Headlines:
SAS Fraud Software for HSBC
HSBC Holdings PLC is planning to use payment card fraud detection software it developed with the Cary, N.C., vendor SAS Institute Inc.
The London banking company announced last week that it plans to use the system to monitor its entire portfolio of more than 100 million credit and debit cards.
T.J. Horan, the product strategist for SAS, said in an interview Wednesday that HSBC has "made a commitment to roll this out across the globe as their standard fraud-management platform."
The two companies have been working for almost two years to modify SAS software to support HSBC's needs, he said.
HSBC plans to install the new software in the United States first, starting in mid-2006. The system will monitor card purchases as they are made at the point of sale or afterward to spot fraudulent transactions. It includes reporting, analysis, simulation, and case management capabilities, Mr. Horan said. "This is everything you need for payment card fraud detection."
SAS plans to offer the software to other large banking companies and expects to be installing it at additional customers by mid-2006, he said.
Synovus May Integrate Further
Synovus Financial Corp. of Columbus, Ga., which combined its new-account opening software with its sales-tracking system last year, is now considering adding online banking and loans to the integrated system.
John Woolbright, the $25.1 billion-asset banking company's chief technology officer, said Thursday that it hired Metavante Corp.'s Consulting and Professional Services unit to integrate the account-opening and sales-tracking applications. Synovus completed that project in December and now is in "enhancement mode," he said. "We're looking to extend that [integration] into Internet banking and loans."
Synovus outsources its customer data warehousing and core accounting for deposits and loans to Metavante Corp., the technology subsidiary of the Milwaukee banking company Marshall & Ilsley Corp., and its online banking services to S1 Corp. of Atlanta.
S1 also provides branch automation software and an "enterprise platform" that stores customer-contact applications.
Mr. Woolbright said Thursday that his company historically focused on executing transactions but in the past few years has been trying to shift to a "sales culture" in which branch employees focus on selling more banking products.
Having multiple systems hindered this transition, because employees often had to enter information into both the account-opening and the sales-tracking systems, he said.
"Sales and referral integration was a very important part" of the project, Mr. Woolbright said. "As you were moving into a sales culture, you had to do things twice."
Dan Shannon, a vice president at Metavante and the general manager of its consulting unit, said his team developed tools to connect the S1 systems with the Metavante core accounting system.
Mr. Woolbright said Synovus can use a standardized interface that connects its employees to the middleware, instead of writing custom software to link each user to each application.
"In previous implementations, we had point-to-point connections to each application," he said.
Synovus began rolling out the integrated system in mid-2004, one user at time. The systems were also integrated into its human resources database from Oracle Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., so that Synovus could convert individual users as they completed their training.
That meant that one employee might be using the old systems, while someone at the next desk was on the new one, Mr. Woolbright said. "It was a very complex rollout."
