American Express Foreign Exchange Services (Amex FES) has profited from the successful implementation of IMX Software, a solution for retail and limited corporate finance forex deals.
Amex FES is an authorised dealer in the retail forex market, and focuses on the purchase and sale of products such as traveller`s cheques, foreign notes, drafts and telegraphic transfers.
"The solution provides us with real-time position, flexible pricing based on client profiles and branch locations, and improves security and controls with a tighter reign on level of overrides allowed at branch level. It also enables a tiered authorisation structure and management information with a single snapshot of company-wide information," says Andrew McDonic, managing director at Amex FES.
IMX SA, a division of Business Edge Systems (BES) and the South African distributor of Australia-based IMX Software group, facilitated the upgrade of the company`s existing IMX Software solution to its new generation of client-server products.
The integration of the IMX Software was done using the company`s existing Citrix (Windows Terminal Server environment) architecture.
Solution
Susan Harvett, General Manager at IMX SA, says IMX Software products were installed for administration and management of retail foreign exchange purchases and sales.
The IMX BackOffice was installed at head office and manages and controls the business rules for its retail delivery channels. The solution is controlled from a central graphical user interface and serves as the settlement system with other internal and external systems. IMX BackOffice is also used by management for marketing and administration purposes.
The ISS product (International Services System) was installed for use at the point of sale (POS) for the capture of transactions. The solution allows for full stock management including tracking take-on, sales and purchases, inter-teller and inter-branch transfers, and balancing at either denomination or bulk level.
The solution allows the dealing room to amend rates and automatically synchronise modified rates through to the branches in real-time. The system administrator can amend system parameters, such as currency rules, commission rules and fees, for example. These business rules can be set up per product, per currency and per branch or per teller.
Tight security is enforced through transaction limits set up per currency within each product. These relate to transaction amounts that have to be authorised by the dealing room first, tellers` own transacting limits, commission or rate override thresholds.
The solution also offers levels of authorisation with restrictions on tellers` personal exchange limits, transactions where supervisor authorisation is required or once-off password control functionality. All activities within the system are logged, and provide exception reporting to senior management level.
"IMX BackOffice integrated seamlessly with Accpac for automated processing into General Ledger. We wrote the user interface to extract info into XML format for reporting of all cross-border transactions to the SA Reserve Bank," says Harvett.
"System integration was a challenging task and was executed jointly by IMX SA and Amex FES`s IT department. The standard client-server communication layer was modified to match the client`s Citrix environment. In addition, the various system components were deployed in such a way that they would provide optimum efficiency and performance," she says.
All product extensions and customisations were done by the IMX SA team based in Johannesburg, the design was vetted by IMX Australia, and integration and testing were done on site.
Benefits
All transactions are forwarded from branches to the back-office using MSMQ, resulting in the dealing room having access to real-time position in terms of currency exposure and branch stock-holding.
Clifton Cockcroft, Financial Director at Amex FES, comments: "Real-time positioning allows Amex FES to competitively manage its margins as well as accurately assess its exposure. Since the system has gone live we have not had a loss in the dealing room."
The solution has also increased productivity of the business significantly. "There is a quicker turn around and we can serve more customers. With the volatility of the rand, the system gives them the capability to adjust exchange rates and have these rates available to branches within seconds," says Cockcoft.
Harvett concludes that the business has benefited from the capability offered by the IMX solution to configure the rules database easily to cater for new products. This has allowed Amex FES to respond rapidly to market demands without the need to first develop new system components.
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