First Tuesday`s Vodacom Mobile Connect evening was held at the Sandton Convention Centre, and saw the inauguration of the WASP awards, which will be an annual event. Nearly 80 entries were nominated in 6 categories, judged by a panel of experts in the field including luminaries like Tomi Ahonen, the world-renowned expert in 3G and related technologies, who was also the keynote speaker.
Leaf Wireless scooped top honours in the "Best Mobile Application or Service: Corporate Market" category for InContact, the innovative banking solution developed for First National Bank (FNB). The InContact transaction and banking information notification system was designed to bring the most benefit to the customer, in the form of useful, timely information and peace of mind, and to the Bank, in the form of increased customer loyalty and improved risk management, form a simple, readily-accepted and understood SMS-based service.
Other banks had already launched limited small scale forms of SMS notification, but Leaf and FNB designed to set their service apart. Key elements were customer-defined controls over what notifications they wanted and when. Customers can specify which accounts they want to monitor (both card and banking), minimum transaction amounts, and the times of day when they want to receive messages. This allows the customer to cut out the clutter and not be woken in the small hours by notifications.
Quinton Leigh, Managing Director of Leaf, said "It took several cycles of design, discussion and review before we and FNB were happy with the specification, and then there were many technical hurdles along the way. We had to integrate our technology with the Bank`s mainframe-based Hogan system, and we had to ensure we maintained the strictest controls over confidentiality and overall security. And then, of course, we had to be prepared to handle very large volumes of traffic."
InContact was launched in August 2002, and soon outstripped the most optimistic projections. By September 2004 over 1 million customers were receiving over 10 million SMS messages a month. It took less than a year to get over 10% of the Bank`s customers using InContact, and the cost of running the service was being more than covered by the benefits to the Bank.
Tomi Ahonen , interviewed after the awards, commented that "Leaf`s InContact solution ranks with the world`s best. It`s technically excellent, handling high volumes of messages with high reliability, and well integrated with both the Bank`s internal systems and the network operators; but as impressive is the fact that it so clearly meshes with the Bank`s and the Bank`s customers` needs, as is evident from the rapid and still accelerating uptake."
Leigh believes a vital aspect of the system design is that the end-user aspect of InContact is simple, requiring no training or effort on the customer`s part. "We are geared up for next generation solutions, but the mass market right now is not in 3G territory. FNB wanted something that would work for the average customer, not just the technically-literate owners of top-end cell phones. I believe we delivered that. Under the covers things get more complicated, especially around meeting banking security and confidentiality requirements, but the customers don`t want tor need to know that."
A critical component in the InContact solution was Leaf`s Genius Gateway, a carrier-class, scalable SMS gateway now in its fourth generation. Genius accepts SMS messages in text, ring tone, logo, binary and six other formats, and connects to all the major SMSCs. It handles load-balancing, delivery confirmation, round-trip time monitoring (using Acid Test another product from Leaf), re-sends and prioritisation to ensure consistent and measurable Quality Of Service. For FNB, it has already carried peak loads of one million messages a day.
A White Paper on Leaf`s InContact solution may be requested from Richard Fearon.
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