ProductsH3C’s value-added expertise to Finance
Challenges Facing the Financial Industry
Financial services companies in Asia are experiencing many challenges as increasing competition from regional and global organizations and rapidly developing local markets drive the need to deploy technology-based customer offerings like e-banking services, Point of Sale (POS) and ATM networks.
Infrastructure standardization is a trend that many banks are following throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Major changes and upgrades to network infrastructures are needed to deploy new online services to customers and meet international accounting regulations. Financial institutions must also take into consideration government mandates for privacy, and the security concerns that come with intra-branch operations.
This trend has been a long term one in the US and Europe where companies have been slowly replacing their older legacy equipment in favor of new advanced technologies that enable next generation services. In many Asian economies, the banking and investment industries are maturing quickly, and as nascent industries, they are able to leapfrog older technologies allowing them to take advantage of the latest networking technologies to maximize revenue and growth, meet new regulatory issues and improve customer management.
Winning New Customers, Better Serving Current Customers
Regional financial institutions are trying to find ways to attract new customers amid growing competition while better managing their existing customer relationships. Customers in regional hotspots like Shanghai, Bangkok, Singapore and Seoul expect greater levels of service in the form of multi-function ATMs, fully interactive online banking portals with more features for money management and account control, and more widely dispersed PoS systems that offer customers greater choice of banking functions while shopping. In the highly competitive environment for customers, more and more banking, investment and financial institutions are looking at ways in which their technology infrastructures can be utilized to address these critical issues.
Improved service deployments to the customer not only helps attract new consumers but also improves the relationship with and profit potential from existing customers. Improved systems for the management of customer data and marketing programs aimed at retaining customers both need high speed and always-on channels for data and transaction transmissions. In the case of investment houses and equity firms, the need for secure, real-time transmission of transactions is essential to the success of their business and the foundation of their online services. To provide the performance, security and reliability needed by these organizations, the latest networking and switch technologies managed by sophisticated software solutions must be installed.
Reducing Costs, Increasing Performance
IT administrators are being pushed to continually reduce costs while answering increased demands for better network performance and expanded service capabilities. Streamlining their network and IT systems is an effective means of cutting the associated costs for each transaction and offering the security, performance and reliability their customers, partners and internal stakeholders require.
Integrated e-banking architectures comprising computer system processing, storage infrastructures and network backbones can allow organizations to offer greater online and ATM services while giving internal operations powerful tools like VoIP, secure intranets and video conferencing to improve management and improve efficiency and productivity. In addition, highly reliable systems reduce costs by eliminating network downtime that can impact on critical business systems resulting in loss of revenue and customer dissatisfaction. Further costs savings can be found by deploying scalable network solutions featuring modular equipment and centralized management that can help future-proof investment.
Managing Risk More Effectively
Risk management is a major challenge for banking executives. Institutions are starting to take a more holistic view of the customer, including a centralized view of their risk position. Sometimes referred to as enterprise-wide risk management, this view covers market, operational and credit risk. Regulatory compliance is driving adoption of better risk management tools.
The growth aspirations of many regional banks is also driving the move to develop more comprehensive customer value modelling and risk assessments. Expansion through customer growth, acquisition or mergers can all benefit from deploying better banking systems and infrastructures. To remain competitive, banks need to deploy a combination of advanced financial software packages and powerful networking equipment, which can help to develop and deploy more cost-effective and better customized loan and credit packages to customers based on sophisticated data modelling and risk assessment tools.
Increasing Regulatory Pressure
Asian banking and financial institutions are shifting to new record-keeping standards based on international accounting and reporting regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standard IS 3239 (IFRS), and Basel II. Hong Kong has already made the move to the IFRS standard and other locations around Asia are preparing to shift soon.
As regional banks begin transferring their accounting rules to meet IFRS and Basel II, many are taking the opportunity to improve their technology infrastructures to deploy standardized regulatory and accounting tools that will result in vastly improved compliance and transparency while decreasing costs and risk.
Solutions for Reliable, High Speed Financial Networks
To sharpen their competitive edge, banks and financial organizations need to offer new and existing customers the latest e-banking and transaction services through online, ATM and PoS access points. This level of functionality demands a self-adapting financial network that features high quality service integration managed by an intelligent network architecture to provide fully convergent communications.
Such advanced network architectures support the latest financial and accounting systems for improved expansion capabilities and customer service offerings. H3C, as a leading provider of networking equipment and services, has helped many financial-related organizations design and build infrastructures that enable them to provide these types of services to their customers.
Financial organizations need to maintain competitiveness in today’s financial services market. Enterprise class networking capabilities are within the reach of many small-medium sized banks and financial organizations.
Solution providers like H3C offer end-to-end solutions that can deliver the performance, security, scalability and reliability that organizations need while maintaining high cost-effectiveness and outstanding manageability. In addition, H3C’s networking solutions help future-proof networks, thus providing the best return on investment.
Multiple Service Network Platform
The multiple-service network platform offers high effectiveness and multiple functions to satisfy the requirements of large-scale networks with centralized data and transaction services. H3C provides banks and financial institutions with converged network systems for data centers, VLAN and WLAN, with multi-dimensional security, integrated intranet/extranet, full remote access and VoIP deployments. In this arrangement, the Business Data (BD) server and OA server are located at the central bank with OA, BD and multimedia functions integrated into one infrastructure. PoS, ATM and dumb terminal services are provided by accessing the financial centralized data center and OA systems and IP phone functions can be enabled for improved worker efficiency between local bank branches. In self-help banks, customers can contact live help using an integrated IP phone and the IP video surveillance can ensure customer security and privacy and help prevent fraud and identity theft.
The switches of the H3C product family can be divided into 5 categories – core routing switch, gigabit switch, L3 workgroup switch, L2 workgroup switch and desktop switch. Based on different bandwidth requirements, switching capability, forwarding capability and size of the network, banks can select different switches series to build their LAN or MAN environment.
The core routing switch includes the H3C S7500 and H3C S9500 series switches, which are typically used in metropolitan area network backbones and widely dispersed large corporate networks.
Gigabit routing switches include the H3C S5600, H3C S5100 and S5000 series switches to provide a gigabit to desktop solution and as a convergence switch in a large size Ethernet networks. The L3 workgroup switch includes H3C’s S3600 and H3C S3600-HI series switches for the convergence layer, and departments or building level core switches. The L2 workgroup and desktop layers are where end users and customers typically access the network directly. H3C’s powerful and secure H3C S3100, S3000 and S2000 models are deployed at these access levels to provide full end-point security and access management and traffic control for the network.
Intelligent Financial Network
Financial organizations that want to fully realize the capabilities and advantages of H3C MSNP should also utilize the advanced capabilities of the Intelligent Financial Network solution. H3C can help banks and other institutions build a backbone for service implementations and customer-facing services like:
·Integrated ATM (special terminal access)
·Self-service system access
·Intelligent terminals
·IP videoconferencing and monitoring
·IP voice and special service terminals
·PoS access
To provide an in-depth service awareness of network activities, detailed analysis of packets helps direct traffic from the edge to the core. At the edge node, in-depth analysis of activities is conducted to determine service connection and status, while analyzing and directing the contents of service traffic (for example. using Netstream). H3C’s switches provide intelligent terminal self-adaptation for different cooperation strategies for data, voice, and video terminals. In-depth service awareness at the core then triggers the resource control platform and the end-to-end resource allocation policy.
H3C also deploys its Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) technology as part of the Intelligent Financial Network solution to allow stacking of up to eight switches offering greater port density. IRF’s DDM feature allows easy management of the whole system via console, telnet, web and SNMP, which greatly facilitates the management and maintenance of a large number of switches at the access layer. IRF technology automatically configures switches newly added to the network and checks their versions, significantly simplifying the installation and deployment of access layer switches.
Multi-Dimension Network Security
Security is an essential element of any financial-oriented network. Sensitive customer data must be kept secure from piracy and identity theft. Bogus purchases and account activity caused by identity theft is a major issue for the global financial services industry. To limit the risk of such security threats, H3C suggests that banks utilize technologies that can cater to multi-dimensional threats and provide full access control and data security.
Using its MDNS solution, H3C helps organizations secure customer records, safeguard real-time transactions and online activities from hackers and other intrusions, and provide highly resilient systems to eliminate network downtime resulting from denial-of-service attacks.
H3C’s SecPath Security solution offers centralized deployment of network security policies to streamline the management of security components and ensure consistency of the organization’s network security policies. Through deployments of its SecPath series firewalls, real-time collection of security events from PCs, ATM and PoS access points, storage devices and related security equipment generate a wide range of information resources and customer data for enhanced security, customer service and risk analysis activities.
Correlative analysis of these security events can help detect risks and provide better alert mechanisms for future incidents. SecPath let’s administrators conduct accurate, real-time evaluation of a network’s security status and make rapid responses to new threats according to preset policies.
Systematic Network Management
Another key element of advanced network architectures is total management of network resources and traffic control. Solution providers like H3C can implement management systems that offer tools for traffic shaping, capacity management and account control that is automated and highly cost-efficient. H3C’s integrated management center offers comprehensive controls for a more functional and flexible management platform.
Deploying the H3C network management system (NMS) provides IT administrators with topology management, fault management, configuration controls and 24/7 dynamic network status analysis.
H3C’s Comprehensive Access Management Server (CAMS) offers financial institutions cost-effective increases in performance, security and reliability, and is geared for architectures that require high performance, higher port density and easy installation along with solid return on investment. CAMS is a comprehensive identity-based access control server for network infrastructures consisting of H3C switches, routers, and security devices. Enterprise network user management focuses on providing LAN, VPN, wireless access management, authentication, authorization and accounting, and CAMS is at the heart of the integration and control layer, constructing a multiple service management, maintenance, and security control framework with high interoperability within existing enterprise systems.
