ABA Banking Journal - May 2007 - (Page 56)
Tech topics Webnotes continued from p. 54 Counting on Vista and “payments as a service” concept to lure small businesses A financial services example Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is the international investment banking arm of Dresdner Bank and, since July 2004, a Socialtext client. With some 6,000 employees in Europe, New York, and Asia, DrKW executives felt the need to enhance collaboration between its IT and business units—across two oceans. Back in 1997, the firm had installed an intranet using then-available collaboration tools. Today, its enterprise wiki commingles with these other products: the intranet; B2Evolution blogs; Microsoft Sharepoint; and MindAlign instant messenger client. “Because we are regulated, we need to make sure that everything we do is recordable, archivable, searchable and retrievable,” says J. P. Rangaswami, now head of alternative market models. To get the new IT-based service off to a fast start, DrKW pre-populated it with content before the system went live to a broader audience in the fall of 2005. After that, the firm switched to a low-key strategy that fosters slow, organic growth. In early 2006, DrKW added Socialtext’s new WYSIWYG editor. Dipen Jobanputra, who was a vice-president of DrKW’s digital market sales at the time, said that the new content editor was pivotal to the success of the wiki by quickly producing a 30% boost in the number of users. Niall Hammond, DrKW’s head of London banking systems, initiated a wiki for the operations and IT departments. The wiki replaced old intranet pages, some of which were three years out of date. About 2,500 DrKW employees now use wikis, with one in ten visitors now making at least one edit. Nigel Verdon, manager of digital markets business development, raises this warning about corporate culture: “I think wikis would fail in organizations where people are frightened to talk and publish, and there are “fear culture” organizations like that. It works in DrKW.” By Bill Orr, contributing editor, who writes from Waterbury Center, Vt. and can be reached at billorr@ibert.org. 56 MAY 2007/ABA BANKING JOURNAL in brief B y now, Vista introcation distribution ductory fanfare has model,” says Kvederis, faded and the softwho thinks that bank cusware as a service (SAAS) tomers like PNC will view concept is also beginning Bankserv and PASS to seem, if not a majority Commerce as a lead for play, then much less of a remote capture business. novelty act. For some, it Microsoft thinks that has become a viable alterVista will get 400 million native for delivering difusers worldwide. With ferent vendor applicathis program, an ordinary tions to end users withdesktop can function as a out hefty infrastructure point-of-sale terminal. investments. Chase Paymentech is Now, payments may hoping to target businessbenefit from being given es processing less than a “SAAS” treatment, or million transactions annushould we say, PASS ally. “We want to target treatment? PASS refers to small businesses in many Payments as a Secure different industries,” says Service, which is being Kevin Gallagher, senior delivered by a consorvice-president corporate tium that includes Chase alliances. Gallagher says Paymentech, Bankserv, that Chase Paymentech and Denver-based IP believes that early Commerce. adopters, many of them What’s been unusual new businesses that are here is the bundling of outfitting their operations capabilities that originate with Vista, and early OS from these different venupgrade candidates, will dors, including remote represent a new market deposit capture, credit for the Chase subsidiary. PASS: a simplification card processing, cash Gallagher says that they in payments delivery? management, and finanexpect usage figures and a cial alerts and other customer service clearer sense of project results in three processes. Published online at the PASS months. Commerce Center, these services can be IP Commerce defines the PASS accessed by small business owners run- Commerce Center as an initial project ning Microsoft Vista. IP Commerce and believes that the secure payments developed the framework that effectively framework can help other payments marries the Vista environment to process- companies serve new markets, including ing capabilities provided by consortia small business. members. (Members “publish” or Allen Weinberg, an analyst at “expose” their payment technologies to Glenbrook Partners, Menlo Park, Calif., the IP framework, which allows small raises a question, however. “I’m a fan of business users to “discover” or use the thin-client payment apps in general—and software at the desktop.) the payments as a service concept is one PASS members believe the under- form of it. Because you have centralized served, small business market will benefit control of the code, this is a cost effective from this newer, leaner access. way to get changes done in the field. Yet, “It’s early into this project, so I can’t whenever third parties are introduced to a say that early adopter activity is over- payments process, the potential is there whelming us,” says Dave Kvederis, with for control to be taken out of the hands of Bankserv. “But we’re all excited to have the acquirer. Who owns the customer in gotten in at the ground floor of this appli- the case of PASS?” BJ www.ababj.com/subscribe.html
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