BankCollect^® is an integrated multi-channel revenue collections management platform developed for use by Banks and their corporate customers. BankCollect abstracts the Banking host for purposes of payment capture and provides customized collection capabilities tailored to peculiar corporate business processes, with flexible backend reporting, data export functionalities and optional straight integration to corporate legacy systems. During payment capture, relevant accounting entries are simultenously transferred to the Banking host. BankCollect conforms to bank accounting and reconciliation best practices and provides banks & their corporate customers with answers to questions like:

• Who made payments?
• What are the payments for?
• When were the payments made?
• How much was paid?
   

The Need for BankCollect®

Nigeria and indeed the African continent still largely operate cash-based economies with a heavy dependence on cash as a means of transacting between individuals, individuals & businesses, and even between businesses. The banking culture however is gradually being entrenched with the effect that individuals and businesses now operate bank accounts and do businesses there from. Banks are therefore transaction hubs where businesses in addition to safely domiciling funds can receive payments from customers for goods and services. These businesses / bank corporate customers rely on the banks to provide them with such collection services that would empower them with:

• The ability to keep their own customers happy and loyal by responding to purchase orders in satisfactory time intervals.
• The ability to streamline Order Cycle Management for increased internal efficiency
• Savings in costs by elimination of  middle men or agents where possible
• Fast and accurate reconciliation of accounts

In attempting to meet these corporate customer needs, proactive banks are going beyond providing traditional banking services (such as statements of account and internet banking services) to providing corporate customers with customized collections & order cycle management solutions. Such proactive banks are however saddled with limitations arising from:

Core Banking Applications-

• Traditional Banking applications do not support such functionality
• The cost of incorporating the functionality into existing legacy banking systems is comparatively exorbitant

Custom implementations

• The cost of implementing and supporting disparately built solutions for each collection scenario is very high
• Time to deliver such top down solutions makes it impractical to serve clients who have time constraints and alternatives

BankCollect^® was developed with the afore–mentioned in mind thus providing proactive and e-business oriented banks with the opportunity to speedily and cost effectively:

• Provide customized information about remittances to corporate customers in real time and in multiple formats
• Provide extra and more convenient electronic channels for the corporate customers to receive payments e.g via Internet, POS terminals, and Mobile phones
• Provide for accurate and real-time reconciliation by interfacing with corporate customers’ core business and accounting applications

The BankCollect solution provides banks with:

• Increase in market share due to attraction of the numerous large accounts that have collection needs
• Ability to lock-in existing key accounts that have collection needs
• Potentials for extra revenue in cases where the Bank can charge a premium for such services

State-of-the-arts Collections Platform

BankCollect^® is uniquely architected to allow for two kinds of corporate collections customizations:

• Simple Customization: here, trained and authorized non-technical bank personnel can configure fields to be captured for a corporate, and in a matter of minutes, set up collections interfaces for in-branch and web collections for the customer.
• Advanced Customization: where more intricate business requirements exist (such as peculiar business rules or integration to legacy systems) then collections modules are programmatically developed and simply installed onto the BankCollect framework (thanks to BankCollect’s robust architecture).

BankCollect^® interfaces with the bank’s Core Banking Application (CBA) through a secure state-of-the-arts middleware thereby ensuring that e-collection services are rendered through consistent data capture interfaces on BankCollect and corresponding accounting entries are securely posted into the CBA for complete straight-through-processing (STP). The data thus captured is formatted and presented to corporate customers for viewing online and for downloading into back-end systems.