While payment cards and their complexity have grown exponentially in the market, most of the IT systems that process them have not kept up with the pace of change. Couple that with the silo structure of most banking institutions, with a separate IT system supporting each payment type – cash, checks, debit or credit cards – and it's no wonder you've got significant functional overlap and duplication.
Poorly documented and overly complicated systems held together with temporary patches have become true handicaps. The inflexibility of these legacy systems and back-office environments makes it difficult to respond to market challenges:
- Pressure to reduce rising transaction costs
- The rising need to manage credit and fraud
- Better-skilled competition
- Greater regulatory complexity
- Demand for product innovation to attract new customers and maintain existing customer loyalty
To make matters worse, traditional point solutions are generally costly and often result in less-than-optimal solutions delivered in longer-than-expected time frames. To maintain your edge and continue to succeed, you must respond faster to market signals, create more tailored products and deploy them more agilely. So how can you update your card-processing platform while controlling your capital expenditure?
With a flexible solution and business model that addresses your specific processing needs – such as multiple card product support – along with a robust and secure infrastructure that provides scalability for future growth.
The Right Solution
That's where an agile card framework and agile card utility from HP can help. The framework is a multilayered card platform that isolates account and transaction functions into separate layers. Since changes to one layer don't affect the processes in the other layers, you can make changes faster and more efficiently. Using this framework as the foundation of our agile card utility, we've created a unique shared services environment that provides economies of scale and cost benefits without forcing you to sacrifice product differentiation and packaging flexibility.
Superior Economies of Scale and Access To the Latest Technologies and Business Processes
We developed our strategy by leveraging our extensive financial industry experience, that includes providing payment card systems and processes for some of the most successful card issuers, acquirers and transaction processors across the globe. By combining the agile card framework with an agile card utility delivery model, we help financial institutions of all sizes become cost-effective and gain an agile and competitive presence in an increasingly challenging global and regional marketplace.
Agile Card Framework
This software architecture provides a technical environment that increases your business flexibility while putting you on the path toward modernization and operational transformation. The result: your company can create timely and highly customer-focused product features that differentiate your products and services from competitors.
Agile Card Utility
Through our utility model, we process transactions from a number of financial institutions. In this shared services environment, you benefit from maximized economies of scale as well as use of the latest technological and operational approaches – something few companies can achieve by themselves.
Coupled with our agile card framework and the processing experience, this utility approach reduces your capital expenditure while it improves your operational delivery and helps you gain market share.
The HP agile card utility delivers greater efficiency and flexibility through:
- Shared but segregated facilities to support your specific operations and need for privacy
- Payment card industry (PCI)-compliant processing environments that ensure sensitive consumer data are protected from unauthorized access
- Region-based utility processing centers that leverage cross-industry generic customer account-focused services
- Workforce management across multiple card processing companies that enables efficient brand and process training for all companies while providing unique brand service qualities for your company
- Leveraging processes common to 80 percent of card processing companies while providing the flexible framework to support the 20 percent of operations that make your card product and brand unique
- Embedded offshore operations that provide development, call center and back-office options
Increase Revenues and Reduce Costs
By providing a wide range of Web-based services across your global enterprise, the utility helps you diversify and develop your individual product offerings, as well as avoid large up-front fixed costs. This means you can create new opportunities while reducing risk and providing customers with service levels aligned to their specific segments, creating value that translates into higher margin revenues. The utility also enables you to lower costs for the long term.
Because we spread our costs across a large number of transactions and/or operations, we are able to invest in the most advanced workflow and automation environments, which not only controls costs, but:
- Enhances quality
- Drives efficiency
- Increases information availability
- Decreases processing times
- Permits greater levels of customer service
- Raises levels of regulatory compliance oversight
The net result: enhanced business flexibility and customer service capability, which together present opportunities to package offerings that enhance your brand image, increase customer satisfaction and drive greater bottom-line revenue by transcending price-only competition.
Offer a Wider Range of Products Across a Greater Geographical Area
The commonality among card operations across the world lends itself to the establishment of regional utilities. The benefits:
- Joint economies of scale can be achieved on a regional and global basis
- Isolating applications, business functions and presentation in our agile card framework allows geographically specific functions to be built easily, without impacting core applications
- The availability of geographically specific functions makes it easier for you to launch products in new locations
- Web services enable products and services to be readily integrated into existing and evolving delivery channels
With the agile card utility, you have the means to introduce new products through a single platform so you don't need to replicate building existing products on disparate platforms for new geographies.
Giving You Choice
The agile card framework enables you to be highly adaptable to ever-changing business needs. Choose the services you want – retain some business processes, such as customer contact, or route these functions through the agile card utility.
The agile card utility also allows you to make these choices across different geographies. In some geographies you may elect to use all the services the utility provides, while in others you may prefer to rely on local or internal resources. Because the utility isolates applications and IT from the business functions and channels, you always have a choice.
A Hedge Against the Future
The ability of the agile card framework to adapt to change and the agile card utility to deliver higher transaction scalability provides a structure that is future-proof. As markets evolve and regulatory controls change, spreading long-term costs over a large number of transactions helps you contain costs and safeguards you from large cost fluctuations. The agile card framework also makes it faster and less expensive to make changes.
Outsourcing Your Consumer Card Services To HP Has a Number of Advantages
By outsourcing your consumer card services to HP, you can reduce processing costs while gaining the following benefits:
- Respond to rapidly changing market opportunities using building blocks you define to create new products
- Target specific markets with customized statement designs and bonus-point programs
- Customize rate and terms through account- and transaction-level pricing capabilities
- Manage operational risks, including credit and fraud risk and dispute adjudication
- Enhance collections through account tracking, automated past-due and over-credit-line notifications, and collections workflow support
Choose HP
We can help you develop a responsive, differentiated position in the market while achieving the levels of efficiency, cost-effectiveness and improved customer service you need to be competitive for the long term. And our highly flexible application- and business-function architecture, coupled with economies of scale, makes it possible for you to deliver shareholder value and achieve a sustainable competitive edge.
By taking advantage of our experience in global operations that spans five continents and our industry-leading rate and response time, you can benefit from:
- An authorization response rate of 99.99 percent
- An average MasterCard® authorization response time of 0.06 seconds
- An average Visa® authorization response time of 0.18 seconds
For more information about what HP Enterprise Services can do for you, submit a business inquiry.