Hong Leong Finance Limited

---

Branch Automation, Call Centre and CRM

Introduction

Hong Leong Finance Limited was established in the 60s’ and is today, Singapore's largest finance company with a network of 28 branches serving customers island-wide.

Driven by a need to grow its business, Hong Leong Finance tasked Fujitsu Asia to implement a new branch teller system.

Along the way, Fujitsu was also tasked with rolling out a call centre and customer relationship management solution for their newly created Customer Service Centre and the Hire Purchase Collections area. All three projects were launched in late 2004 – on time and on budget.

IT Demands of Business Growth

Going by conventional wisdom, one shouldn’t fix something when it isn’t broken. Not so in the case of Hong Leong Finance.

In the middle of 2003, the listed financial services arm of Hong Leong Group Singapore decided to replace their 10-year-old host delivery system with a more efficient platform in order to serve customers better, as well as sell more products (in the form of loans) to Consumers and SMEs – their two main groups of customers.

“This system upgrade was deemed necessary at this juncture of the growth of our business,” said Mr Ian Macdonald, president of Hong Leong Finance. “Our old system was about 10 years old and although it had served our needs well with minimal downtime, we felt we needed a modern solution for improving customer service and procuring more business from existing or new customers.”

Therefore, Hong Leong Finance needed a new platform to be rolled out at the company’s 28 branches islandwide and to its 14 departments . The system should be able to quickly capture new customer data into (or retrieve existing information from) a database, thus allowing staff to spend less time creating or updating user profiles, and devote more time to selling loan products. In addition BTS should assist in the distribution of a wider range of Hong Leong Finance products available at the branches, and provide on hand information to staff of suitable products for their customers. Moreover, it should be able to speed up internal transaction times and also communications within Hong Leong Finance.

So the company went through the usual process of calling for a project tender among IT vendors, briefing the companies and scrutinising their proposals.

The job was awarded to Fujitsu Asia. Hong Leong Finance selection criteria were price-competitiveness, professionalism, quality and mainly, understanding their business and the needs of the company.

The Ultimate Solution - Apollo

Codenamed Apollo, the BTS project required the vendor to develop a web-based finance system for Hong Leong Finance. Mr Choi Chee Kong, Regional Senior Group Vice-President at Fujitsu Asia, said Apollo is built using open standards, industry-accepted frameworks and open-source technologies such as Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Struts.

Employing such commonly-used technologies to create individual system components (such as application servers, databases and software engineering tools) allowed Fujitsu Asia to build a robust, stable platform with a low cost of ownership. Apollo’s modular design also enables more components to be added in future without requiring major adjustments to the rest of the platform, for enhanced scalability.

Developed over 12 months beginning mid-2003, Apollo was created using about 1.7 million lines of code and comprises over 400 different financial transactions handled by various departments within Hong Leong Finance. Examples include:

• counter and deposit transactions for the branch tellers
• loan and collateral transactions for the loan or trade finance departments
• enquiries for the marketing, audit or customer service departments
• control transactions for the data control, credit control and IT departments
• personnel-related transactions for the human resource department

Apollo works based on distributed computing, a programming model in which a set of computing instructions is processed at different points within a network. This allows different back-end Hong Leong Finance departments to work on information sent from the front-end branch tellers at the same time, allowing customers to be served faster.

For example, if a customer walks into a branch and applies for a housing loan, the credit control department can immediately assess his credit-worthiness once a branch teller inputs the request. At the same time, the loan department can process the application while the trade finance department assesses whatever the customer has put up as collateral can be accepted by Hong Leong Finance.

As a result, the branch tellers now require less time to process customers’ requests, giving them more time to talk to the customers about new loan products that are available. Ms Rhonda Laing, Senior Vice-President for Operations at Hong Leong Finance, said the new BTS allows a new account to be created in under four minutes, compared to almost 10 minutes in the pre-Apollo days.

Giving the tellers more time to talk about loan products is vital, since Hong Leong Finance’s range of goodies for home consumers and SMEs has widened over time. The old BTS supported about four offerings while Apollo currently supports eight – with potentially more to come in the future.

With Apollo, branch tellers also get a detailed view of a customer’s profile (including credit-worthiness, history of transactions and other information) and are thus in a better position to decide which products to introduce. And “we do sell more products now,” said Ms Laing.

Customer Relationship Management

Halfway during the Apollo project, Hong Leong Finance tasked Fujitsu Asia with a separate project comprising the Project Management of the new customer service call centre centre solution and the customer relationship management (CRM) solution for both the Centre and its Hire Purchase Collection areas.

Meant to offer improved customer service, Hong Leong Finance required a solution that provided their call centre personnel with extensive information about any of their existing customers for inbound or outbound calls. Such information as the customer’s history with HLF and the last contact with the company including the historic questions asked and queries handled. It was also required to track new customer inquiry and the outcomes of product sales.

Fujitsu Asia partnered customer loyalty solutions provider ITApps to roll out the Apropos Call Centre application and the C-Centric CRM solution over six months beginning late-2003.

Fujitsu Asia’s Ms Kitty Wu, Director for Solutions Delivery Division, Solutions Technology Group, said, ”Call Centre and the CRM solutions integrate the ITApps solutions with a private automatic branch exchange (PABX) system from Nortel Networks, the Rightfax facsimile server solution by business solutions provider Ditium, a WebLogic application server, Oracle database and Microsoft Exchange. This provides customer service to be available round-the-clock via phone, fax or e-mail and provided on a single interface for ease of management.”

With C-Centric, the profile of a call-in customer pops up in front of an agent when a call is answered. The solution also includes an embedded set of industry-standard call centre and CRM reports that allow Hong Leong Finance to evaluate system performance and improve service quality.

According to Mr Macdonald, the customer service centre handles about 1,000 calls a day and generates about 20 new business leads per week since its 1 June rollout. A few large transactions, including one S$10 million dollar deal, have also come in through the centre.

C-Centric solution also embedded itself within the Hire Purchase Collections area enabling the efficient monitoring of existing overdue accounts and the tracking of activity for performance based outcomes.

A Contented Customer

Given that Hong Leong Finance’s old system worked fine and the company was a newbie to the call centre applications and CRM solutions, the financial services provider are very satisfied with the outcomes of their project.

Excluding hardware costs, Apollo took S$2.4 million to develop and implement while the Call Centre and CRM solutions collectively took S$1.040 million to roll out. Both projects ran concurrently and were implemented in mid-2004 – on time and on budget.