The Readsoft effect on: HSBC Bank
Solution: Customer driven processes
Segment: Bank
Country: UK
Headquartered in London, HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world. Its international network comprises some 7,000 offices in 81 countries and territories in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa. HSBC’s involvement with ReadSoft began in the mid 90’s with the UK retail bank’s Service Delivery Programme project, the aim of which was to free up branch staff and improve customer service by moving back-office processes to central sites.
Tons of paperwork
Paperwork was certainly a major headache for branch staff, and the Service Delivery Programme revealed the true extent of the problems. At certain times of year there were very high volumes of application forms for specific product offerings—student accounts in the late summer and ISA accounts at the end of the tax year, for example.
Noel Palethorpe is the IT manager responsible for the ICR and imaging systems in use throughout HSBC’s UK banking operations. “HSBC provides banking services to the student market, so over August, September and October we would see in the region of 100,000 applications for student accounts. Similarly, the end of the tax year would see around 200,000 ISA applications coming into the bank. To try to key all those forms from paper would present a massive overhead, so we needed to find technology that could help us with that.”
Rich functionality
“We went through a formal evaluation process, assessing various products in terms of what they offered compared with their costs,” continues Noel Palethorpe. “ReadSoft was not the cheapest option, but what we found was a level of functionality over and above our requirements. The ReadSoft solution was—and still is—very functionally rich compared with the competition. We saw very quickly that we would actually get even more benefit from this system than we’d anticipated.”
The evaluation process highlighted a number of strengths of ReadSoft’s software for processing forms: the powerful recognition engine, the fast verify capability, flexible error routing, and a higher level validation than HSBC had considered possible. “To be honest, our original requirements didn’t really reach this level of understanding of the technology,” says Noel Palethorpe. “So when we became aware of what was available within ReadSoft’s product, that influenced our decision.”
Upgrade to more benefits
After several years of successful operation at HSBC Bank, the time came to upgrade the ICR system, and the team responsible for the original implementation came back to ReadSoft to upgrade to a later version of the software.
HSBC saw little reason to go back to square one. As Noel Palethorpe confirms: “We made our choice in 1997 and didn’t want to go through a full evaluation exercise again. We’ve built up a good working relationship with ReadSoft and we knew their products had moved on themselves in terms of functionality.”
And indeed, with the newer product's vastly improved recognition and verification capabilities, and even greater centralization, HSBC has been able to realize far higher returns on its system than anticipated.
“We piloted ReadSoft’s product in February and had rolled it out by May,” Noel Palethorpe explains. “We believed that the original ReadSoft product had a better recognition engine than its competitors, and since moving to the new version, we are achieving even better rates: at the moment some 70% of our forms are being 100% interpreted. We expected the interpretation to be better than before, but we never expected it to be that much better.”
Good working relations
While the original system installed in 1997 was LAN based and couldn’t really be distributed, modules of the new version are centralized at a data center. As Noel Palethorpe explains: “So we can scan anywhere we like now, and indeed verify anywhere we like. We have yet to really exploit the potential of that positioning.”