Company News • 30.09.2011
Difficulty of deployment once prohibitive to financial institutions in multivendor ATM network environments
Fast and hassle-free with NCR and its APTRA software suite
Less than 45 days after taking the order, NCR Corporation (NYSE: NCR) deployed its APTRA software featuring Advanced Deposit on multi-vendor ATMs in Alaska USA Federal Credit Union’s ATM network, achieving production deployment as much as eight times faster than what used to be normal for the industry in a multivendor ATM environment.
Alaska USA, a $4.6 billion credit union with branches in Alaska, California and Washington, operates more than 150 ATMs, including nearly 70 non-NCR machines. NCR credits its speed of this deployment for Alaska CU to the continually increasing experience of its professional services team as well as improvements to its APTRA software. NCR believes that financial institutions should now expect even better levels of implementation speed, functionality and quality as experienced by Alaska USA.
Based on XFS standards that make it vendor independent, APTRA software can help mid-sized and community banks and credit unions take advantage of the cost efficiencies of multi-vendor applications – especially as financial institutions deploy more sophisticated functions at the ATM, such as ADA voice guidance, advanced deposit, personalization, targeted marketing and integration with other channels.
According to NCR data, only one percent of U.S. financial institutions with less than $50 billion in assets have installed multivendor software applications, despite 75 percent of the 20 largest banks doing so. Traditionally, financial institutions using other providers’ multivendor applications have experienced deployments of 12-18 months to bring the solution to market.
“Simply amazing. NCR has changed my perception of multivendor software deployments by 180 degrees,” said John Kerley, vice president of Operations, Alaska USA. “For years, like many financial institutions, we tried to avoid multivendor software deployments because they had an aura of being problematic and taking a long time to complete. But NCR’s professional services team came in with experience in multivendor environments, and got the job done in just 38 days. And from the first day in production, the APTRA software has been problem-free, exhibiting remarkable levels of performance and robustness. I was impressed by NCR Services and the NCR APTRA software suite.”
Alaska USA’s ATMs are driven by the Alaska Option Network. Alaska Option teamed with NCR and Alaska USA to ensure the ATM functionality worked as designed and that the on-line messages to card issuer host systems were not affected.
“It was an extremely tight schedule and we delivered what our partners needed. It was amazing how the teams from the different organizations worked together from design to implementation. Alaska Option is honored to have been involved in the success of a project of this magnitude,” said Linda Moneymaker of Alaska Option.
NCR APTRA is a suite of ATM software that performs a variety of functions, including delivering secure transactions, managing the ATM network and building customer relationships. NCR APTRA uses a Windows-based XFS interface, facilitating an open software environment and making it vendor independent.
“We engineered our NCR APTRA suite to speed implementation from the beginning. And, as the world leader in multivendor software, we’ve learned from our experience to improve the software to make deployments fast and hassle-free,” said Michael O’Laughlin, senior vice president, NCR Financial Services. “Thanks to our robust product suite and our skilled professional services team, we are able to do multivendor software deployments faster and better than anyone else. In fact, we have now achieved a standard of excellence for the delivery of multi-vendor projects that has been the goal of the industry for years.”
Working in conjunction with Alaska USA FCU and Alaska Option, NCR installed the following APTRA software products:
• APTRA Edge – Multivendor software for running and deploying applications across an self-service network
• APTRA Exchange – Multivendor solutions designed specifically to aid the management of software functions on the self-service channel, such as remote software patches or electronic journal and log file retrieval.
• APTRA Promote – For delivering timely and relevant marketing messages to ATM customers.
• APTRA eMarketing – For communicating to customers and prospects across self-service channels in a synchronized fashion using targeted email messaging, personalized online banking banner advertisements, one-to-one messaging at the ATM and follow-up contact at the call center.
• Solidcore Suite for APTRA – Multivendor ATM software security solution with real-time centralized management that proactively allows only authorised code to run, rather than reacting to known attacks as they arise.
Together, this suite of solutions has given Alaska USA an unprecedented level of flexibility to manage their self-service environment and quickly deploy fresh and dynamic content.
Research published by Retail Banking Research (RBR) shows that NCR is the world’s largest supplier of multivendor ATM middleware and applications. Most notably, substantially more financial institutions in North America rely on NCR’s APTRATM software suite than the next three providers combined, and RBR also finds that NCR holds market share leads in Western Europe and Latin America. NCR has been the worldwide leader in ATM hardware for 24 consecutive years.
