Building the Customer Interaction Hub: It�s About Time

There is little doubt left that an integrated approach to the delivery of financial products and services benefits both the customer and the bank. Technology solution providers have recently begun to offer front-office systems that could be extended to multiple delivery channels. Other technology vendors offer middleware solutions that could be used to integrate the front-office systems onto a common message backbone, a common base of business process and operational data stores (ODS) that can provide data consistency. But with few exceptions, retail bank organizations simply have no incentive to see beyond tomorrow’s stock price and next year’s bonuses to make the long-term commitment that is necessary to create such a delivery infrastructure.

TowerGroup believes this inertia is starting to change. Many banks are implementing tactical changes to their delivery channels, but with a strategic view toward an integrated architecture. This TowerGroup Research Note describes the characteristics of a customer interaction management (CIM) hub, an idealized multichannel architecture, that will aid the bank’s business and IT managers not only in developing the technical requirements for such an architecture, but also in beginning to plan a deployment strategy that reduces the risk of implementing through a “big bang” approach.
Building the Customer Interaction Hub: It�s About Time