Asian Financial Services Congress 2008

Winner: Yes Bank Limited (India)
Recipient: Suresh Sethi, President-Transaction Banking Group, Yes Bank Limited.

Introduced electronic payment of both real-time gross settlement (RTGS) and National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) via the web. The platform provides online confirmation along with instant settlement within 2 hours for RTGS and same day confirmation for NEFT payments, making cash flow forecasting easier and precise to the last minute. Important details include various security features, authorization workflow, online IFS Code library, email advising to beneficiaries, etc.

Winner: Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd. (Japan)
Recipient: Tsukasa Makino, Manager-IT Planning and Coordination, Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd.

Awarded for its Business Renovation Project, an extremely ambitious undertaking to overhaul every aspect of the business, covering insurance product redesign, business processes, claims services, core systems, and the agency portal. The project spans several stages and stretches out till 2011, with the insurer underway in achieving its targets to reduce workload for agents and employees by up to 30%, improve system development efficiency by 30%, and raise straight-through processing to 100%, among others.

Winner: Bank Danamon Indonesia (Indonesia)
Recipient: Victor Korompis, Senior Vice President-IT, Bank Danamon Indonesia

Danamon Bank leveraged smartcard and biometric technology to bring efficient and differentiated microfinance product offerings to Indonesia's micro-entrepreneurs. As a result, Danamon's microfinance arm has shown strong growth over recent years and now plays a more significant role in the bank's proposition to the market.

Winner: Taishin International Bank (Taiwan)
Recipient: B. R. Ho, Chief Information Officer, Taishin International Bank

Taishin Bank is awarded for developing a new sales force automation tool for its telemarketing team that effectively integrated different systems covering the datawarehouse, the risk assessment system, the credit bureau, computer telephony, SMS, and the core banking system. The system was completed in a short period of time, allowing the bank to see a sharp increase in businesses booked through a new, cost-effective and customer-responsive channel.

Winner: UnionBank of the Philippines (Philippines)
Recipient: Herminio Pugeda, Executive Vice President-Corporate Banking, UnionBank of the Philippines

Integrated, one-stop-shop portal to make e-payments to the key government agencies. It enables corporations to settle their monthly mandatory payments with the BIR, SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG in a simple, online, and efficient manner.

Winner: CIMB Bank Berhad (Malaysia)
Recipient: Devabalan Theyventheran, Director-Transformation Office & Business Process Development, CIMB Bank Berhad

Malaysia's CIMB Bank has seen improvements in operational efficiency by introducing automation in their account opening process. The new system has not only decreased the average branch queue times but has also resulted in a significant increase of new accounts booked.

Winner: Westpac Banking Corporation (Australia)
Recipient: Mate Vulic, Product Manager, Westpac Banking Corporation

PayWay is an internet-based solution, which can be used to manage and collect customer payments. It supports direct debit and credit card payments, enabling customers to pay online or over the phone. PayWay is a solution providing businesses with multiple receivables channels with low implementation and ongoing costs.

Winner: ING Asia/Pacific Ltd.
Recipient: David Garceran Nieuwenberg, Regional Head-e-Business, ING Asia/Pacific Ltd.

Awarded for its implementation of "Towards Project Excellence" (TPEX) intranet strategy execution for its subsidiary, Bank of Beijing. TPE was introduced to Bank of Beijing to logically cluster its hundreds of projects into a TPE Excellences framework to simplify staff functions, and identify and motivate staff responsible for strategic projects. The framework is proving to be a more practical tool for executing strategy and evaluating performance.

Awarded for "Project REACH", OCBC's one-stop end-to-end credit and risk management system. This solution sees a collaboration between the corporate banking and risk management divisions to achieve an end-to-end information flow for each credit process, and allows OCBC to manage global exposure and control drawdown transactions in a timely manner out of their head office.

Overhauled its trade services business and moved from a decentralized structure to a centralized structure - a hub and spoke model. This is a radical change from the previous structure and allowed the bank to rapidly scale up its trade services business moving from 16 "spokes" in 2006 to 42 in 2007. The change also occurred at the people level as the bank invested heavily to train and improve its staff's ability to service customer requirements.

Islamic Payment Switch (IPS) which allow customer to Purchase Saudi Riyals in various denominations and load the cash into a card (AL MUSAFIR) and have the ability to withdraw from Al Rajhi Saudi's ATM when customers are there. Subsequent phase is to allow Al Rajhi Malaysia's customers to perform cross border withdrawal transactions and debit their account directly.

Supply chain finance initiation and SWIFT TSU integration into SCB's Straight2Bank platform. The incorporation of TSU into SCB's platform is a first for the industry and allows customers to take advantage of the benefits and efficiencies created by automating the document matching process. With TSU as a value-added part of SCB's solution, the bank can offer customers the convenience of working with trading partners "embedded" with another bank's electronic solution.

Baiduri Bank's FAST (Fast And Secure Transactions) is a mobile authentication and transaction platform for banking and services payments. The project is poised to prove that an interactive voice response-based (IVR-based) system can effectively resolve security issues to provide a convenient and personal way for consumers to undertake mobile payments. The FAST Project's inclusive approach allows a broad selection of third parties to offer the mobile phone as a payment channel to customers, aside from providing a new payment channel for credit cards and hire purchase --- business lines that are uniquely strong in the Brunei market.

Bank Mandiri strengthened its payments infrastructure through the adoption of SOA and a holistic enterprise payment framework, enabling them to implement multiple payments initiatives quickly and cost-effectively. This has led to a significant increase in fee based income and transaction volumes, as well as higher net interest margins resulting from low cost funds.

HSBC Global Payments and Cash Management in India partnered with an authorized alliance bank to make electronic payments (E-Tax) on behalf of clients through their portal with differentiators such as pan-India coverage and an outsourcing proposition for processing these transactions. It was launched with the joint efforts of various teams, including the Legal, Tax, Compliance, Operations and Customer Group teams who worked together with the Global Payments & Cash Management team in India to complete this launch within 3 weeks of the regulatory mandate and comfortably met the timelines set by the CBEC.