Radical has enabled one of South African’s big four banks to implement a call centre solution in record time to help meet industry regulatory requirements. 

The locally developed Radical Business Management software has been implemented in the largest Voice Over IP (VOIP) solution in Africa to provide a call centre to enable Standard Bank to comply with the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA). 

“FICA has placed an unprecedented demand on banks and financial institutions,” says Derek Hughes, CEO of DVT Business Systems Solutions. 

FICA requires customers of banks and financial institutions to verify their identity and place of residence. “Financial institutions will, over time, be required to contact their entire customer base ,” says Hughes. 

“Radical was a clear choice for Standard Bank’s FICA Call Centre because of its flexibility, local support, rapid implementation, easy integration into the bank’s database, and relatively low cost,” says Michael Deftereos, SBSA Services Manager of call centre specialists, Merchants a Dimension Data Group Company. 

“Call centre solution providers that concentrate on the upper end of the market, usually require lengthy implementation times,” observes Deftereos. “Fast implementation and easy customisation were prime requirements for the FICA Call Centre,” he emphasises. 

Deftereos says Merchants decided to outsource the implementation of Radical because it was more cost effective than doing it in-house because of DVT’s shared-risk approach and fixed-price fee structure. 

“DVT was able to implement, integrate, and customise the Radical solution in under two weeks because of the open, standards-based architecture of the product and the fact that is a local company,” says Hughes. 

“An important component of the Radical solution is its rules and forms editor, which contributes to its ability to adapt rapidly to changing business requirements,” adds Hughes. 

The FICA Call Centre is handling around 35000 calls a day with a current implementation of 120 outbound seats, but Hughes says the Radical solution is well-suited to any call centre from 5 to 250 seats. 

There are currently approximately 10 million records in the Radical database, with Standard Bank’s customers being in excess of 6 million customers. 

95% of the calls in the Call Centre are outbound, with 5% being inbound. 

Radical has been successfully integrated with the Avaya switch through Avaya Soft Phone integration. Radical is also integrated with Standard Bank’s Customer database. 

“Radical is also considerably cheaper than equivalent foreign products for which development costs would have been incurred in dollars,” he concludes.