Credit Suisse migrates credit solutions to afb

Munich, Germany, 9. November 2007 - The Munich-based company afb has installed its afb Credit Management Solution at the newly established BANK-now. The 100% owned subsidiary of Credit Suisse will use the solution to handle its personal loan and car leasing business in Switzerland.

BANK-now, the consumer financing bank based in Horgen, Switzerland, took up its position on the starting grid on 3 January 2007. Credit Suisse merged its personal loan and car leasing business divisions with City Bank AG to form BANK-now, a legally independent company. The new bank will continue to use the IT services provided by Credit Suisse's main computer centre.

Three old systems used for credit decision making and processing have been replaced at the front-end by the central afb Credit Management Solution. "We wanted an integrated system to provide for the far-reaching automation of our business", BANK-now CEO Erich Wild said about the decision to go with afb. It is planned that the solution will make decisions on an average of over 100,000 personal loans and 12,000 vehicle leasing applications each year.

The solution also mirrors the company"s respective business strategies: "Because the afb system makes sub-processes available as web-based Enterprise Services, BANK-now products can be introduced quickly and service diverse communication channels flexibly depending on the sales and marketing strategy", Wild commented.

Processes as web services

In spite of all the new innovation the 240 employees in the different divisions and approximately 4,500 affiliated sales partners will not need to abandon the familiar, tried and tested process flows of the old systems. The afb Credit Management Solution maps these systems. The same applies to dealer and customer data, which has also been migrated to the new solution.

Alongside external sources, this data serves as the basis for an automatic credit decision-making. The Munich-based credit processing specialist established a connection with ZEK/IKO, which records details of all personal loans extended in Switzerland. Address data, information about payment attitudes, details from the register of companies for company and personal checkups as well as credit scores are all supplied through a second interface to Deltavista. This information is based on commercial and socio-demographic data.

afb has created an internal interface to the system for contract management and accounting. The credit solution can use this interface to automatically transfer customer and contract data to the associated back-end following final approval.

According to afb Technology Director Gerolf Dienhold, however, the greatest challenge in the project"s implementation was not the integration of the application. "Compared with other European banks Credit Suisse has an extremely high level of security", Dienhold said. The afb solution, for instance, had to support the company-wide single sign-on procedure. Here each internal and external user logs on to Credit Suisse once and then has individual access to data and IT services based on a saved profile.

The afb Credit Management Solution at Credit Suisse runs on Sun Solaris, the standard operating system at the major bank.

Profile of afb Application Services AG

afb Application Services AG, founded in 1995, optimises complete business processes related to banks" and leasing companies" credit allocation activities. Up-to-the-minute IT solutions oriented around application service provision allow the complete automation of the credit allocation process - from applications to fully automated credit decisions, credit processing and contract management. The Munich-based company"s solutions are currently in use around the globe. Prestigious clients from the financial services sector now earn a significant percentage of their revenue through afb applications. Among the best known are cashgate (CH), FFS Bank, GE Money Bank, General Motors Acceptance Corporation (D, A, CH, PL), Honda Bank and the Santander Consumer Bank S.A. (Poland).

BANK-now profile

With a portfolio of approximately 130,000 clients and a market share of 27% in the personal loan business and 10% in the car leasing business, BANK-now is one of the most important providers of consumer financing in Switzerland. Its product range includes the CREDIT-now and LEASE-now product lines. BANK-now allows its customers easy access to innovative and transparent products through a number of channels. The bank employs approximately 240 employees at its head office in Horgen and in its 21 branches across Switzerland and has an established network of sales partners. It is a 100% subsidiary of the Credit Suisse Group. Hanspeter Kurzmeyer, manager of private customers Switzerland at Credit Suisse, is the chairman of the board of directors. Erich Wild is the company"s CEO.