Business Activity Monitoring: A New Way to Control the Payments Process?
The payments business is critical for banks as it constitutes a large part of their revenues. Increasing volumes, less staff, more regulations, more competition, and more complex technology – banks must deal with these challenges and reduce their costs at the same time. Banks are beginning to realize that monitoring their payment process manually is too expensive, and represents a major hurdle for meeting their cost saving objectives. Too many checks must be conducted manually with multiple sources of information: not the best way to guarantee that quality is delivered to customers. When a problem occurs, staff quickly become overloaded and unable to keep up and the reputational risk of that situation can be devastating.
Business activity monitoring is being adopted by IT managers and business executives to increase business efficiency. Business activity monitoring ensures that business processes unfold as expected, so that business commitments and customer expectations can always be met. Business performance activity measurements are immediately available so decisions can be made faster, if not automated, to optimize revenue opportunities. In the financial area, Business activity monitoring helps to reduce payment processing costs by automating the manual monitoring, thereby improving operational efficiency. Business activity monitoring is addressing all types of payment, including high value, small value, SWIFT, Internet, cross-border, etc. Business activity monitoring dashboards monitor payment activity performance against operational business objectives, and offer real-time perspectives for the differing requirements of business, operations and IT.
Business activity monitoring solutions for payments process are non-intrusive, outboard solutions that integrate seamlessly into the existing enterprise environment. The solution collects, filters, correlates and analyzes, in real time, information from all information silos across the payment process, and brings it together into a single application to produce a set of comprehensive dashboards suited for each group of users on a need to basis. The navigation between dashboard groups is a simple matter of clicking on the icons in the title bar of each set of dashboards.
Using this type of solution, banks can:
Payments operations managers are responsible for managing the volume of activity and the speed at which payments are processed. Business activity monitoring dashboards show them whether or not their process is running without interruption and, if there are interruptions or potential ones, it will show exactly where the problems are. This type of application allows managers to focus on areas where human interaction may be required such as repairs or authorisations, areas that frequently contributes to process delays. The payments processing application dashboards provide multiple avenues of investigation if there is a need to dig into a situation.
While the previous dashboards focused on the proper execution of the payment process itself, this type of dashboard focuses on how the payment process is performing. Typically the vice president of payment operations or major account management executives use these dashboards because their objectives are avoiding penalties, caused by missed deadlines and cut-off times, and maintaining the satisfaction of key customers.
These dashboards give business management and executives real-time insight into the performance of their business. They are typically used to monitor:
They can also show in real time if the major customers are being well served.
The previous two sets of dashboards helped the business organization stay in control at all times. The final set of dashboards are geared toward the IT organization, helping them better understand how the information system might impact the payment process. They show the messages that are passed between application components and the physical components that support those messages. For example, the application support group wants to be sure that the messages are flowing without interruption between applications. If there is a problem, the support manager can drill down and get to the root cause and fix it quickly.