Support of Equation-Based Retail Business System

Industry
Banking

Customer

Our customer, Alfa-Bank, is the largest Russian privately owned bank that has been successfully operating in the market since 1990. Ranked among the most reliable and diversified financial institutions in the Russian Federation, Alfa-Bank serves more than 1,100,000 individual and 70,000 corporate clients, including the Russian top 200 companies. The Alfa-Bank branch network comprises 110 affiliates with subsidiary banks in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the Netherlands, and representative offices in Great Britain and the United States.

Alfa-Bank is ranked among the five Russia's largest banks in terms of assets and shareholder equity. In 2004, the assets of the Alfa-Bank Group equaled US$7.0 billion, net profits US$153 million, shareholder equity US$708 million, and loan portfolios US$4.7 billion.

Project Overview

Equation is a world–class integrated, multicurrency, and multilingual retail banking system that provides support for all banking operations from a single automation platform. Using Equation as a core, Alfa-Bank developed a set of additional routines to automate its retail banking operations. These include EHI, transaction processing, commission charge, interest rate calculation, and loan accounting.

Maintaining the Equation–based Retail Business System involved 24x7 functional and technical support for employees who use the system for banking operations. The task was to identify problems that users encountered while working with the system, as well as register and route system errors, incorrect system settings, wrong user actions, and etc.

Project Execution

Leveraging its qualified resources, IBA formed in a short time period a team of professionals experienced in the support and development of banking information systems and AS/400–based software products. The IBA team worked on the customer site for a year providing excellent technical support and effectively assisting end users in handling the Retail Business System.

Project Results

With assistance from IBA, Alfa-Bank automated its retail banking operations using the Equation–based Retail Business System. IBA solved technical problems caused by the deployment and operation of the new software tool, while bank employees could focus on their key areas of competence. As a result, IBA facilitated the smooth and quick transfer of Alfa-Bank to 24–hour automated client service. Commenting on the IBA work, Vladimir Gibenko, Head of Information Systems Support Department at Alfa-Bank, said: “IBA specialists provided support for the Equation System. Seven days a week and 24 hours a day, they responded quickly to the emerging problems, solving these successfully. I would like to thank the IBA experts for their professional attitude and responsibility.”