Your industry was once stable, but times have changed. With new players entering the credit-card market and regulators forcing you to reassess your business model, leading to more competition and lower margins, you?re tasked with cutting information technology (IT) costs while improving flexibility, transaction speed and functionality.
But cutting costs doesn't address the other pressures facing your business that require further investment and reassessment. Pressures like enhancing transaction processes, improving customer service, upgrading fraud prevention and integrating innovative technology such as RFID tags in order to offer new product features.
However, if yours is like most companies in your industry, the systems you have in place cannot readily handle these initiatives. Your legacy systems are large and self-contained. As you?ve introduced new features to take advantage of better solutions, you?ve had to deal with a mass of connections within the original systems, customized adaptations and half-integrated third-party applications. Just changing one piece of functionality often impacts all the other components, making change risky and expensive.
Because your business has to reliably perform large volumes of transactions quickly and with uncompromised accuracy, traditional mainframe solutions, coupled with robust transaction-monitoring tools, are essential. So how do you achieve more agility and flexibility? By taking advantage of our strategy for accommodating rapid growth and increasing transaction volumes, without long lead times and capital investment.
At the core of this strategy are our agile card framework and agile card utility.
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.
The agile card framework is a highly flexible and multilayered card environment. It standardizes all the interactions outside the processing engines, making interfaces much simpler. A range of presentation and integration services makes accessing both core and extended systems and processes transparent to the user.
Additionally, the framework allows process-improvement services to be plugged in ? such as call-center services and back-office workflow functions.
- Presentation layer – The Web-based presentation layer accesses information from the transaction layer leveraging the flexibility benefits of a loosely coupled architecture
- Access layer – Accesses basic data using standard Internet protocols; any data transformation can be performed in the access layer
- Transaction layer – Isolates transaction processes where users no longer interact with antiquated, multipurpose green screens. This functional orientation makes your transaction environment highly efficient. It also allows you to introduce specific functionality quickly and enable the packaging of product features within the channel and business function layer
- Business function layer – Provides the vital services necessary for card issuers and acquirers such as:
- Authorization
- Fraud detection
- Dispute processing
- Credit analysis and scoring
- Account upgrades
- Card replacement
- Collection
- Statement preparation
- Merchant account management
Agile Card Utility
Through our utility model, we process transactions from multiple financial institutions. The high transaction volumes in this shared services environment drive significant economies of scale that enable us to deliver the latest technological and operational approaches at a competitive price – something few companies can achieve by themselves.
Coupled with the agile card framework and the processing experience of HP this utility approach reduces the capital expenditure needed to improve operational efficiency and customer services.
The HP agile card utility provides the latest consumer card application suite, integrated into the agile card framework that enables your company to develop its own unique service offerings. The utility also benefits from optimized processes and highly flexible delivery channel integration.
Superior Economies of Scale and Greater Control Over Your Products
The agile card utility delivers greater business 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 is protected from unauthorized access
- Region-based utility processing centers that leverage cross-industry generic customer account-focused services
- Work force 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
Greater Efficiencies
Migrating to new operating structures and technology solutions have traditionally been very complex and time consuming. The agile card framework overcomes these challenges by delivering a seamless entry into a utility environment. Because the presentation layer allows vital components to access the latest workflow and process-control techniques, highly labor-intensive tasks can be rapidly improved as the migration takes place.
Future-proofing
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.
Benefits of Our Agile Card Utility Model
HP's agile card utility model can help your company gain a competitive advantage in the payment card market:
- Reduce your operational costs by transferring your card processing functions to us for greater efficiency
- Lower your total costs through our economies of scale
- Reengineer your processes using the latest techniques while controlling your fixed costs and capital usage
- Take advantage of best-practice methodology, including increased levels of business intelligence related to the performance of your operation
- Future-proof your card processing through the use of our agile card framework and our leveraged technical infrastructure
- Reduce your capital charges because these are shared across all utility members
- Improve your customer experience through business relevant service level agreements
- Enhance your operational risk management with the latest credit and fraud management tools
- Extend the range of services you offer because the utility accesses a broader range of card options across wider geographies than an individual bank can provide on its own
Access To Even More Business Processing Options
The agile card framework and utility not only let you use advanced technical solutions, but can also be used to access other HP business process outsourcing options. Call centers dealing with customer interactions and queries could be handled through near shore services, while some back-office processes could be allocated to another location to be handled with the right balance of cost, efficiency and security.
A Comprehensive Solution Customized For Your Environment
With a flexible, end-to-end card processing solution and plug-and-play options, we can tailor a solution that best fits your needs, such as:
- Card processing for a variety of products, including revolving credit, commercial/procurement, debit, gift, payroll, premium and prepaid cobranded/affinity cards
- Alignment of risk with reward through comprehensive assessment of credit worthiness, transaction-risk management and flexible pricing options
- Authorization tools that ensure enterprise risk policy is applied to every request
- Extensive issue/reissue controls, dispute resolution, cardholder maintenance, billing services and debt collection capabilities
- Integrated fraud tools that typically detect from 40 percent to 60 percent of fraud and reduce losses by 20 percent to 50 percent
Industry-leading Stand-in Rates and Response Time
Exceeding the standards set by MasterCard® and Visa® , HP has a proven track record of helping clients like you 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
Leverage Our Pricing and Expertise
Rely on the expertise and deep industry knowledge that comes only from 40-plus years of card processing. We have experience running the top card processing platforms, as well as our own proprietary system. Plus, variable pricing lets you leverage our processing centers without making a large hardware and software investment.
Choose HP
By combining the highly flexible application- and business-function architecture of HP agile card framework with the economies of scale possible through the agile card utility model, you can help your company develop a responsive, differentiated position in the market. You can also achieve the levels of efficiency and cost-effectiveness necessary to retain long-term competitiveness.
For more information about what HP Enterprise Services can do for you, submit a business inquiry.