1.0 SUMMARY

ITC carried out the CCM (Credit Conveyor Module) project as a subcontractor for the Czech company BSC. The end user client was a bank belonging to one of the largest private banking groups in the Russian Federation.

2.0 CHALLENGE

The bank decided to take a prominent place in the credit market. The key problem when providing loans in Russia is checking client data and credibility. Besides automated checking, manual checking is crucial, especially due to the fact that there is no birth number system or any other system for the identification of inhabitants.

The bank wanted to provide tens of thousands of loans per day. The majority of these were consumer loans provided to clients for the purchase of goods. In this case, the bank guarantees a very short approval time (within tens of minutes), that represents a huge workload of data checking. The key to the success of the bank’s plan was managing the checking and credit approval system effectively.

Besides the need to modify the existing banking systems, a subsystem for manual credit checking had to be created, which was a clear bottleneck in the whole project. The CCM is the solution to this problem.

ABOUT OUR CLIENT:

THE END USER IS ONE OF RUSSIA’S LARGEST PRIVATELY OWNED BANKING GROUPS IN TERMS OF EQUITY, ASSETS, BRANCHES, RETAIL DEPOSITS AND FUNDS UNDER MANAGEMENT.

It offers a wide range of products and operates in all sectors of the financial market, including corporate and retail lending, deposits, payment and account services, foreign exchange operations, cash handling services, custody services, investment banking and other ancillary services to corporate and retail customers.

The Group also operates through subsidiary banks, affiliate and branch offices in Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Cyprus, the US and the United Kingdom and serves more than 2.6 million individual and more than 51 thousand corporate clients.

These include many of Russia’s top 200 companies.

3.0 OUR SOLUTION

THE CREDIT CONVEYOR MODULE (CCM) IS AN AUTOMATED SYSTEM FOR DISTRIBUTING TASKS RELATED TO CHECKING DATA IN CREDIT REQUESTS. IT WORKS IN A SIMILAR WAY AS SYSTEMS USED IN CALL CENTERS.

Complete sets of data, necessary for a credit (consumer loan, leasing, mortgage...) request, enter the CCM system together with a list of requested tasks (checks, verifications...) that need to be carried out for this credit request. The system assigns these tasks to operators. The client expects to process up to 80 000 requests per day, which represents an average of 3,5 tasks per request a total of 280.000 tasks per day, assuming there are 1000 operators working 24/7.

The System has a mechanism for defining rules, based on which the tasks are added to queues waiting for the first available most productive operator to process them. There are business administrators, responsible for the system’s business rules that divide operators into groups according to their abilities and effectiveness. Then, taking into consideration the necessary experience, the complexity of the tasks and the time available, the most suitable group of users is assigned to the particular queue. The operators use a client application, implemented in the Eclipse environment open source product, that gives the end user the comfort of a “fat” client. Updates of the client application in the event of a new version of the system being available are carried out automatically remotely during restart (secured by Java Web Start technology). The operators responsible for the tasks have a basic screen that informs them about the task they are supposed to be solving and the time remaining. When designing the system, ergonomy was an important point, because of the heavy workload. The system constantly follows operator effectiveness and optimizes the distribution of tasks accordingly. The system also monitors the duration of break times.

Users with the role of Shift Boss watch and manage the task processing and distribution through their client application and can group together operators, shift them from one group to another, add operator groups to a queue or change priorities. They have on-line monitoring statistics that give them an overview of the current status not only as data, but also in the form of graphical output.

The results of the credit request data check are then transferred via internal systems for further processing.

CCM is integrated with other customer production systems (banking systems) by means of open standards- web services.

4.0 RESULTS

The system is now in operations and serves approx. 500 employees. The end user is satisfied with the system’s functionality and especially with the quality of delivery, which saved him a considerable amount of money in the testing phase. The CCM  module already helped the bank successfully through the Christmas season 2007.

TECHNOLOGY:

Client: Eclipse RCP
App. server: IBM WebSphere
DB: Oracle
Integration: SOA - Web Services

OUR SERVICES:

System design and Implementation (J2EE, SOA, IBM WebSphere, Eclipse RCP)