4 April 2007

With operations in five countries and an aggressive expansion schedule, Bahrain's Ahli United Bank (AUB) was looking for a solution that could offer a short message service (SMS)-based banking service to its customers in Bahrain and later extend it for customers in other countries.

BankSmart is the innovative global system for mobile communications(GSM) banking solution from Acette, built on message master xsp - Derdack's premium messaging platform. Acette is a Derdack Certified Partner and a leading IT infrastructure and technology system integrator in United Arab Emirates.

BankSmart and message master xsp provide a multilingual SMS banking solution for pull and push messages. By integrating with message master xsp, Acette could concentrate on the functional aspects of the system, piggybacking the inherent strength of messaging with the flexibility and scalability of the message master xsp SMS middleware engine.

Customer registrations in BankSmart are completed using a web-based application. At AUB, the system is set up for use in English and Arabic. Customers can request banking services in either language during the registration process. The system validates the request and fulfills it by interacting with the bank's back-end systems. BankSmart is a highly configurable extensible markup language (XML)-based system. A user friendly front-end is provided for configuring the system, which empowers the user. This architecture allows the bank to deliver bank-specific and customised pull services within a very short lead time.

In AUB, the pull services are enquiries like account lists, account balance, credit card balance, currency exchange rate and services like the last five transactions on the account or card. Additionally, pull services are available for account transfers, utility bill payments, mobile phone top-ups or credit card payments.

Registered customers can subscribe to and configure alerts. BankSmart validates the alerts generated by the banking systems and sends them to customers by SMS or email and in the preferred language of the customer.

BankSmart provides tools for managing the system and monitoring activity and message queues. These tools make the day-to-day administration of BankSmart very easy. Bank Smart also considerably reduces the delivery time for customer requests.

A bank running BankSmart can define its custom transactions and associated processing workflow, without having to customise or enter into program development. All message text in multiple languages can be defined as a named template in XML. This allows changes in customer messages to be carried out by end-users through a simple, user-friendly XML formatter.

The Campaign Module, which is an optional add-on being used at AUB, can track pull campaigns and provide graphic and other reports where a bank's marketing department is using it to collect customer feedback on products and services or to run promotions.

The optional secure eservices module being used at AUB allows the bank to define customer-initiated pull transactions where additional security is required, such as in a third party payment or the payment of an unregistered utility bill. Transactions are carried out in two stages, with the customer having to respond with a challenge token to confirm the processing. This is to prevent any security breach by 'spoofing' a GSM number.

Push messages and templates and pull transaction mnemonics can be defined in multiple languages. These can be done as end-user activities, to extend the system to accommodate new business requirements.