Overview of the Banking Solution

The Banking Solution is an application that you can use to control how you sell and manage your offers.

Banks have traditionally tried to sell products to customers through mass marketing, one size fits all, approach.

Time to market cycles for new products typically ranges 6 - 9 months and can involved the development of custom code and inherent testing complexities and costs.

The result has been low acceptance of new offers, high costs for new product development and low account to customer ratios. To address this problem, banks need the following:
  1. A detailed up-to-the second understanding of its customers
  2. The ability to offer products and product bundles that are tailored to the current needs and desires of the customer.
  3. The capability to manage new product campaigns and make in-flight course corrections based on product acceptance.

List of artifacts

The following artifacts are included in the solution.
  • IBM® Product Master artifacts
    • Data model
    • Workflows
    • User interface
    • Sample data
    • Security configuration
    • Data validations and other code that enhances the user interface usability
    • Ability to publish SPEC changes
    • Ability to publish changes to hierarchies
    • Ability to publish changes to items
    • Integration with IBM Operational Decision Manager
  • IBM Operational Decision Manager artifacts
    • Integration with Product Master
  • InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition artifacts
    • Ability to support products based on Product Master specs
    • Ability to receive changes for hierarchies and items
  • Business Process Management artifacts
    • Integration with the physical MDM
    • Sample next best offer user interface
    • Sample onboarding workflows

Roles and tasks

For most Banking Solution systems, the tasks that are accomplished in the solution are generally covered by users in the following main roles.
Accountant
As an accountant, you are responsible for ensuring that the correct general ledger (GL) codes are assigned. Control the GL account assignments in all of the catalogs.
Administrator
As an administrator, you are responsible for any activities that are related to IT, for example managing specs and attribute collections. The IT administrator is responsible for the technical aspects of the system. This includes being the Business User in charge of the Features Catalog content. As an administrator you cannot change content in the other catalogs.
Channel manager
As a channel manager, you are responsible for ensuring that the channel is ready to sell and service the offer. Your focus is primarily the offer catalog, and might have the ability to select or create channel-specific offers and approve copy that is used by the channels they control.
Compliance
As a compliant checker, you are responsible to ensure that the bank follows all of the government requirements. You need to manage any compliance-related data primarily in the sellable items catalog, but also potentially in the offers catalog.
Copywriter
As a copywriter, you are responsible for creating all of the text, pictures, and videos for offers and promotions. You control all of the copy write related content that is either held or referenced by the offer catalog.
Offer manager
As an offer manager, you are responsible for managing offers within a release. You will likely be in a marketing organization and your primary focus is the offer catalog.
Product manager
A product manager, you are responsible for managing one or more base products. You will likely be within the operations team of a line of business and you have control over the content of the sellable items catalog.
Promotion manager
As a promotion manager, you are responsible for managing promotions within an offer. This might be the same individual as the offer manager or might be an external sales person. Your primary focus will be to control the promotion-related data of the offers catalog.
Release manager
As a release manager, you are responsible for managing one or more combinations of offers that need to be managed together.
Risk credit
As a risk credit checker, you are responsible for ensuring that the risk implicit in an offer or promotion is properly accounted for. Therefore, generally, risk is determined on the product level and focused in the sellable items catalog.
Super users
As a super user, you can perform every task outside of a workflow, except change attributes.
Tester
As a tester, you are responsible for testing all offers before they go into production. This is a business function ensuring that the offers work as designed and that there is no unintended consequences of changes at the feature or product level in both offers and existing contracts

Rules for creating offers and managing sales processes

When managing offers and customer, the following types of rules should be considered.
Terms and Conditions
Terms and conditions represent the proposed or actual contract with the customer. The offer contains the proposed version and they may or might not be able to be changed as part of the on boarding process. The actual terms and conditions are contained in the agreement or contract.
Compliance
Compliance ensures that the appropriate government regulations are being met and the processes and procedures are in place to ensure an ongoing enforcement of the rules and regulations. For example,
  • A bank might not allow more than three withdrawals from a Savings Account in any given month.
  • An account might not be opened by a person under 18 years of age unless there is a joint account holder who is 18 years old or older
Eligibility
Eligibility is defined by the rules that the bank wants to apply and beyond compliance, such as:
  • A person must have a checking account and a credit card already.
  • The checking account must be kept an average daily balance over $5,000
  • A person must not be a current customer of the bank.
  • Only valid if accepted and applied for through a specific channel such as the internet.
Pricing
While straight forward in concept, providing flexibility can be complicated. Pricing can by driven by one or more of the following:
  • Volumes, cumulated over various time horizons
  • Balances, also cumulated over various time horizons
  • Sales, service, or transaction initiation channels
  • And include calculations of commissions and other fees payable to third parties
Marketing
Marketing focuses on who is told that the offer is available and how will they be told. Marketing considerations take into account what is known about the customer such as age, gender, social economic factors, the channel over which the interaction is occurring, and the location of interaction and of the customer. It is possible that consumers who are eligible for an offer might not be told about it, yet are still able to sign up for it if they do find out.
Risks
Specific customer risks can influence pricing of arrangements involving credit, but might also influence other fees since this effects the ability of a customer to move their business. Offers might also be structured where only individuals with credit scores that are higher than a certain level might apply.
Events
Events are rules that are run based on some change in status or transaction. For example,
  • Birthdays
  • Current physical location
  • Transaction or balance volume changes
  • Changes in methods or frequency of interactions
  • Required update of financial or other documents that are required for compliance or risk assessment