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Lateral Thinking Delivers Rapid Results at Alliance and Leicester
With help from Compuware, Alliance and Leicester have developed a method of integrating systems in real-time, without the need for either expensive specialised tools or hand-coded point-to-point interfaces.
But rather than invest in expensive and complex integration tools, or resort to equally expensive hand-coded interfaces, a little lateral thinking has made it possible to do the job with general-purpose software from Compuware that the Bank already had in-house. A tradition of value plus serviceAlliance & Leicester is a major UK financial group, part of the FTSE 100 index since demutualisation in 1997. It can trace its origins back to the 1850s through antecedents such as the Leicester Permanent Building Society. At the end of 2001, the bank had £27.4bn of customer advances including £21.9bn of secured mortgage advances. It has over 300 branches across the UK and operates more than 1700 ATMs. It also operates current, small business and commercial transactions through Britain's 17,500+ post offices. The Bank offers a broad range of financial services to personal, commercial and small business customers, and prides itself on offering a comprehensive range of financial products that represent genuine value for money, supported by excellent personal service. The drive for instant decisioningFrom the point of view both of these objectives - service excellence and value for money - it makes sense to automate processes from end to end wherever possible. That's why in 2001 the Bank decided to integrate its credit application systems. Historically, customers applying for credit at a branch had had to wait a few days to hear whether their application had been successful, and were then notified of the decision by post. Most of the processing was already automated, but by two separate systems: a system that branch staff used to capture details of the request, and a central decisioning system that evaluated the application. What delayed matters was the need to transmit application data from branch to centre and then to re-key it - a labour-intensive job shared between the bank's clerical staff and a bureau. The Bank was now determined to give customers visiting its branches an on-the-spot response to their credit applications - a facility that would put it abreast of its biggest competitors. But to provide this facility required electronic transmission of information between the two systems concerned. Lateral thinkingAt this point many organisations would have started to shop for a specialised 'enterprise application integration' product, but the Bank's technical team had other, more original, ideas. Alliance and Leicester was already using an automation tool (QARun) from Compuware which was capable of taking output from one application and presenting it to another application, feeding in the data exactly as if it was being keyed in by a human operator. This tool, originally purchased as an aid to testing, had already been successfully used to provide one-way integration between the Bank's Internet application facility and the decisioning system. That integration approach had proved to be technically straightforward, and had the important advantage of avoiding the need to modify either of the applications being integrated. The technical team believed that a similar approach could solve the problem of integration between the branch system and the decisioning system. This time the challenge was more complex, since the integration had to be two-way, with application data being sent from the branch system to the decisioning system and decision data being passed back. However, talks with Compuware Professional Services (with whom the Bank had collaborated on the previous integration) confirmed the viability of using the tools as envisaged. The talks also fleshed out the Bank's ideas about how the project could be approached. The idea of involving Compuware technicians was especially attractive at that particular juncture, since many of the Bank's technical staff were already committed to other major programmes. Complete in eight weeksA combined team of Compuware Professional Services and Bank staff assembled for the ALISS to Autoscore project or A2A as it became known. With team members working closely together on-site in Leicester, the Bank's specialists contributed their detailed knowledge of the applications to be integrated and of the business requirement, while Compuware brought expertise in the use of the tool plus past experience of integration projects. A successful working relationship quickly emerged. "What made this project work so well was firstly that everyone was working towards shared goals and secondly that everyone on the team showed the same 'can-do' attitude," says David Bolton. Despite time pressures, the team carefully tested the interface, first at a local branch, then with a week's pilot at 15 branches. After that, roll-out to the full branch network progressed smoothly - the branch staff welcomed the system and needed very little training since no additional keying was required. A post-implementation survey of branch staff produced highly positive feedback together with constructive suggestions for future releases. The whole project was completed on schedule, in just eight weeks - a 'quick win' that impressed Alliance and Leicester management and users alike. Despite the exacting timeframe there was still time for skills transfer: by working closely with the Compuware staff during development, the Bank's technicians became self-sufficient in the maintenance of the interface. Keeping it simpleCustomers visiting branches to apply for credit now get an immediate decision, putting the Bank's customer service on a par with that offered by the biggest financial institutions. Branch staff have the satisfaction of being able to see the transaction through to completion, managing the message if it's a 'no' or completing the process if it's a 'yes'. At the same time, a substantial amount [costing an estimated £50k per month] of re-keying has been eliminated since input data is now automatically transferred from the branch system to the decisioning system, instead of having to be entered by clerical staff. The beauty of the technical approach to this project was that it used a tool that was already in place, familiar to and trusted by the Bank's technicians. That saved the cost and complexity of evaluating, buying and learning specialist enterprise application integration tools, yet did so without the need to resort to the traditional, and inefficient, alternative of hand-crafting each interface. The same approach lends itself to other situations where legacy applications need to communicate. Since the A2A project, a similar two-way integration architecture has been used to allow customers applying for a financial product via the Internet to get an immediate decision - something few competitors have achieved. The Bank envisages applying the same architecture to several other integration tasks in future. This process automation strategy is helping the Bank to achieve its strategy of offering customers a seamless way of doing business, whether over the Internet, by telephone or at a branch. "Having these integration methods at our disposal allows us to incorporate appropriate legacy applications into the new multi-channel environment in a very modest time-frame," says David Bolton. "This way, we can maximise the return on our existing investments." |
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Alliance
and Leicester has integrated its credit application processes to an extent
that many larger competitors would envy. The new integrated processes
allow the Bank to offer customers applying for more credit or a loan,
a streamlined, near-instant response, whether they come in via a branch
or on the Web. There have been noticeable improvements in customer satisfaction:
"Automating the whole application and decisioning processes has put
us in a much better position to manage our message to customers,"
says David Bolton, Alliance & Leicester Project Manager. "At
the same time the integration has eliminated a substantial amount of unnecessary
re-keying [costing £50k per month]." 
