Banking Software: Retail Banking

Retail Banking Software: Strategy for Success

Innovation, convenience, agility and fee management are the four critical success factors of any retail banking strategy. If you know your market well, and combine these factors appropriately, you can attract and retain a profitable mix of customers. Portfolio Plus gives you the ability to control these key factors and execute your strategy for success.

Retail Banking: Critical Success Factors

Portfolio Plus: Parameter Powered Products

Retail banking analysts have been promoting the concept of parameterized products for years. Portfolio Plus makes it a reality. Your retail products won’t be hard-coded. You create. You tier. You decide what product features you need to bring the maximum return and customer retention. There is no waiting for a software vendor to provide an enhancement. It’s all at your fingertips.

Portfolio Plus at the Heart: A Plug-In Banking Architecture

Retail Banking Brochure

The Plug-In Banking architecture of Portfolio Plus gives you freedom. You have ample flexibility to evolve your banking strategy organically. For starters, you don’t have to purchase all the modules or interfaces at once. When you grow and need to add new lines of business or functionality, give us a call and we can provide it for you. You can scale your business horizontally, by adding more lines of business, or vertically, by increasing your volume of business. In either case, you’re covered. The Plug-In banking architecture ensures your future is wide open and your costs are controlled.

Web Banking: Just add Portcullis

To transform your Portfolio Plus retail banking system into a full blown web banking system, you add the Portcullis product along with the requisite internet hardware and security. Portcullis leverages all the rules and setups that you've provided for the Portfolio Plus retail banking system, in addition to extra web security features. Want to read more about web banking with Portcullis? See: web banking software.

Retail Banking: Product Options

Chequing, Savings, Lines of Credit

With Portfolio Plus and its parameter powered product capability, you have countless options. Basic account types include chequing, savings and lines of credit with varying fee structures and multiple tiers of interest. The control of these products is in your hands. You determine the product classes, external interfaces, security options, interest rate tables, teller tables, currency tables and country tables. To make your teller’s job easier you can also set up intelligent defaults. If it’s a virtual bank that you have in mind, you can also set up defaults that apply to electronic-only accounts.

Retail Banking: Basic Account Types

• Chequing accounts with variable fees, tiered interest rates and overdraft.
• Savings accounts with variable fees and tiered interest rates.
• Lines of credit with varying interest rates.

Retail Banking: Delivery Options

The Portfolio Plus Retail Banking software module offers the following retail channel delivery options:

• Web Banking Interface
• Bank Teller
• ATM Banking Interface
• POS Banking Interface
• Telephone Banking and IVR Banking Interface
• Retail and Custom XML Interfaces

Retail Banking Software: The Customer and the Teller

Web banking may get the most attention in the media, but as the statistics point out, there is still plenty of face-to-face banking going on. The Retail Banking software module of Portfolio Plus delivers complete teller functionality.

The teller functionality of the Portfolio Plus retail software module includes:

• Receipt printing
• Passbook printing
• Cash dispensing
• Drawer interface
• Customer account search
• • Social Security Number or Social Insurance Number
  • Last name, first name
  • Telephone number
  • CIF number
• Multi-Currency Blotter
• Stops and holds lookup

Teller Close-Out

When a teller has completed a day’s work and is ready to log off the system, a bank deposit slip or clearing tape can be created containing all non-cleared cheques received. Once the deposit or tape is made up, the cheques are removed from the teller’s drawer. In a similar manner, cleared cheques and any vouchers are removed.

The remaining drawer contents are automatically entered on the teller’s blotter. This allows for easy balancing and close-out of the drawer. The teller is empowered to produce reports on the drawer’s content at any time. The blotter also manages multiple currencies.

Retail Banking Deposit Processing Options

The Portfolio Plus Retail Banking software module includes options for:

• Full account analysis capability
• Flexible service-charge and fee options
• Centralized table of rates that can be shared by all products and accounts
• Maintenance options to update accrual settings for all accounts automatically
• Overdraft management
• Charging and interest rates based on consolidated account groups
• Variable interest accrual and payment methods
• Storage and tracking of personal and marketing-oriented information
• Stop and hold tracking
• Tiered balance charging
• Combined statements that may include an unlimited amount of accounts
• Flexible customer-to-account relationships
• More

Retail Banking: Security

In the age of Sarbanes-Oxley, controls are key. The Portfolio Plus retail banking software module includes full audit and security controls including:

• Limits on transactional amounts, by employee or by class.
• Security class employee grouping
• Audit trails for each transaction by system, user, date, time and description
• Password controls
• Record access level controls
• Screen access controls
• More...

Retail Banking: Cheque Printing

For cheque printing, SIT provides Chequescribe, a product that is certified by the Certified Public Accountant association. Chequescribe allows you to print blank cheques for your customers on demand, using custom paper stock. Chequescribe also can create cheques for various payments that may be required.

Plug-In Banking: Interfaces and Service Oriented Architecture

The Plug-In Banking architecture of Portfolio Plus also enables interfaces to external computer systems and services via TCP/IP (Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), SSL (Secure Socket Layer), Java Messaging Services (JMS), Enterprise Services Bus (ESB), Financial Services Bus (FSB), IBM WebSphere, TIBCO Rendezvous, and other modern service oriented architectures (SOA). The ability to facilitate two-way real-time communications is available with the Portfolio Plus Universal Gateway.

Retail Banking Software: Overnight Processing

All teller, IVR and Web Banking transactions update the accounting system in real-time. Some processing, such as PAC and PAD postings from external sources, are not provided in real time. These processes are often run overnight, unattended, using the batch processing capability of Portfolio Plus.

Other operations that can be run in a "lights out" manner include:

• Clearing
• PAD/PAC
• Post interest/fees
• Cheque reconciliation
• Statement Production

Retail Banking: Management Reports:

Senior management needs to know where the bank stands, financially, at any point in time so they can make effective decisions. Auditors need to be able to look at history, and drill down if necessary. To accommodate these requirements Portfolio Plus offers a number of reports including:

• Trial Balance
• Dormant Accounts
• Overdraft Report
• Fee Summary Reports
• Stop/Hold Reports
• Open/Closed Accounts
• Line of Credit Delinquency
• Line of Credit Review
• Account Transactions by Transaction Code
• Teller Transactions by Entry Date
• Teller Transactions by Type
• More

Tax and Regulatory Reporting (Canadian Options)

• T-5 Tax Processing
• T-5 Supplementary
• NR4 Tax Processing
• Quebec Tax Processing
• Daily Balance Report
• C.D.I.C. Report