Banking & Finance Customer Experience

How one leading Australian bank harnessed real-time insights to speed up payments and nurture client loyalty with Axway

Axway Decision Insight

A nationwide initiative to simplify and speed up payments put one leading retail bank under increased pressure to deliver fast and seamless payment services. Its complex, heterogeneous payment processing infrastructure made it difficult to meet service-level objectives.

With Axway Decision Insight, the bank now uses real-time business activity monitoring capabilities to proactively identify and address payments issues before they impact service levels. And the bank can focus on its customers by offering innovative and convenient payments services.

A demand for higher-level service standards

It all started with the move to a new, nationwide payments platform designed to enable households, businesses, and government agencies to simplify payments with near real-time, 24/7 fund availability.

Launched in February 2018, Australia’s New Payments Platform (NPP) was born out of industry collaboration to create an open-access infrastructure for fast payments.

In order to continue to enhance its offering with innovative payment services to customers, one leading Australian bank needed to be able to identify and resolve issues faster. And with payments set to become more convenient, the bank also anticipated a significant increase in payments volumes in the years ahead.

As a spokesperson from the bank described it: “With new open banking regulations and growing consumer expectations on one side and the demanding requirements of faster payments on the other, we knew that our existing approach to payments would be insufficient to achieve our goal.”

No need to rip and replace

To get to where it needed to be, the bank had to work around aging infrastructure. Previously, a complex, heterogeneous payments processing infrastructure with disparate technology platforms made it extremely difficult to identify where payments were in the process at any given time.

But the bank knew that replacing its payments environment outright was unrealistic — too costly both in terms of the initial capital outlay and recurring operational spend. A spokesperson explains:

“Our breakthrough came when we realized that we could harness real-time analytics and automated business rules to simplify the management of our existing payments platform. By collating, correlating, and analyzing data from all our payments technologies, we were confident that we could help our team to remediate issues rapidly and achieve our aggressive targets.”

Empowering banks to make faster, data-driven decisions

The bank partnered with Axway to enhance its existing payment processing platform. With help from Axway’s expert consultants, they deployed Decision Insight, a business activity monitoring solution that notifies users of threats and opportunities that require immediate action.

It also assesses the potential impact of their decisions on clients, regulatory, and business obligations. Crucially, Decision Insight extracts data without any performance impact on the underlying legacy systems.

The NPP imposes demanding service-level agreements (SLAs), so the bank set itself an ambitious target: no more than four payments issues per customer per year, 30 minutes to fix each issue, and zero lost payments.

Besides ensuring fast, reliable processing for high-volume, low-value payments, the bank also saw an opportunity to enhance its approach to monitoring high-value payments and intraday liquidity.

With Decision Insight, the bank’s teams have instant access to accurate information — empowering them to act faster to resolve issues and jump on fleeting investment opportunities.

Future-ready with a proactive approach

Today, with real-time insight into potential issues, the bank comfortably meets its service-level objectives for all payments flows and is able to satisfy the new payment platform’s SLAs.

Equipped with rich operational intelligence, the bank can detect and resolve incidents before they ever impact a customer. The Axway solution also opens up new revenue-generating possibilities, as access to real-time data helps avoid uninvested funds and optimize cash usage.

The actionable insights are allowing the bank to be nimbler. For example, because teams no longer need to wait 24 hours to get a clear picture of the bank’s liquidity position, they can adopt far more aggressive approaches to fund management.

“Without a doubt, our Axway solution is playing a key role in strengthening our service delivery,” concludes the spokesperson. “With real-time insights into our payments process, we can ensure seamless services for our customers — protecting those hard-won relationships from nimble market entrants.”

Learn more about how companies are fine-tuning their data for real-time insights.