"We pride ourselves on innovation. The work we've done with Datamail has definitely helped make us a market leader in the credit card sector."
Bernie O'Loughlin, Bank of New Zealand

Bank of New Zealand partners with Datamail to transform its credit card statementing

Datamail's innovative data formatting and archive and retrieval capabilities enable Bank of New Zealand to further enhance customer service levels while reducing overall costs.

The Challenge
Prior to engaging Datamail on this project, Bank of New Zealand had in excess of 450,000 credit card customers operating over half a million different credit card accounts. Each customer was billed monthly. A copy of each credit card statement was archived as part of the bank's requirements with the Inland Revenue Department.

• Bank of New Zealand identified that service levels to credit card customers would be enhanced if Customer Services personnel had exact image files of statements in front of them as they spoke to customers.
• The archiving system at the time allowed Customer Services personnel to view the data, but not the actual statement, so there was no true document viewing functionality.
• The stand-alone legacy system was highly proprietary and therefore relatively inflexible: it was difficult to integrate with new applications or modify for new credit card products.
• Legacy hardware presented other challenges, including limited storage space.
• Managing the system was highly labour intensive.
• The statements themselves - all 31 million pages of them - were held in two separate formats.

The Solution
These challenges prompted Bank of New Zealand to ask Datamail to rethink its credit card statementing. The Bank wanted to re-engineer how credit card statements were processed, stored and retrieved.

Datamail provided the bank with an innovative production, dispatch, imaging and archiving system that created both a paper copy of the statement and 'full and faithful' image archive of the document for instantaneous retrieval.

This billing and statements solution is hosted and managed entirely by Datamail and encompassed three key capabilities: print and mail, data formatting, and archive and retrieval.

Implementation of the solution also involved the conversion of seven years of credit card statements held in two separate formats - to an electronic format compatible with the new archive and retrieval capability. This made the old statements available for online viewing at any time, and in every case an exact duplicate of the original statement has been maintained.

The Benefits
Customer service levels have been enhanced following implementation. The archive and retrieval capability allows Customer Service personnel to access a 'full and faithful' image of any one of over 60 million statements in a matter of seconds, instead of a matter days, and answer customer queries faster and more efficiently.

The capability also allows Bank of New Zealand to recall and/or reprint quickly and easily if a customer loses their statement or requires another copy for any reason. This includes statements dating back over the past seven years.

Credit card processing overall has improved in terms of speed and flexibility. The new data formatting capability enables Bank of New Zealand to personalise credit card statements to an unprecedented degree. The bank can now format statements for all of its credit card products, and can easily accommodate changes to statement layouts and new statement formats as new credit card products come on-stream. The data formatting capability also interfaces seamlessly with the archive and retrieval capability.

Datamail hosting the archive and retrieval capability on behalf of Bank of New Zealand provides the bank with significant savings on data storage and eliminates the need for it to purchase expensive new hardware when storage limits are reached.

Since initial implementation, the bank has leveraged the archive and retrieval capability to better serve its customers in other areas, such as outgoing customer communications other than credit card statements, and some incoming communications such as credit card applications.