How a Chat App Revolutionized the Banking Industry

What are the main ingredients of a successful banking system? Most of us will agree that it is either effectiveness or security. When we talk about a highly complex system that manages, stores, lends, and profits from money, the slightest dent on its security or effectiveness will diminish the public’s trust towards it significantly. Therefore, how does J Trust Bank, a company which, in 2018, has no less than 947 employees in 47 branch offices located throughout Indonesia with a total asset value of IDR17,823 trillion, manage to keep their day-to-day business operations as well as security at its best?

To answer that question, we need to see how the core banking system (CBS) in general has evolved through the years and adapted with the ever-flourishing challenges around it. The first-generation CBS, born in the 1970s, was built with a technology that focused on the mainframe-based transaction processing. However, with the notable evolution of technological ecosystems in the past decade, thanks to the emergence of the Internet, the technology that the older CBS relied on became rapidly outdated.

With automation taking over almost all processes that happen in human lives, the outdated CBS grew costlier and more mundane for the banks. Besides, consumer demand is also changing. Now that phone calls, photography, and public transportation are just a click away, modern society is leading a life faster than its predecessors. Humans have also become more practical and efficient in everything that an old banking system just cannot do anymore for us. The expectation to have banks that can open an account, transfer money, and calculate credits in mere seconds, but with the same or even better standard of security that the old CBS can offer us, is growing higher and higher.

With such high pressure to evolve according to the development of IT and to maintain, if not increase, the security level in which a bank operates, J Trust, as one of the major players in Indonesian banking industry, understands one thing: not only do they have to create better banking products to offer customers, they must also strengthen the system from within by building better communication engineering. Just as an event organizer will not be able to execute a grand event if its committee members are still communicating with each other by exchanging letters, so will J Trust Bank not be able to deliver better service to its customers if they stick to old communication strategies. This was when the idea to create J Trust U App, the bank’s internal chat platform, emerged.

As the chat SDK provider that empowers J Trust U App, we understand that an enterprise chat app used for daily operations must meet several requirements:

Scalability

With almost a thousand users who will use this app to communicate with one another on a daily basis, the app must be able to handle that much traffic without losing stability. Luckily, it uses Qiscus Chat SDK which is able to handle up to 10 million concurrent user connections.

Security

As mentioned before, banks deal with people’s money and assets and thus are heavily regulated by the government. The employees must operate on a high-security level every day, and so should the chat app that they use to communicate for work. Qiscus makes sure that J Trust U App offers the highest level of security so that the bank’s data will not be compromised.

On-premise deployment support

Considering the complexity of how banking works, the bank’s chat app must utilize a system that supports on-premise deployment—that is, the chat app can run using the bank’s own servers. Qiscus Chat SDK has supported by on-premise deployment, making the chat apps that are built with it more secure and private.

Brand

J Trust U App is a corporate product. Therefore, it is important that the app manufacturer is willing to build it as a white-label product so that the company can present its brand in the app more effectively. Being white-labelled is another special characteristic of the Qiscus Chat SDK.

A chat platform with enhanced features

With Qiscus Chat SDK, J Trust U App is capable of several features. Some of them are basic chat features like private chat and group chat and enhanced features, which resulted from the integration between the chat app and the bank’s internal systems. The integration is derived into three distinctive abilities of J Trust U App, which are:

A chat bot that tells the exchange rate

Previously, employees can only learn about the current exchange rate by calling the Treasury Department at J Trust Bank headquarter. This manual process takes an awfully long time and is no longer efficient. With this chat bot’s ability to access the exchange rate data from the bank’s system in real time, the employees are now just one chat away from getting this important information. This cuts down toilsome communication between the branch and the main office by a wide margin and, frankly, just makes things easier for everyone involved. This feature also boosts transparency tremendously since now everyone can access the exchange rate data from the same source at the same time. Surely the risk of miscommunication or delayed information is now greatly diminished thanks to this chat bot.

A chat bot that is integrated with the HR system

Recently, J Trust U App has started developing a new feature that will enable employees to manage their HR-related necessities using only this chat app. The app is being engineered to be in sync with the HR system so that employees can propose for leave, reimburse a business trip, access performance review, and do other HR-related actions just through a chat and without having to open up any other systems.

An admin dashboard

The rigorous process that the Human Capital Department must go through to monitor the employees’ communications, along with the sometimes-tenuous system it clings onto, can now be replaced with a simple dashboard that can monitor thousands of chats in real time. The admin system enables Human Capital staff to control the flow and security of the conversations between the employees in a much easier way than the old practices. With this dashboard, Human Capital staff can also make direct engagement to every employee in J Trust Bank Indonesia without breaking a sweat.

One step closer into digital transformation

All in all, one can see J Trust U App as one of the many innovations that J Trust Bank is creating as their commitment to transform their business into a digitalized banking system. A digitalized internal chat app surely will lead to a better communication system within the company, which in turn is expected to give birth to many wonderful collaborations within the bank itself and with other companies.

As in the case with other industries and businesses in general, good communication is the key to becoming better, stronger, and greater. Therefore, with communication being made simpler and more effective like what is happening with J Trust U App, and along with the digitalization of many other basic operational processes, it is hoped that digital transformation will not stay as a hollow slogan in this country. Rather, it can be realized and implemented in all actions that the industries make, so that their systems can also be transformed to adapt better with the changes that are happening in this golden era of technology.

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