S1 Corporation (Nasdaq: SONE) has enhanced S1 Personal Banking and S1 Business Banking, its online banking solutions for consumers and small to mid-sized businesses, to help banks differentiate their online experience, improve relationships with their most profitable customers, and offer value-added services that drive incremental revenue.
Highlighting the latest innovations to S1's online banking applications, both the consumer and business banking applications now offer an enhanced, integrated service, Personal Finance Manager, which enables users to record, categorize, and reconcile transactions online. In addition, S1 Personal Banking now offers a completely integrated Electronic Bill Pay and Presentment module that offers online bill payment with invoice presentment to users. These features combine with improved self-service capabilities such as new account opening and automated enrollment to create a rich, highly-functional online user experience and drive customers to a lower-cost delivery channel for most banking interactions.
"Online banking users have moved beyond just viewing account information and now want to pay bills, track their online statements, actively manage their cash, schedule recurring transfers, and perform account reconciliation online," said Ross McKay, vice president of product management. "S1 delivers these capabilities with scalable solutions on the S1 Enterprise Platform to address consumers' increasingly complex needs while also enabling banks' multi-channel integration strategies."
In turn, banks are looking to boost the capabilities of their online solutions to capture customer loyalty and increase profitability. According to Brad Adrian, senior analyst at Gartner Research: "As many banks explore their second-generation Internet banking solutions, the focus has turned to customer retention and customer relationships. Therefore, banks are focusing on adding extended functionality, enhanced capabilities and performance, targeted solutions that also fit their channel integration strategies, and mature packaged solutions that enable their key initiatives."
By extending the capabilities of its online banking applications and continuing with its industry-leading investment in integrated S1 Enterprise applications, S1 is delivering solutions that meet the needs of banks and their customers. The sophistication of customers dictates the need for advanced functionality that can help them manage their funds efficiently and effectively. These new releases enhance money management and self-service banking features that drive customer loyalty and profitability.
Personal Finance Manager
S1's Personal Finance Manager (PFM) provides banks' most profitable customers -- their online users -- an integrated, online system to better forecast their account position, set up recurring transactions, and complete other critical banking tasks. With the PFM module, users can save time performing advanced functions that were previously only available with home PC accounting packages. In turn, banks cultivate more active and loyal online customers that repeatedly use their Web sites to perform advanced banking tasks. Highlights of PFM include:
Provides a single online banking environment that delivers seamless access to financial management functionality integrated with account information.
Enables users to see net worth with account information.
Features enhanced reporting capability, including reports by payee that are particularly useful for small business users.
Integrated Electronic Bill Pay and Presentment
The fully integrated Electronic Bill Pay and Presentment (EBPP) module in S1 Personal Banking provides a seamless, tight user experience as it delivers bills for customer review, payment, and filing. The rich functionality and integrated nature of the solution keeps users on a bank's Web site rather than on third-party sites, deepening loyalty and exposure to marketing initiatives. Highlights of the EBPP module include:
Enrolls users for receipt of e-bills from presentment-enabled merchants.
Enables users to establish and pay merchants that are not e-bill enabled as well as manage e-bill enabled merchants.
Presents completed and scheduled payments in the online banking account register "pending" section incorporated with balance information.
Other highlights of the S1 online banking applications include:
Automated new account opening in S1 Personal Banking utilizes user information pre-fills and a consistent workflow process across channels. Combined with the applications' cross-selling capabilities, customers can respond immediately to marketing campaigns and quickly enroll, greatly enhancing a bank's profitability picture.
Enhanced Self-service tools such as incident reporting, password reset and secret question and answer challenge are available in both the consumer and business applications. In addition, S1 Personal Banking features self-service for lost credit card replacement.
With the release of S1 Enterprise 3.0, nine major applications are now integrated on a common platform including S1 Enterprise Teller and S1 Enterprise Sales and Service Platform, S1 Personal Banking, S1 Business Banking, S1 Corporate Banking, S1 Insurance, S1 Enterprise Call Center, S1 Enterprise Voice Banking (powered by Edify), and S1 Enterprise Analytics. These solutions can be efficiently deployed as either on-premise or hosted solutions. The applications are available independently or collectively as an integrated solution that gives banks one view of their customers across channels. More than 100 financial service providers have committed to S1 Enterprise solutions to realize measurable benefits through implementing multi-channel ready applications.