The trivial customer-oriented feature of business has become one of the major postulates as declared by the banks in their development strategies and programs. Of course it is very important to know how fast and with which quality the bank's front office system works that is designed so that the organization of the work with customers would be more efficient.

On the one hand, front office is the bank's division that directly contacts the customers and covers in the first line the sales and marketing, so it is a kind business card of the entity. And the success of business mainly depends on the extent the operation of the above division is organized.

On the other hand, front office has ceased to be just a structural unit of the bank and now it is treated as the business process to handle the customer's application for receiving this or that banking service. Alongside the way through which the customer applies to the bank makes no difference: through the branch, separated point of sale, contact centre, payment terminal, ATM, mobile or e-banking system. Thus, front is not the workplace of the operator, but a system covering the work of all the office's employees (cashiers, operators, client managers, contact centre operators), all the remote channels of service.

A rapid growth of the clients' number, appearance of new banking products and development of channels to deliver the same lodge very rough requirements to the front office solution both in the area of business scope augmentation and in the area of interaction with other information systems.

FEATURES OF THE SYSTEM

Every bank strives for provision of their customers with the maximal quantity of methods to get access to banking services, to reduce service time and alongside to comply with the due quality level of the service to be rendered. A high degree of automation for the process of interaction with clients and profound integrity of systems that ensure such automation are the essential factors to achieve the above goals.

The front office system's objective lies in arrangement of the employee's work in a single window and with a unified type of interface, having removed a plenty of frontal applications of the bank's information system. With this state of affairs all the necessary information is contained in one application: it may be a thin client on basis of any Web-browser, for instance Internet Explorer. Such system makes it possible to give fast response to the customers' inquiries and use all the volume of data as existing in the lending institution.

The modern front office shall possess a certain number of features that are especially important for the buyers of such systems, thinks Mikhail Gevorkov, the Vice President of BCF Bank. Such features in the first line include the opportunity to work through a thin client on small channels, easiness to get interfaced with the basic operation day of the bank and, of course, flexibility and easiness of the system's setting. "When choosing the front office system in our bank we were guided by the above principles", states Mikhail Gevorkov.

The Vice President, Information Technologies Department Director of "Renaissance Credit" Bank, Andrei Ezrokhi emphasizes on the demand for cross sales functions, personal attitude towards the clients (that this way or another relates to CRM-processes), as well as scalability and invariability in respect to system platforms, end equipment configuration and communication channels' capacity among the most significant items specifying the selection of solutions for the banks' front office automation.

Andrei Ezrokhi has informed that the front office of "Renaissance Credit" Bank is based on the principles of service-oriented architecture enabling to remove the dependency on the bank's back office and to ensure the continuity of business processes. "In addition when building up the front office we took into account the low demands to the system resources and communication channels, stability, scalability, intuitiveness and easiness to deploy the user's interface", says the expert.

OPERATIONS IN THE FRONT OFFICE

The front office's business process work consists of several groups of operations. Firstly, these are the performance of classical instructions from the customers, for example, a prolongation of deposit, transfer of money from one account onto the other or in another bank, etc. Secondly, these are the information service for the customers presupposing answering the questions and advising for customers, those who come to the bank's office personally or applying to the contact centre. In some banks the employees who work in the front office not only fulfil the instructions of the customers, but in some cases offer the new products and services to them, i.e., they are engaged in active sales. Besides, there is a group of processes, for instance, on processing of the credit application and making of the credit decision which are originated in the front office, however touch upon a part of the middle office's processes. As an example let us take the calculation of the potential borrower's screening points and decision-making as for grating a credit for him.

Naturally, the front office system in the bank is urged to be capable to solve very complicated problems. Besides, there should be a possibility of fast and flexible re-setting of the system's parameters. For example, when launching new products it is usually required to have a grand setting of the system, especially if it goes on about such complex lending products as mortgage. Here we need to change not only such parameters as the interest rate, term and amount of the primary contribution, but to create a brand new solution, which for instance allows for the parent capital upon issuing the mortgage loan or any other factors. Such changes for the front office systems' parameters must be carried out very quickly as under the contemporary market conditions both the flexibility and the speed of decision-making are the key points for the customer to determine the bank's operation quality and consequently its competitive strengths.

INDUSTRIAL SOLUTIONS ON COMPLETE AUTOMATION

Almost every significant player at the bank automation market is already offering industrial solutions as for a complete automation of the front office in this or that stage of readiness, believes Mikhail Gevorkov. "There are a lot of interesting solutions. It's just a question of price and quality of the functionalities to be provided", says the specialist.

Andrei Ezrokhi, on the contrary, states that there are few solutions of that kind. "And the major cause is evidently the fact that front processes that is the processes to serve the customer can be of various nature in different organizations, surmises the expert. With this situation it is quite hard to generalize all the possible peculiarities and details and to create a universal front system. Therefore the market has a certain number of generic work-pieces, platforms, but sometimes one's own development of the system from scratch turns out to be cheaper and more efficient than the reconstruction of such work-pieces, and many banks prefer their own development of the front office through industrial solutions".

Besides, such peculiarities of the front system as the stability of operation, speed of operations, involvement of the client into the service process, opportunity to form cross-product offers, etc., can become the right competitive advantage of one bank against the other. It is not accidental that many banks think that front systems are their key technology.

PROBLEM OF MODERNIZATION

Experts are unanimous in their opinion that in the first line an accurate problem setting of the business unit, clear understanding of the aim for modernization, of the effect that is planned are required for modernization of the front office from the point of view of IT.

"Initially the technologists shall record the flow chart to process the applications with a detailed description of the decision-making algorithm, says Mikhail Gevorkov. Any attempts to modernize will surely fail without such a document being officially approved".

From the point of view of IT the reasons for modernization can consist in the problems of the current system as connected with the productivity, resource capacity, fault tolerance and, for example, the chance to make changes, guesses Andrei Ezrokhi. "In addition, we need to have a full involvement and motivation of the business customer at all the levels for the clear and efficient interaction both at the development stage and at implementation or migration", emphasizes the expert.

Apparently particular problems may arise when we are updating or expanding the functionalities of the front office; such problems are almost similar to those which arise when updating any software.

"If the business process is somehow fixed in the bank, even through a rather non-optimal way, the full replacement of grand modernization as usual leads towards a revision of the bank's business processes, resulting in a serious load upon all the units engaged in the process, tells us Mikhail Gevorkov. So it is the top priority task of the technologists to have the most comprehensive arrangement of the process".

According to Andrei Ezrokhi's opinion, the major problem lies just in the migration from the habitual existing system to a new one. The trivial human factor, which in this case is related to the necessity of training for personnel and adaptation of the system across the entity, affects this process. "Besides, one needs to foresee the potential emergency scenarios as connected with no availability of the system due to technical or other factors in order to support the continuity of business processes," adds the Vice President, Information Technologies Department Director of "Renaissance Credit" Bank.