Error rates were rising rapidly, quality of service was declining and in times of heavy call traffic, customer hold times grew. The limitations allowed the center to open just 50 accounts per day.

All that was before the introduction of the back office support system (BOSS), a patent-pending application that ties together all data and customer interaction information, from a new high-powered Web site to the call center. Although Providian had been using a Web site to open new accounts, it had much more ambitious plans under BOSS. "We needed to build an infrastructure to deal with large volumes and fluctuations in volumes in an efficient way," says Richard Laiderman, executive vice president and treasurer at Providian. The goal was to build a system that could track and make accessible up-to-date customer transactions and comments to service staff on demand.

One of the biggest challenges when the project began in 2001 was the fact that there was no suitable platform on the market. "There was nothing that could integrate all the different channels," says Joel Bosch, senior vice president, retail deposits at Providian. "We needed a platform to integrate all the information for opening an account, funding and servicing it." The solution came from a combination of in-house software designs combined with existing technologies from back-end service provider Metavante and a fraud detection application from RiskWise. The resulting BOSS platform combines the proprietary application with an Oracle database. BOSS was rolled out in phases starting in 2001 and the project was completed in 2004. In the first year under BOSS, the newly designed Web site fully automated account setups, funding through ACH and customer identity checks with no human involvement needed.

The BOSS system was supported by a restructuring of the call center operations, including a cross-training effort that establishes a backup when calling volumes are heavy. Employees referred to the streamlined process improvements as "once and done" for the drive to eliminate the steps needed to complete a task. Once those process improvements were put in place, linkages were made between BOSS's Web-based database and the systems used by call center employees, allowing staff to access up-to-date customer information. The combination of BOSS and operational restructurings has enabled the treasury unit to process more than 200 new account applications per day, with a staff of just 65. Cost savings are estimated at $6.2 million annually.

Perhaps the greatest strategic advantage comes in the form of flexibility not possible under the old system. Treasury can use BOSS to turn special pricing promotions on and off quickly. The system can be programmed to offer automatically additional basis points to qualifying accounts based on criteria such as the size, term and method of funding a deposit. Graphics and text about the promotion can also be designed to quickly appear on the site. Under the old system, such a process took at least 10 to 12 weeks. When new rates are entered into BOSS, the system automatically updates the Web site, updates tables for use by call center and operations staff and sends them out to rate subscribers via e-mail. The system contains audit and anti-fraud features, including several dual-entry systems that ensure that information is entered correctly. It also keeps track of all user activity and all staff viewings of an account.

In the first year of the BOSS automation improvements, the number of new accounts handled swelled by 450% as staffing fell by 27%.

SILVER AWARD WINNER

General Electric Co.

General Electric Co. set out to improve a difficult situation that can affect any large multinational: Fee information from non-U.S. banks tends to be decentralized, paper-based and all but unreliable to corporate customers. For a company like G.E. that operates in dozens of countries and must deal with transactions in as many currencies, the time had come to work toward a solution, especially with Sarbanes-Oxley Act control reforms on the horizon. "We had no way to verify on a consolidated basis that what we were being billed was accurate," says William Faulkner, G.E.'s treasury operation services manager. After a number of tries, the right solution was found in the International Bank Compensation program, led by G.E. officials. The ambitious program brought banks and corporations to the negotiating table to come up with an electronic standard that would benefit both sides. Participating in the program are 10 banks, including Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Citigroup and ABN Amro, and 32 international companies, with Microsoft, Caterpillar and International Paper among them.

What became clear early on was that the existing U.S. standard, known as 822-file format, was not a viable option because it was not flexible enough to handle multiple currencies, reports in numerous languages and data from multiple countries. What was chosen in the end was an XML-formatted electronic billing statement that each bank agreed to deliver to customers on a monthly basis for the wide variety of languages, currencies and transaction types involved. The statements show the price of each service and volume information, as well as totals by bank, bank account, currency and country.

Faulkner says G.E.'s savings from a similar conversion done several years ago that involved U.S. bank fees were as high as $2.5 million per year. He expects similar savings from the new system for non-U.S. fees just from the ability to verify that what G.E. is being charged is correct. There are other benefits as well. "The analytics we get will tell us how many bank accounts in one country are not at our preferred bank in that country, according to our negotiated rates," says Faulkner. That will allow G.E. to concentrate accounts with the banks that offer the most competitive fees, another huge cost savings.

SILVER AWARD WINNER

Toyota Financial Services

Executives at Toyota Financial Services (TFS) had a sinking feeling there was a better way to sell the company's commercial paper (CP) than through the network of broker/dealers it had been using for years. When the company set out to establish an in-house or direct CP placement desk, it was with several goals in mind: increase the base of institutional investors; increase CP liquidity; and raise transparency in its dealings with investors. The company estimated it was losing $500,000 each month by sticking with the broker/dealers (and their commissions), and with CP volumes accounting for nearly 25% of its total debt, any delay was seen as costly.

Fortunately for TFS, it had a seasoned hand in Jeff Carter, the company's national treasury manager, to oversee the project. Carter had spearheaded a similar shift to direct CP sales for another employer years earlier, and he was convinced the conversion would deliver. "We're a sales organization, so what our customers are thinking and need is very important to us," says Carter. "We weren't getting it from these [broker/dealer] intermediaries." What was new to Carter was the emergence in recent years of Web-based or ASP technology, which allowed TFS to create its direct CP sales program on a very slim budget. "We couldn't have done it without it." As an ASP, the CP platform requires no oversight or involvement from in-house IT staff, but instead is managed by an outside vendor, Financial Sciences Corp., which provides the technology and manages day-to-day operation of the solution.

Despite the outsourced ASP application, it took Carter and his team 10 months to establish all operational phases of the project. Project coordination help came from the cash management department and accounting employees, who among other things helped with interfacing the new application with the existing PeopleSoft accounting platform. A team of five sales persons were hired and trained and IT employees helped to establish dedicated lines for primary and backup trading connections.

Once the system was up and running, it took just one year for TFS to rank among the top three direct corporate issuers of CP in the U.S. The number of active investors has risen from between 40 and 60 under the broker/dealer sales to 263 that either have traded within the last 90 days or currently hold paper.

BRONZE AWARD WINNER

Honeywell International Inc.

Like many large multinationals, Honeywell International Inc. expects to repatriate billions in overseas profits this year to qualify for the special one-time tax break under the American Jobs Creation Act. With cash valued at more than $3 billion and held in more than 60 countries in 46 currencies, it was clear that something more powerful than the traditional e-mail and spreadsheet approach was needed to manage cash positions and create daily cash visibility. So it was up to treasury to come up with a solution that could enhance cash visibility and control across the entire organization. "Time was of the essence," says Craig Mondschein, director of global banking and cash management at Honeywell. "We were able to have visibility much faster with two phases and two tools."

The first phase, known as the Treasury Web Tool, was an in-house application that was up and running in just six weeks but still required manual inputting of data in local currencies for the capture of static bank account and investment data. Among the problems that had to be addressed were user access security and restrictions for more than 200 employees around the world. No off-the-shelf solution was good enough, so the treasury team established a self-service user creation interface to allow users to create their own IDs and service their password resets. The team also used SWIFT code, country code and global business unit code databases to validate the bank account data collected into the system. The Web Tool allowed treasury to begin rationalizing and optimizing bank account structures by eliminating or consolidating accounts around the world. With this first step, the team was able to get more accurate readings on free cash flows that would form the basis of the more automated solution to come. "When we started our repatriation effort we needed to determine where our cash was located," says Mondschein. "As it moved through inter-company lending, being able to track where money is located is essential to our efforts."

The second phase of the project, which took more than a year to get online, came in the form of a Global Treasury Workstation by SunGard. The workstation automates much of the data that was earlier put into the Web Tool by hand through the use of electronic bank feeds for transactions and balances. As a result, the company reached visibility to 97% of the cash and cash equivalents balance, up from 30% before the start of phase one of the project. The Web Tool is still used for accounts in developing countries where banks don't provide automated services.