branch managers can monitor high value customers and collaborate with external relationship managers to build highly personalized offers for those at risk of defecting.
  
  
• Institutional traders can supplement news feeds with near realtime advice from remote colleagues to make more informed investment choices.
  
  
• Remote branch tellers can stay abreast of company policies, procedures and special offers and enrich their customer service abilities at night from their home PC's
  
  
• External Claims assessors can provider faster claim turnaround with more accurate assessment when they have direct remote access to the claims management system of the insurer, as well as its policies and procedures manuals.
  

Payments

Do you need to improve the accuracy and speed of your payments systems? Can you increase your volume of business easily? Manage the growing complexity of your customer bases? With AccessAnywhere you can reduce reduce costs by offering your customers online payment options. With full security and tracking. Meeting government requirements.

Drive innovation, prepare for growth

Implementing AccessAnywhere for Financial Services can help your organization:

• Improve customer service and sales by empowering your employees with tools to remotely communicate more effectively
  
  
• Achieve operational efficiencies to reduce costs
  
  
• Streamline human resources to speed up the hiring process
  
  
• Reduce employee turnover to preserve your intellectual capital and reduce the high cost of employee churn
  

Risk and Compliance

But before financial companies can realize these benefits, they must balance information access with security and privacy, as mandated by governments and state legislation. This leaves many financial institutions struggling to find an effective way to bridge the gap between competitive efficiency and stringent security.

Basel II Accord

International financial institutions will soon be getting more information from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. Of most concern to the IT community is the Basel II Accords' focus on Operational Risk.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has adopted the common industry definition of operational risk as "the risk of direct or indirect loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal process, people and systems, or from external events" - a definition which clearly focuses on IT security. Although, specifics for compliance will not be required until 2005, regulatory requirements do imply a need for strong authentication, authorization, and auditing of all information access to banking and customer data.

AccessAnywhere offers high availability and redundancy, enables rapid deployment of strong authentication and authorization, and creates an audit trail to the per-user/per-event level.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

In the US, the requirement for FDIC-insured institutions to protect Nonpublic Personal Information, or NPI, has been mandated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act since 1999. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act includes three basic requirements:

• Banks, brokerage companies, and insurance companies must securely store personal financial information;
  
• Banks, brokerage companies, and insurance companies must advise consumers of their policies on sharing this information;
  
• Banks, brokerage companies, and insurance companies must give consumers the option to opt-out of some sharing of this information.
  

The IT industry has been most concerned with the first of these requirements, which are included in Title V of the Act's provisions. Technically, the legislation mandates the following basic features to meet Title V standards:

• Protection of external electronic communications
• High availability and redundanc
• Audit trails
• Perimeter defense

As with most consumer protection legislation, the GLBA allows states to formulate protections that exceed federal law. The majority of the state law debate has centered around the opt-in standards.

AccessAnywhere provides a means to protect NPI in transit, offers high availability and redundancy, enables rapid deployment of strong authentication and authorization, and creates an audit trail to the per-user/per-event level.