New Oracle FLEXCUBE Features Provide Umbrella Solutions For Banks

The current financial services landscape calls for seamless, rich and individualised online and mobile experiences for consumers, new ways to meet increasing regulatory pressures and the ability to continually drive improved performance. Oracle FLEXCUBE has expanded capabilities to support these areas including new contactless payment and rich, personalised portal enhancements as well as new Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) certification and Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) compliance.

Oracle Financial Services Software Limited introduced new Oracle FLEXCUBE capabilities that help financial institutions to support regulatory compliance, offer richer and more personalised customer experiences, improve performance and streamline their IT environments.

“Financial institutions are grappling with evolving customer and regulatory requirements and the need to reduce IT complexity,” said Chet Kamat, CEO & Managing Director, Oracle Financial Services Software. “The latest enhancements to Oracle FLEXCUBE help banks to provide an enhanced customer experience, meet industry standards, such as FATCA regulations and SWIFT standards, as well as streamline compliance, reduce risk and minimise IT complexity.”

Supporting Regulatory Compliance

With FATCA provisions set to take effect in July 2014, Oracle FLEXCUBE provides new features to help facilitate compliance and reduce risk. These features include support for due diligence for new customer on boarding and existing customers to identify United States (U.S.) individuals and U.S.-owned foreign entities.

Enhancing Customer Experience

Oracle FLEXCUBE Mobile Banking now supports contactless payments, including near field communication (NFC), quick response (QR) code support, person-to-person (P2P) and social media payments, enabling banks to offer a new level of convenience and flexibility for customers.

Oracle FLEXCUBE Direct Banking enables banks to provide more comprehensive, flexible and consistent service as well as greater customer convenience with end-to-end multi-channel, multi-step and multi-device collaborative originations capabilities for retail and corporate customers. It also provides expanded customer self-subscription and on boarding features and enables full-scale straight through processing (STP) and support for offline processing.

Corporate banking users of Oracle FLEXCUBE can now take advantage of the enhanced bulk payment capability to help streamline operational efficiency and reduce risk.

Oracle FLEXCUBE has been named a SWIFT Certified Application for Payments 2013.

The enhanced Oracle FLEXCUBE platform also integrates more easily with multiple channels, such as call centers, ATMs and kiosks to quickly and effectively enable customers to access their accounts.

Improving Operational Performance

To help financial institutions better divide and compare transactional data while managing profitability, cost and performance, Oracle introduces Oracle FLEXCUBE Information Server. This new capability enables users to simply and rapidly analyse products, review current profitability data and trends to better optimise business decisions and manage competitive pressures, and review standard reports and enhance accountability by monitoring branch-level performance.

Reducing IT Complexity

Oracle FLEXCUBE Development Workbench will now support R10 and R11 versions of FLEXCUBE, enabling financial institutions to transfer existing customisations from one FLEXCUBE release to another to help speed upgrades and help reduce cost and resource requirements.

To ease testing of upgrades, patches and fixes on Oracle FLEXCUBE, Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle FLEXCUBE Testing Workbench for Universal Banking, which enables banks to record user and branch transactions, extract subsets of production data, re-run data in test environments and receive immediate diagnostics on errors, which can substantially reduce testing efforts.

To help banks better manage production environments and data compliance, Oracle FLEXCUBE now also ships with a new archiving and purging utility.

Oracle FLEXCUBE Universal Banking now runs on Oracle Database Appliance X3-2 to deliver mid-size banks a compelling banking-in-a-box solution. With this certification, banks can benefit from a low-IT-footprint, high-performance, full-scale banking technology that is engineered to support end-to-end business requirements.

In a recent performance test of Oracle FLEXCUBE Universal Banking on Oracle Database Appliance X3-2, the system managed more than 2.6 million online transactions in 60 minutes.

This equated to 744 transactions per second with an average response time of 156 milliseconds for 98 percent of the transactions.

The solution completed end-of-month batch processing for 10 million customer accounts in 123 minutes during the performance test.