Telephone expenditure within the banking environment

Unison`s Core Billing Solution enables the banking environment to control call costs in order to drive down telephony expenditure.

The banking industry is one of the highest paying Telkom customers in SA, with some of the larger institutions having call cost bills in excess of R10 million per month. However, according to Unison`s Managing Director, Craig Young, with adequate systems in place controlling the telephony infrastructure, most of the expense could be managed and in fact reduced.

Young states that a good deal of the management problem relates to a number of issues and also results in:

* Inaccurate reporting, manual processing and information that is outdated.

* The incorrect allocation of call bills.

* Billing departments not being able to recover costs, due to a lack of or incorrect allocation.

* Budgets not being managed or met.

* New financial period budgets based on estimates.

* The inability to draw centralised statistics for the entire organisation.

* A Telkom bill that cannot be reconciled.

He goes on to say that there is often a preventable duplication of hardware and software within branches and regional offices. Administration of disparate systems also creates a duplication of staff and redundant procedures.

Says Young: "The consequence of these inadequate processes is in Telkom call costs growing substantially year on year and for many institutions it becomes an exercise of resignedly increasing the following year`s budget as a result."

Unison`s Galactrix Enterprise Solution addresses all of these issues. The success of this product is its reporting capabilities on a company`s telephony expenditure.

* Galactrix manages and tracks all aspects of a company`s telephony infrastructure.

* It includes a highly sophisticated call costing solution.

* An advanced telephony infrastructure billing system drastically reduces the inaccurate allocation of accounts.

* It has the ability to generate precise reports allowing for accurate forecasting of budgets.

Where billing departments were previously not able to recover costs, Unison has created the opportunity for 99.9% of telephony costs to be accounted for. This allows a company to drive down as well as to recover costs.

The banking industry`s demographics are typically that of an enterprise with nationally distributed branches. Unison offers a complete centralised billing solution, enabling management of all regionally dispersed entities.

Young maintains that with 20 years of experience in the telephony industry and cost reduction applications, Unison`s Research and Development team have finely tuned the products to the specific requirements of the banking industry.

Young states: "Unison has already installed systems with positive results in a number of banking institutions and has consistently proven how effective their Telephone Management System is in reducing communication costs and telephony spend."

The financial sector is one of the highest employers in SA with the banking environment contributing strongly to the overall numbers. Employing well over 150 000 people across more than 20 institutions, a typical enterprise banking group in the industry may have anything over 20 000 individuals.

With such high staffing numbers the industry unsurprisingly has high communication infrastructure needs. The nature of these organisations as well as the services they render dictate that there be a high need for both internal communication, as well as external client communication. Banking institutions have customer bases that run into the hundreds of thousands and despite the amount of potential interactions at any given time, clients need to be assured of the best possible service at all times. The need for extensive communication necessitates the adoption of complex networking and telecommunication infrastructures.

Banking institutions have very often been seen as the early adopters of highly sophisticated and often very costly voice networks with budgets for voice and data infrastructures running into hundreds of millions per annum.