Financial

The global financial services industry – encompassing banks, credit card companies, insurance agents , stock brokerages, investment funds and government-sponsored organizations – manage vast amounts of information through branches and call centers or through unattended Web, ATM and phone channels. Their objective is to achieve profitable growth at an acceptable risk, and they are harnessing communication technology to achieve it.

Financial institutions today face a convergence of communication challenges unlike any other time in the recent past. Just as they realize that customers are still walking into the branch to conduct business, they also find that their current communications technology infrastructure will not support additional functionalities.

Smoothstone understands that the branch of the future will demand even more from its network, and knows that clear voice and video, along with collaborative tools, will become a necessity in a financial institution’s toolkit. Also, with corporate mergers and acquisitions in the financial space, Smoothstone has positioned itself to help IT directors faced more and more with the technological challenges that come with branch expansion.

Why Smoothstone?

Smoothstone makes it easy to connect numerous branches to each other in a way that allows for scalability in the future. Using Unified Communications applications hosted on a cloud-based infrastructure, Smoothstone allows branches to effectively manage their communication efforts, while providing the ability to easily integrate new branches into the network.

When an FI opens new branches, they generally have to spend a large amount of money on a PBX system, and whenever bankers move to a different branch, a frequent occurrence in the industry, they need a new phone number. Telephone extension moves, adds, and changes require technicians and increased maintenance costs.

Smoothstone can:

• Improve the responsiveness and efficiency of operations at the financial institution’s on-site inbound contact center, as well as establishing a virtual contact center capability and an outbound contact center
• Enhance collaboration and reducing travel costs for internal meetings, training, and technical support through integrated communications solutions
• Boost productivity by allowing FIs to consolidate voicemail, email and faxes in a single unified inbox
• Provide Unified Communications capabilities to all personnel

For smaller financial institutions this means the ability to communicate with the precision of an enterprise, while UC allows larger banks to simplify communication between locations, allowing for improved customer service.

Customer Example

Client
A wholesale banking institution with over 600 employees spread out to 14 locations nationwide.

Challenge
As an existing WAN user, the client already understood the benefits of MPLS, but wanted the voice features of a Unified Communications platform. However, they had to find a solution that integrated seamlessly with their existing MPLS service and Cisco Call Manager infrastructure.

Solution
The client had an existing relationship with a Smoothstone network partner, so it was very easy to layer voice services across their existing MPLS network. All this was done quickly, without disruption of the company´s current services and processes. Additionally, Smoothstone was able to provide voice services to their existing Call Manager via SIP Trunking.

Benefits
Smoothstone was able to provide SIP trunking to the client´s Cisco Call Manager through a central delivery of 270 trunks across all of their locations. This allowed them to extend the life of their current Cisco equipment without any disruption of their current service.