By Mia Rosienna Mallari & Rizal Raoul Reyes
GEORGIA, United States-based firm NCR Corp. launched in the Philippines a suite of solutions its executives claim would help local banks improve speed of service, reduce downtime and enhance customer experience (CX).
“Banks are under enormous pressure to innovate as customers demand amazing experiences when and where they want, and on a platform of their choice to interact with their bank,” National Cash Register (NCR) Corp. Vice President Yiannos Papadopoulos said in a news briefing on October 4. “This has led us to focus on the next generation of online and mobile services to complement traditional person-to-person interactions, creating an ‘always available’ banking environment to ensure that banking customers have the flexibility and control in their hands to manage transactions.”
Among the solutions launched by the NCR Corp. is one that runs on an Android platform designed to blend into existing banking and information technology (IT) infrastructure.
According to Matthew Heap, the firm’s director of marketing and solution management in Asia Pacific, the solution “is able to cut down operating costs by 40 percent.”
For a cash-driven society, like the Philippines, automated teller machines (ATMs) remain key points for obtaining cash. Data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) show that, as of end-December 2013, the country has a total of 14,530 ATMs nationwide, as banks added 2,079 ATMs that year.
“ATMs play a huge part in financial inclusion but they’re traditionally quite expensive and difficult to deploy in remote parts of the Philippines,” Heap said. “NCR sees that the legacy ATM infrastructure is ripe for disruption.”
Heap claims the software is generally more secure, despite the Android operating system being an open-sourced platform. He explained the solution by the American computer hardware, software and electronics company generates codes that deletes everything in the system that is not included in the ATM operation.
“We’ve created codes that were both publicly and privately signed by developers so that only the authorized codes, publicly and privately signed by NCR, will run in the machine, whereas the existing technology now is more open,” Country Manager Carlo Cruz said. “We have the option to make it safer. We see this as more secure than the rest.”
The system was launched in Western countries last year. Heap added that NCR is still running on both conventional and upgraded platforms, allowing clients to choose between staying on the Windows-based platforms running on the traditional server or moving up to the cloud-based, enterprise-driven architecture.
“We’re very focused on security. We look at all the holistic security. We look at potential points of compromise; not just malware but also physical attacks, card-scheming attacks,” Heap said. “We’ve designed many solutions which run holistically to provide the highest level of security.”
In line with Android operating systems, mobile banking is expected to play an important part in the country’s digital banking industry toward financial inclusion.
But penetration remains low, according to documents provided by NCR Corp.
As of 2014, digital-banking penetration in Asia was rapidly rising, it said. However, the Philippines, stood at a 10-percent level, a far stretch compared to Malaysia’s 40 percent.
Heap elaborated that over time, the digital-banking trend in most countries involve personal computer-based banking flourishing before gearing toward smartphones with a more massive infiltration.
“However, in a country like the Philippines, where mobile banking is still just over 10 percent, it’s going to be some time before a very large piece of the total transaction is improved,” Heap said. “That’s why we think ATMs which dispense cash—cash is the key part and customers still like cash, to be able to transact in cash. That’s the difference with ATMs compared to transactions with a mobile device.”
Another solution that NCR Corp. launched is its SelfServ ATMs that, Cruz said, will allow financial institutions in the Philippines to “not only be able to offer customers fast, reliable access to their bank accounts but also offer banking services beyond traditional banking hours.”
Heap said the NCR solutions does not require banks to dispose of their legacy infrastructure because the NCR platform integrates with existing bank infrastructure.
He added banks can now develop smaller branches and allow them to expand more in other parts of the country. Heap said rural banks are potential customers of the products.