Woodforest National Bank® is a privately held bank headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas. Established in 1980, the $6.4 billion-asset institution proudly stands among the strongest community banks in the nation, operating more than 700 branches in 17 different states across the United States.
Learn how INETCO helped Woodforest to not only improve operational efficiency and promote fact-based decision making, but also drive more business and improve branch profitability by:
- Maximizing ATM availability
- Remediating transaction performance issues before customer service is significantly impacted
- Performing profitability analysis on every ATM
- Improving cash forecasting and replenishment at the individual ATM level to reduce both idle cash and ATM cash-out scenarios
Challenges
Like many other financial institutions, ATMs play an increasingly important role at Woodforest. Faced with a growing number of customer transactions shifting to cards and the ATM self-service channel, Woodforest recognized it was time to investigate new ways to optimize the health of their electronic payments ecosystem. Emerging requirements for Woodforest included the ability to:
- Continuously monitor the performance of customer transactions as they traverse third party processing and internal systems
- Quickly identify when applications, authorization hosts or payment rails are failing to respond as expected
- Conduct comprehensive card and ATM profitability analysis for each branch location
- Speed up mean-time-to-resolution rates and immediately identify when customer transactions are not completing as expected
The Solution
Woodforest chose real-time transaction data specialists, INETCO, to provide a real-time monitoring, analytics and data streaming solution that met these requirements. INETCO’s real-time transaction data platform allows Woodforest to continuously monitor and analyze the primary and peripheral systems related to payment card transactions and the management of ATMs. It provides a 24×7, centralized performance view into:
- Every customer transaction taking place across a multi-vendor fleet of 850+ ATMs
- Every payment card transaction that is submitted to Woodforest by one or more authorized payment networks or other third parties
Woodforest’s rich transaction intelligence is then stored within a prominent, scalable open source database, and forwarded to user friendly dashboards customized by INETCO for on-demand visualization, reporting and analysis of:
- Availability — What is the uptime of each individual ATM machine?
- Profitability — What is the profitability of the ATMs located at each branch location?
- Cash forecasting and replenishment — How many deposits, and how much cash, is utilized at each individual ATM location?
- ATM placement — When does deposit activity and transaction volume data indicate it is time to re-evaluate whether one full service/one cash dispenser ATM per branch location is the right combination?
- Card usage — Where are card transactions being acquired from?
Results
INETCO’s real-time transaction monitoring, analytics and data streaming solutions have helped Woodforest improve operational efficiency and promote fact-based decision making, even down to the branch level. Woodforest believes that rich transaction intelligence has also helped them drive more business and improve branch profitability by:
- Maximizing the availability of their ATMs
- Remediating transaction performance issues before customer service is significantly impacted
- Performing profitability analysis on every ATM
- Improving cash forecasting and replenishment at the individual ATM level to reduce both idle cash and ATM cash-out scenarios
The Future
Woodforest continues to work with INETCO, exploring new ways to derive meaningful insights from their real-time transaction data. Emerging use cases include early warning fraud detection and third party and internal system monitoring.