The speed of modern International Trade presents banks with new challenges. High value goods can be shipped and delivered to another country in a matter of hours, leaving old banking technologies struggling to match the new demands. Bank customers are adopting new technologies and are demanding increased sophistication and reduced turnaround times to meet their business requirements. E-mail is replacing faxes as a method of correspondence, browsers are becoming the standard for a low-cost front end for data input and information retrieval. Modern Information Technology theory proposes one time input of data at source. Banks have to offer services that help their customers meet these new challenges or they risk losing their valuable customers.
The CS Customer Access System delivers trade finance functionality to bank's customers in real time over the universal Internet medium or through the bank's own intranet. Customers can capture and deliver information to the bank's systems across all business areas, linking the customer to the appropriate bank officers in real time. Customers enter instructions using a standard browser. Data is submitted to CS Eximbills, or any other back office trade finance system, after the appropriate level of authorization within the customer's organization.
The Customer can now submit an application for an LC while on an overseas buying trip, eliminating the need to wait for their return before submitting the application. This will lead to improved turnaround time of the inventory and better utilisation of credit lines by the customer.
Customers automatically receive updates, advices, Letters of Credit from the bank after back office processing is complete. Letters of Credit applications, payment instructions and queries are received by a bank the instant the customer sends them. Incoming Letters of Credit are sent to the exporting customer the moment a bank receives them, reducing turnaround times from days to minutes.
CS Customer Access is a flexible and user-friendly solution that provides:
- Integration with the customer's office products including Email facilities between the bank and its clients
- High level of security
- Automatic creation of trade finance supporting documents for customers
- Customer links to other trade finance partners such as freight forwarders and customer agents
- Real time enquiries
- Import Letters of Credit
- Issue, amendment and negotiation
- Discrepancy notification and response
- Settlement notification
- Debit and credit advises
- Fee reports
- Outstanding reports
- Shipping guarantee
- Release orders
- Export Advising
- Export advise
- Amendment
- Transfer
- Automatic generation of supporting documents
- Discrepancy notification
- Negotiation
- Incoming SWIFT data automatically mapped
- Debit and credit advices
- Collection Orders
- Documentary
- Direct
- Tracers
- Payment notification
- Fee reports
- Debit and credit advises
- Disposal instructions
- Payment Instructions
- Transfer of funds between accounts
- Instructions for payment
- Letters of Guarantee and Standby Letters of Credit
- Standby and guarantee creation, amendments
- Debit and credit advices
- Notification of claims
CS Customer Access comes with a toolkit that offers the ability to create and amend the client pages, the calculation and validation rules. New functionality can be added by the bank without programming.
CS Customer Access can easily link to new or existing back office systems. The integration factory toolkit makes the mapping of data between systems a quick and reliable process. New data items can be easily added to the
CS Customer Access database definition.
CS Customer Access Technology
The CS Customer Access System delivers Trade Finance functionality to Bank Customers over the universal Internet medium or through bank's Intranet. A customer-site user enters the Trade Finance instructions into a Web browser application, running either over the Internet or the bank's private "Extranet." Once the transaction has achieved the appropriate level of authorization within the customer organization, the data is submitted to CS Eximbills (or other back office system).
The core of CS Customer Access is a custom built application running on a Windows NT or Unix server together with a number of custom designed business objects which also run on the server. These business services have been written specifically to deal with business rules relating to the entering and authorisation of trade contracts, such as letters of credit. There are also a number of business objects subsidiary to this central task. These business services deal with business rules that provide such services as currency conversion. All these business services maintain an internal repository with which CS Customer Access keeps track of all users, customers, contracts, and the actions taken on these contracts.
This core system communicates with users through web browsers on the client-side. This browser front end enables users to perform a number of tasks remotely, such as maintaining customer lists, authorisation limits and so on. It also enables customers to create and authorise contracts.
CS Customer Access' core technology consists of:
- HTML, Java-generated pages
- Object-oriented design
- Distributed components
- Support for COM/DCOM, Corba, Sockets
- Client Support for Java and Active Server Pages (ASP)
- Mainframe, AS/400, Unix or Windows NT web servers
- Support for Microsoft Transaction Server, IBM MQ Series
- Support for Microsoft SQL, Oracle and other ODBC compliant RDBMSes
- Wide range of security and encryption options including:
- Secure Sockets Later (SSL)
- Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS)
- RSA (Rivest Shamir Adleman) Encryption Algorithm
- Support for Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Apache and iPlanet web servers.
- Clients can use any standard web browser
- Web server hardware support:
- IBM RS6000
- HP9000
- DEC
- Sun
- IBM AS/400
- Mainframe (MVS)
- Intel Pentium III
- Database server support:
- IBM RS6000
- HP9000
- DEC
- Sun
- IBM AS/400
- Mainframe (MVS)
- Intel Pentium III
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