The North-Western Bank of the Sberbank of Russia has the most extensive branch network in the region, with more than a 1,000 branches. Not only does the bank keep up with the modern market trends, but it actually goes ahead of them, showing utmost confidence in the world of rapidly changing technologies and customer preferences.
The North-Western Bank of the Sberbank of Russia has the most extensive branch network in the region, with more than a 1,000 branches. Not only does the bank keep up with the modern market trends, but it actually goes ahead of them, showing utmost confidence in the world of rapidly changing technologies and customer preferences.
Clear objectives
Like in the case of every respectable bank, special emphasis here is on the customer and savings security. All of the Bank’s facilities - its divisions, self-service machines, offices, depositories, ATMs, etc. - are equipped with modern security systems.
When choosing software to power its security systems, the North-Western Bank of the Sberbank of Russia highlighted the following as the key objectives:
• Provision of remote access to the installed systems
• Optimization of the customer complaints settlement procedure
• Setting up a centralized surveillance unit
Therefore, the Intellect Physical Security Information Management software from AxxonSoft was North-Western Bank’s choice to help it handle the above objectives.
Providing the right solution
Today the Bank’s entire security system is based on the Intellect PSIM: this includes both the surveillance of the premises and the adjacent territory and supervising the technological process. The North-Western Bank of the Sberbank of Russia and AxxonSoft can to-date boast with more than 10 years of successful cooperation.
At the time when it began, the top priority was to build local video surveillance systems for customer-operated machines (like ATMs). For this to be done, first thing it was decided that DVR had to be replaced completely with specialized video management software to be installed on computers. This was quite a bit of an experimental task at the time. Video recordings were not synchronized and on-site visits by technical staff were still required each time to retrieve locally stored video footage.
Given that ATMs are usually located all over the city, the process of retrieving recorded video used to be very challenging in terms of both timescale and costs. And as the Bank expanded its business, the number of its service points grew also, which made things even more complicated, contributing to the rising risk of a technical fault. It was, therefore, decided that Stage 2 of the revamping would involve providing remote access to systems installed on ATMs. This was aided by the special ATM Intellect module developed specifically for use by financial organizations with widely distributed ATM networks and many offices. ATM Intellect has helped to pool data from the ATM hardware and software protection tools, setting up centralized remote monitoring and providing hardware health checks and event response.
By using ATM Intellect, the operators were able to funnel in information about the security system health and events on the fly. Data were transmitted over a standard ATM transaction data link. Little bandwidth for video further prompted the development of a new algorithm for data transmission. Additionally, data flows proper were assigned this priority: when request for video footage archive by a remote operator coincides with a customer conducting a transaction, priority is given to financial transaction traffic, while video footage transmission is suspended for the respective period.
The solution for optimizing the customer complaints settlement procedure suggested by AxxonSoft was integration with ATM software whereby transaction data were synchronized with the video archive. Accordingly, search in the video archive was conducted with strict reference to a specific transaction. Additionally, the integration made it possible to realize the security system’s operating scenarios based on a specific ATM sequence of events.
The need for centralized monitoring emerged as a result of the need to integrate not only the stand-alone ATMs, but also the offices of the Bank into a single system. It was then that the program to redesign the offices of the North-Western Bank of the Sberbank of Russia was launched, which involved retrofitting security systems. This program was implemented alongside fitting out the monitoring center. To date, both the offices proper (400 offices) and the ATMs (some 4,500) have been fitted with video surveillance systems. To this end, AxxonSoft has developed a module for monitoring events and system health, with a specialized interface pooling the data on all components of the system. The interface itself proved to be both logical and user-friendly, which facilitated the work of operators lacking special skills and relieved the Bank from the necessity to provide lengthy training for new employees.