Founded in 1963, Banco Popular is the biggest private bank in Dominican Republic, with assets in excess of 1.5 billion dollars and a portfolio of approximately 800,000 customers.
Banco Popular is a subsidiary of Grupo Financiero Popular and has more than 2,500 employees distributed in 60 branches. The main services provided by Banco Popular are checking and saving accounts, term deposits, debit cards, credit cards, personal and business credits, among others.
Banco Popular has the biggest automatic teller network on the island, with more than 200 machines in the country.
The main competitive advantage of this company is its strong image, customer service and its continuous technological innovation.
Following the need for growth of the Bank, the Information Systems department initiates the evaluation of migrating to Windows NT architecture.
"Systems in the mainframe were all spread out and did not give us easy access to the information" explains José Reynoso, Bank Information Systems Division Manager. "We also had a high level of interruptions in the service because when a system starts a Batch process, a service such as phone banking or the automatic tellers would be interrupted".
After the analysis of available choices, Banco Popular decided to migrate to the Windows NT Server Platform, "we noted that everybody was migrating to NT, and of course it makes sense to adopt a platform that was becoming the industry standard. Microsoft had already strengthened its BackOffice platform for an Enterprise environment, so we had no doubt that this was the path to follow", said Reynoso.
The first stage of the project was the migration from the mainframe system to Windows NT based architecture. To do this 60 servers (one in each branch) and four Enterprise servers were implemented in the central computing center.
The second stage started with the implementation of a solution that would separate the customer service modules from the bank internal processes, in order to make services front-end and prevent failures or delays in internal processes affecting customer service. "Maybe this is the most critical application for a Bank because this is the only one which has direct contact with the client. If something doesn't work in any other system, the client doesn't know either. But if there is an error in this system, the client knows immediately", said Guillermo Villanueva, Research and Development Director of Ki Teknology.
That's how Ki Teknology created the first Latin-American solution which fully implemented Microsoft's Distributed internetworking Application Architecture (DNA) in a mission critical application.
"Until now, Banks didn't use Microsoft technology for mission critical applications because this wasn't mature enough. Now, with the Enterprise version of BackOffice and the positioning of Microsoft as an industry standard, big companies feel more secure adopting this products for its key applications", says the Ki Teknology Executive.
This new application procecess all the transactions produced online in the bank which may affect a client account, such as a withdrawal (from a branch or from an ATM), credit card purchase, phone banking, account consults, etc.
The system has enough capacity to include a growing margin. Today, the demand is around 14 transactions per second but the system can handle 20 to 25 transactions per second.
This application will have many users, including around 1,200 Bank employees, customers who use the phone bank and ATM and around 10,000 businesses that accept debit cards as a method of payment.
Bank employees can access the system through NT workstation, but there are employees who are still accessing the application through the Mainframe. "The objective was to avoid an abrupt replacement of the old terminals and start the employees training in groups to make the migration easier and to create a good change atmosphere". Says Reynoso. Today 800 employees have NT Workstation; this will double when we finish the migration.
The complete information of all customers, including the Bank products used by them, are stored in a Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Data Base. "The straight of SQL Server is a key factor in this application, because Banco Popular has a customer portfolio of around a million customers, 800 thousand checking and savings accounts with 64 million movements and 300 thousand transactions are processed in a single day". Says Reynoso.
The main benefit of this solution is the flexibility it gives to the bank to adapt their systems to changes in their business. "Banking is a changing business, that's why we must be able to react immediately to external changes" says Reynoso. "With the mainframe, flexibility to exploit information was too poor. It was by extension difficult to add the customer information or search it in different ways because there is no relational Data Base in the Mainframe. But now an employee in any branch can access all the client information with a few clicks, in a shorter period of time".
When we have an available client profile, we can design offers thinking of our customers' needs, offering a personalized service giving the customer a high value in the client-bank relationship; this is a comparative advantage over our competitors.
Our customer service will also improve because this solution guarantees continuity of service. As this application has its own platform, failures in the mainframe don't affect it. That's how we fix the past service interruptions. With the old system, the ATM was off line when some Batch processes were running. This usually caused a serious inconvenience for our customers when they needed to use an ATM.
As a medium- and long-term benefit, projections estimate a significant decrease in hardware and software acquisition costs including those costs associated with systems administration and maintenance.
Finally, this solution contributed to the positioning of Banco Popular as a company at the forefront of technology and customer service, this means a greater retention of existing customers and attraction of potential customers.
When such a strong technological change is implemented, it is necessary to get initial support from key players within the organization who can guarantee successful project execution.
"In the beginning, Banco Popular launched a presentation and an educational process about this new technology. Once we have the support of these key people we initiate a gradual conversion of the users to make them appreciate the benefits of this new technology and spread the enthusiasm in the employees who are still working in the old structure. This made the users make the change". Says Reynoso.
"Thanks to Microsoft technology we have created a solution that allows us to react quickly to changes in our industry, offer better service to our customers and increase the opportunities for the Bank."
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Ki Teknology present at the Annual Gala Dinner of the North American Chilean Chamber of Commerce (NACCC).