West Coast Financial Institution

Contact:
BEA Systems Incorporated
385 Moffett Park Drive
Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1208
U.S.A.
http://www.beasys.com

Tools Used:
BEA's ObjectBroker™, Digital UNIX™ on Alpha Netscape, Visual C++™, Windows 3.X, Win 95™ and Win NT™

Description:
In 1995, West Coast Financial Institution decided to streamline customer service and other banking operations by converting from the traditional stove-pipe application structure to one that is more customer-centric in structure. In keeping with this goal, they began by looking at their customer service department and how their service reps could have better access to customer information and at the same time attain a high level of customer satisfaction. The bank also needed a way to handle a widely distributed customer base due to a number of bank mergers and acquisitions that had happened or which were about to happen. Of course, the on-going business need was to continue to grow the bank's business.

Description of application

Several new applications have been implemented, most notably:

1. Internet Banking

• Written in C++ on an Alpha Unix platform in conjunction with a Netscape Commerce server.
• Provides direct customer online homebanking to over 55,000 customers and growing by 300 customers per day.

2. Agent Desktop

• Primarily written in Visual C++ on Win 3.x PC's.
• Has also been installed on Win 95 and Win NT in the lab and in a pilot, but is only in production on the Win 3.x.
• Supports agents working with customers that have called into the bank for banking information and account maintenance types of activities.
• Currently supports 4000 desktops.

The applications run on Win 3.x, Win 95, and Win NT on the PC platform and Digital UNIX, HP/UX 9.x, and HP/UX 10.x on the server side. IBM mainframes holding bank's legacy online data are integrated on the third tier.

ROI/Benefits

Over-all benefits for the IS department is:

• Increased software efficiency faster application development time
• Integration of legacy applications with new client GIU's(Graphic User Interface)
• Re-use of application objects in the future
• Investment protection of hardware, software, and databases.

For the Agent Desktop application:

• Faster, more accurate access to customer information.
• The ability to more easily see all the customer's business with the bank at once, and thus be able to recommend additional banking services that may be of interest.
• Generally higher customer satisfaction.

For the Internet Banking application:

• More direct customer access to their own accounts,
• Bank operational cost savings,
• Increase of new accounts due to the easy homebanking style of access.

Size

As of 1997, the Customer Agent application supports 300 desktops and 600,000 business invocations/day.