June 1998

BY WILLIAM H.MATLACK, JR.

In the intense competition for business customers, banks are finding that technology can provide a substantial competitive edge by allowing them to provide services that meet a wider range of business customer needs. As result of this awareness, banks have become leaders in accessing and deploying a wide range of advanced communications systems and services designed to make banking easier and more efficient for their busy customers.

Recognizing the importance of leading customers to advanced technology implementations, NationsBank is committed to evaluating and demonstrating the viability of technologies that can provide enhanced services. To accomplish this, a Strategic Technology Group was established at the bank, and the group set up a lab to test and demonstrate emerging technologies.

PROOF OF CONCEPT LAB
An important objective for the Strategic Technology Group within the bank is to present these new technologies in a relevant context for business people. The lab accomplishes this through Proof of Concept (POC) demonstrations. These demonstrations allow customers (the bank's various business units) to readily see the potential impact of demonstrated technologies on their businesses. As part of the POC, Strategic Technology does not endorse or sell a particular application to a line of business. Rather, the concept is demonstrated from a technology maturity standpoint, and if the customer is interested in applying it to their business, a pilot program is established within the bank.

THE SMALL BUSINESS CUSTOMER POC
In a recent POC, NationsBank tested the viability of integrating multiple applications to provide advanced banking services to small business bank customers -- where and when they are required. Typically, these customers are very mobile and time-constrained, so the bank envisioned a highly integrated application that would provide access to all bank services via telephone or Internet/intranet interfaces. A major part of this POC was determining the impact of the Enterprise Computer Telephony Forum's (ECTF) Interoperability Agreements on integrating the estimated twelve applications that would be required to provide all the services envisioned. The bank purposely "overloaded" the POC with more applications than would realistically be implemented, but this served as an additional factor to help establish viability.

NationsBank believed that the integration potential provided by ECTF interoperability had brought computer telephony technology to a point where it could provide real value for highly mobile bank users. Small business customers wanted fast, 24-hour, global access to money management services via phone, intranet, or Internet. Since time was always at a premium, they needed to be able to use their available time on the road to access banking services. Simply put, they needed mobile, multimedia access to a variety of banking services, and these services needed to be very easy to use.

NationsBank's concept for addressing these needs was to provide a simplified user interface via a telephone or computer keyboard with the telephone playing the central role. Users could access bank services at any time and from any location. The application would have to provide simple and accurate user identification via voice or keyboard input and would have to allow for hands-free navigation through the system. Invoices and statements would have to be easy to create and distribute via voice or keyboard commands, and the system would have to support multiple telecommunications channels. Providing this full range of coordinated services via phone and Internet/intranet required integration of twelve different vendors, and served as a real proof-of-concept for ECTF interoperability.

THE CONCEPT - C2M2I
As the POC architecture was sketched out, the bank began calling it Computer-Controlled Multimedia Integration (C2M2I) because of the high level of integration required to make it work seamlessly for the user. Seven key technologies were identified:

• Voice Print Authentication -- allows subscribers to record a polysyllabic password that is verbally authenticated each time the user accesses his or her account.
• Interactive Voice Response -- IVR is a very common technology in banking that allows electronic voice responses to customer inquiries.
• Speech Recognition -- uses a technology similar to voice print authentication to provide system understanding of the spoken word for data entry and navigation.
• Text-to-Speech -- the converse of speech recognition, it provides voice output of text data.
• Internet Fax -- provides Internet delivery and access to fax documents. A user can read fax documents online, print them out or have them forwarded to another fax number.
• Integrated Internet Data Access and Telephone Calls -- allows simultaneous Internet browsing and voice communication over a single phone line. If voice latency is expected to be excessive, the connection can be established with a direct dial connection.
• Off-Switch Call Control -- is the application that controls the call's movement around the network. Without off-switch call control, all of the servers have to be daisy-chained together, increasing overhead and response times.

SCREENING PARTICIPANTS
Acorn Communications of Boston was selected to act as systems coordinator for the implementation. Since so many applications were called for, it was obvious that selecting the right vendors was a critical part of the process. NationsBank used a four-part screen designed to collect vendors willing to commit the needed amount of resources and participation. Participants were selected based on their commitment to and implementation of ECTF interoperability; willingness to participate in a multi-vendor environment; commitment of their resources; and ongoing support.

Since the key to establishing the scale of integration needed was ECTF interoperability, the first question was the most important. NationsBank was looking for the best technologies working together rather than the best individual technologies. Ultimately twelve vendors passed through the screen (Table 1).

The twelve companies selected for the NationsBank Proof of Concept Demonstration

THE IMPLEMENTATION
After vendor selection had been made, the architecture could be fully worked out. Since the application would service on-the-go small business customers, a voice-distributed server approach was selected. This represented a change to conventional resource allocation approaches since it meant that widely distributed servers would be operating in multiple environments to provide integrated access via a number of sources including:

• Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
• Virtual Private Network (VPN).
• LAN connected to a PBX.
• Intranet (a dedicated IP link to the Internet).
• Extranet on the Internet itself.

This approach was designed to allow shared multimedia resources and multiple applications to provide a seamless and streamlined interface with bank services. The high level of integration involved would also test the limits of current ECTF interoperability.

CONTROLLING ACCESS THROUGH VOICE SYSTEMS
Since the application was envisioned to be especially useful to small, mobile business users who needed to conduct transactions via phone, major speech applications were implemented. The system needed to have real-time business awareness of the customer, so that a service person could get access to an account status while en route to the location. Field personnel would need to generate invoices upon completion of jobs that could be mailed, faxed, or e-mailed to their customers. This could be done at the job site by allowing them to provide verbal answers to voice prompts via phone. All of the multimedia features of the system would be accessed by voice input, and the system would provide dynamic financial monitoring and status of the account via IVR capabilities.

In addition to voice access via phone, the system was designed to provide voice and keyboard access via the Internet or intranet to business status and account control. This would also include Web voice/data interchange. There would also be an overall improvement in customer fulfillment due to the real-time interaction provided by the system.

RETHINKING THE INFORMATION MODEL
At the time NationsBank began designing the architecture, the state of the industry was such that each application had to access its own resources independently. That meant that each incoming voice call, fax, or e-mail had to be routed through media presentation, call control rules, and to the legacy database independently (Figure 1). The potential of ECTF interoperability allows each application to share all resources, and this concept became the basis for the POC information model. The C2M2I Functional Diagram (Figure 2) illustrates the role played by each of the twelve vendors participating in the POC. Users, of course, experience the system as a single application. The C2M2I system diagram shows the architecture of the total system. It also illustrates how small businesses access the services via Internet or Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

Using this diagram, it's easy to trace access flow for each type of interface. Telephony accesses Syntellect's IVR application and T-NETIX's speaker authentication application. Calls are routed through the Bosch telephony hub to access the other bank services applications. Acorn provides call control services, Edify provides automated banking applications, and Nuance provides transaction creation and speech recognition.

Internet-based transactions are accessed through any Internet provider. eFusion provides Internet voice services, Acorn provides text-to-speech, NetCentric provides a fax server, and Informix provides databases.

For users, all the applications are behind the scenes. They get what they need no matter where they are or what time they access the system.

INTERFACE EXAMPLES
Several examples serve to illustrate how users access and manipulate the system. First, the system authenticates a user via very sophisticated speech recognition. In this case, the user accesses the system through the PSTN. Syntellect's IVR is activated and speaker authentication is provided by T-NETIX. This provides user authentication with an error rate of less than 1 percent for accepting a false user. It will reject a recording made by someone standing behind a user on the basis that a voiceprint cannot be exactly the same twice. It can also be set up to ask a user to repeat a different password for transactions over a set amount. After the user has been authorized, he is free to access his account information.

To request account balance and report of recent transactions, the user can access the system through the PBX/hub, intranet, or a LAN. The call is routed via the Bosch hub to the Edify IVR and banking application. If phone access is being used, the system provides the user with verbal information from the system's IVR. The user can also verbally request a fax. If the system is accessed via the intranet or LAN, information is transmitted to the user via that carrier.

LESSONS LEARNED
The purpose of a NationsBank POC is to demonstrate the viability of emerging technologies and to learn lessons from the implementations. Broadly, from this POC, NationsBank discovered that vendors are still in the early stages of adopting ECTF Interoperability, but there is enough implementation in place that the system objectives were achievable. However, the degree of integration available today is limited. There was enough integration to make everything work, but a lot of work-around was required. In particular, call control hooks need to be clearly specified.

Specifically, the POC demonstrated that traditional telephony mixes effectively with other media if emerging ECTF Interoperability is used. In the absence of an effective call control specification, the required open PBX/hub adds system overhead. Effective call control will make the application much more efficient when it is available, and the hub can be used more effectively.

One of the most important factors demonstrated by the POC was that application servers could be widely distributed to the PSTN, the Internet service provider, and intranets. This dispersed, logical architecture has the potential to save an enterprise a considerable amount of money by not having to build dedicated servers at each location. This was demonstrated in a "real-world" scenario made possible by a connection between NationsBank's Lab and MCI's Developers Lab.

The POC also demonstrated that ECTF Interoperability can deliver multi-vendor applications, but vendors must be selected with care. Many vendors claim to be able to do everything, but the strongest overall implementation will occur by choosing vendors for their strengths in specific areas coupled with their ability to work in conjunction with other applications.

NationsBank next phase POC (for distributed applications) will use middleware products to achieve a higher level of call control. Pilot programs from this POC are pending effective Call Control protocols from the ECTF and the applicability of the selected middleware.

William H. Matlack, Jr., is an independent writer and public relations consultant with over twenty years experience directing strategic marketing communications for a wide variety of high-tech companies. For additional information on the ECTF and to obtain ECTF documents, please access the ECTF Web site at www.ectf.org. To inquire about membership, contact the ECTF at 510-608-5915 or direct e-mail to [email protected].