Case study: ASB Bank |
Issuing & Acquiring
ASB Bank boosts service,
streamlines card management
ASB Bank – a leading New Zealand trading bank – is a foundation GFG Group customer and a development partner in GFG’s cornerstone card management product: CadencieTM, as well as GFG’s loyalty solution, GFG:Loyalty.
The relationship began more than 10 years ago, following a major review by ASB Bank of its card operations. For its cards business to grow, the bank needed to respond faster to market conditions and changing competitor pressures. Improved customer service was to be its main weapon.
By defining its business requirements and calculating future needs, ASB Bank estimated it would require an effort of 40 man-years to develop its own system.
After comparing the functionality of market offerings ASB Bank approached GFG Group staff, who initially designed and built them an inhouse Visa card application. Developed in a CASE/4GL language, the project took 4.5 man-years and resulted in a product that was a forerunner of today’s well-established Cadencie solution.
“For over ten years, ASB has had a true, real time, online system which is still ahead of the market in terms of its ability to provide a single view of customers’ business. We can respond immediately to action customers’ requests, and have all the information available to manage our risk.”
Clayton Wakefield, ASB General Manager, Technology and Operations.
This product transformed ASB’s processing from a batch system to online, real-time processing. Card issuance was reduced from three weeks to three days and card replacement from two weeks to 24 hours. And what had been an ongoing loss-making operation became, by project completion, not only streamlined but profitable.
Today, ASB Bank uses Cadencie to service its own customers, as well as those of its online banking subsidiary, Bank Direct.
ASB Bank was able to issue more products, better serve its customers, and achieve another of its business objectives: to begin acquiring.
Cadencie now processes more than six credit card products and co-branded cards for ASB. As many as 14,500 merchants are on the system, and ASB offers a bureau service to other institutions by capitalising on Cadencie’s mulit-institution feature.
“Cadencie is a very successful, New Zealand-developed banking software product,” says Clayton Wakefield, ASB’s group general manager technology and operations. “For over ten years, ASB has had a true, real time, online system which is still ahead of the market in terms of its ability to provide a single view of our customers’ business. We can respond immediately to action customers’ requests, and have all the information available to manage our risk.”
ASB subsequently scoured the world for a suitable third party loyalty system to service all of its bank products, not just credit cards.
It was looking for easily attainable rewards for its customers and travel options similar to those available in the popular FlyBuys programme. But the bank’s key criteria were for the new system to interface with its existing IT platform, and for it to match its time to market, business functionality and cost specifications.
It found most of the market offerings were based on airline loyalty systems and would have required extensive additional development.
The existing relationship with GFG meant it was a natural choice to develop a tailor-made loyalty system for ASB, because it knew the bank’s people and its business.
The cooperation resulted in Loyalty Bank, which was custom-built by GFG in only four months, and which ASB branded ‘True Rewards’. Today, the True Rewards service is hugely popular with ASB Bank customers.
ASB Bank case study | CadencieTM