Radovan Jelasity
Chairman & CEO, Erste Bank Hungary Zrt.
Erste Bank’s four-year project: 25,000 person-hours on 53 systems THE BEGINNINGS In the spring of 2017, the news of a new, nationwide project, instant payments, spread like wildfire among our colleagues working in payment services. Unsurprisingly, at the first meetings, we mainly listed the questions. 24-hour balance management? What happens to the end-of-day closing? How to ensure continuous availability? What exactly has to be available on a 24/7 basis? What are considered secondary identifiers? In which situations are requests to pay useful? Which risks should we prepare for? The longer we analysed the task at hand, the clearer it became that it was not simply a matter of ‘expanding’ the existing payment services. It meant systems and their operation. Architecture. Processes. Channels. Account statement and customer information. Besides payments, lending and risk management are also affected (as interest rates have to be calculated). The same goes for telephone customer service and for providing the information in our branches. Complaint management. Internal and external reporting service. It became clear that similar to the introduction of intraday clearing cycles in 2012, another new dimension will be added to Hungarian payment services. We mulled over the solutions over and over again. We were looking for the place of instant payments in the everyday lives of customers and of the bank at various debates and discussions. However, the details just kept raising new questions. The number of the sub-cases to be solved increased. In the end, the number of the affected systems was over
127
