Alerts platform providing clients with immediate access to the status of their financial operations by means of a full alerts service delivered via mobile phone, e-mail or fax.

Caja Madrid is Spain’s fourth largest financial managing an annual volume of business of € 227,848 million in 2006 and a leader in the credit and customer deposit markets.

The Caja Madrid Group provides a full range of retail, corporate and private banking products and services, serving 6.7 million customers in all segments from families and SMEs, through to major corporations and public and private institutions.

Caja Madrid has over 12,000 employees and an extensive distribution network of 1,940 branch offices in Spain, as well as an advanced system of additional channels, supplemented by the contribution of external networks such as the Sistema Mapfre commercial network, consisting not only of agents and brokers but also 330 Caja Madrid outlets at Mapfre branches. The institution also has three overseas branches in Miami, Lisbon and Dublin.

The Caja Madrid Group is a leading player in terms of social action, due to its long-running commitment and the volume of funds applied in this area. Active in socio-cultural work for over three centuries, the Group’s social, care, educational, cultural and environmental programs are today managed by the Caja Madrid Social Projects Fund and Foundation. Total expenditure on the projects run by the Social Fund and the Foundation amounted to € 161.2 million in 2005.

Initial context

Customer service is an ever more important factor today. Unquestionably, firms that are able to identify customers needs and wants, and provide solutions, are those that will succeed. If there is an almost universal need, it is to simplify our lives by reducing the backlog of things we have to do. This means managing our daily lives to find room for the occasional moment of relaxation. Caja Madrid has hit the mark by identifying and resolving the needs of its customers, whether they are individuals, SMEs or large companies.

Individually, most people find themselves overwhelmed by must-do obligations, not to mention a whole host of minor matters that keep us on our toes and complicate our diaries. Each of these may be a simple thing in itself, but when they all come together the results can be very stressful. How often, for example, do we find ourselves faced with some difficult problem but at the same time wondering nervously about something as “unimportant” as whether the monthly payroll check has arrived, or bills have been paid, or whether we may have overrun the limit on a credit card? The usual course of action is to call the bank in the hope of speaking to somebody who can provide this information. But what if nobody answers the telephone? Or if the person we need to speak to is in a meeting? We might even find ourselves considering whether to go to the bank in person.

Naturally, things are the same for firms. The director of the import department, for example, may want to know whether a transfer has arrived from abroad, or whether remittance documentation or a documentary import credit has arrived.

The challenge

Caja Madrid understood these problems and decided to offer its customers a full automated or on-demand alerts and messaging service via mobile phones, e-mail and fax. The idea was that the service should segment and send the information as soon as it is generated depending on the user’s own needs and objectives, using the most appropriate channel, format, source and language at each moment. In short, the solution would need to be flexible and open to parametization to allow:

• Use and management of all technically available channels to deliver information to the user.
• Elimination of technological barriers that could block access to services. Everything should be just “one click away”.
• Use of numerous different multimedia information sources, at the same time as ensuring easy personalization by each user depending on his or her needs.
• Easy inclusion of new alerts without the need for intervention by technical specialists or investment in development.

To achieve this, Caja Madrid sought the services of Kynetia.

The solution

After an in-depth study of the needs of all parties affected by the new application, Kynetia created the software architecture, which was then developed in coordination with Caja Madrid technical departments, allowing solutions to be implemented for the Savings Bank’s customers in record time.

The solution (which Caja Madrid called “Avisa”) is based on the Kynetia Alerts Platform (KAP). This platform contains a powerful rules engine and is highly parametizable, guaranteeing the possibility of extension and cover in a multitude of situations. In addition to sending Caja Madrid customers alerts concerning their accounts, the system also allows users to subscribe to events of interest (such as rises and falls in stock prices, news, etc.) and receive an immediate alert via a channel (SMS/MMS, e-mail, fax, voice, WAP Push, etc.) and format (text, image, video,…) of their choice. Based on the KAP technology, Avisa has the following features:

• Multi-portal: companies, individuals, stock market, leisure, etc.
• Multi-channel / multi-format: SMS/MMS, fax, e-mail, voice.
• Multi-source in real time: transactional (host) information in real time, information providers in real time (stock prices, news, etc.), real-time triggers for information held in data bases, etc.
• Multilingual: Spanish, Catalan, Galician, English, etc.

Caja Madrid brought Avisa into production in December 2005, launching its alerts service for all Personal Banking customers of the institution’s “Remote Banking” website.

• Accounts: Salary deposits, payment of bills, checks paid or returned, transfers and balances below a given threshold.
• Cards: Information about card transactions, monthly expenditure and a special alert when the card reaches its limit.
• Deposits: information about forthcoming maturities.
• Investment funds: Regular fund value reports.
• Securities: stock price information.

These alerts provide Caja Madrid clients with relevant information any time, any place. They also represent a step forward in banking security, notifying clients of card transactions and alerting them to possible fraud.

The target public’s response was very positive, and this encouraged the Savings Bank to extend the service. Given the ease of including new alerts in the platform thanks to the underlying KAP technology, the institution decided to create a wide range of new alerts aimed at SMEs and large companies. In November 2006 the Caja Madrid website launched a new alerts proposal for Corporate Banking clients. Firms can now contract the following alerts, among others:

• Welcome message
• Account balance below a given threshold
• Balance drawn down on credit accounts above a given threshold
• Debits for checks paid
• Debits for payment of bills (water, electricity, telephone, etc.)
• Domestic transfers received, including transfers from the Bank of Spain
• Checks returned
• Debits for card purchases
• Monthly card expenditure
• Credit card limit reached
• Credits for remittances received (discounted notes and credit advances, collection management)
• Trade bills returned
• Credits for remittances received (bills)
• Bills returned
• Balance above a given amount
• Foreign transfers received
• Debits for payment remittances (payroll and transfers)
• Correct application of payment remittances to suppliers
• Notification of payments to suppliers
• Receipt of documentation for import remittances and documentary credits
• Credits for export remittances and documentary credits
• Forthcoming maturity of import/export credit lines
• Debits for mass cross-border transfer remittances
• Cumulative daily total in card purchases and cash withdrawals
• Messages to third parties for transfers made via the Online Corporate Office
• Open text messages to third parties from the Online Corporate Office

The Business Mobile Messaging Service provides Caja Madrid clients with immediate access to the status of their financial operations by means of value added mobile phone and/or e-mail alerts related with their products and services.

The alerts can be parametized, and the client can choose which to receive in what time band and on what mobile devices. Up to three mobile phones and three e-mail addresses can be specified to receive alerts.

Technology

As mentioned above, the Caja Madrid AVISA platform is based on the Kynetia Alert Platform (KAP), a system providing high parametization capacity, guaranteeing the possibility of extension and cover for a multitude of situations. KAP’s parametization and its powerful rules engine allow:

• Definition of entity-based alerts (data obtained from sources external to KAP) and rules-based alerts. The rules are applied to data held in systems (i.e. data sources integrated in KAP), offering different combination and filtering options:
  • Conditions employing comparative and trend operators:
    • More (>), less (>), equal (=), different (?) and combinations
    • Occurrence in texts
    • Membership of data sets
    • Downward / upward trend
  • AND / OR logical operators to build rules with various conditions.
  • Priorities in comparisons
• Configuration of alerts
  • Definition of time bands, calendars and restrictions by alert or by user
  • Assignation of priorities and process groups
  • Specific parametized values for each delivery channel (e.g. Subject line in e-mail alerts and front page in fax alerts
• Definition of visual format by channel set up in the system (SMS, e-mail, fax, Messenger, etc.).

All of these operations can be performed using a web tool that allows the definition and control of alerts without the need to update the platform or implement new developments.

The architecture designed for Avisa is based on Java EE and XML technologies to establish a flexible alerts platform that is interchangeable/portable between platforms, versatile, robust and scalable.

• Interoperativity. The design of the system allows interoperativity with diverse data sources and systems, such as Oracle, MS SQLServer, Tibco, Websphere MQ, JMS, WebServices, etc.
• Process capacity: Business processes are performed using an EJB components model allowing distributed replication of KAP processes to scale the performance of the platform up to support millions of events per day and hundreds of messages per second. QUANTIFY. THIS SAYS NOTHING.
• Flexibility: The messages sent by the platform are composed by crossing data XML with a specific XSL template for each output channel and rule. This allows straightforward, real-time specification and/or modification of the composition of each message sent to the user when an alert is generated at a high level of detail from the AVISA administrator. In addition, each user can configure the service in line with needs (time bands for reception, language, maximum number of messages, etc.).
• Persistence and priority: The KAP processes use a system of tails in a data base for persistent storage and generation of alerts based on a system of priorities to define the critical alerts that should be sent first.
• Segmentation of the service:The KAP data model is segment by portal code. This provides a transparent, personalized service for the clients of each portal via a single alerts platform.
• Integration: Given the diversity of systems with which the alerts platform must integrate, a general input/output connectors system was designed to allow fast, straightforward development and integration of any input source or output channel. The connectors system and the rules workshop allow the AVISA administrator to associate a new source or channel to a rule immediately.
• Availability: The use of the platform in clusters and persistent messaging middleware ensure the availability of the service in line with Caja Madrid’s needs. A range of cache, redundancy and persistence mechanisms for data and tasks provide the platform with the robustness required in the banking environment.