Article

A new approach

Level Four builds Bridge to impact the way ATMs do business.

May 29, 2007 by Tracy Kitten — Editor, AMC

The industry talks often of things like customer relationship management, targeted marketing and multivendor networks. But most financial institutions have yet to reach the pinnacle of those offerings. Outdated infrastructures based on legacy systems have for decades sheltered and separated the ATM from technological advancements.

 

FIs are working to rebuild their backend systems to accommodate ATM-channel enhancements, but it's been, and continues to be, a long and drawn-out process.

 

United Kingdom-based Level Four Software Ltd. is pitching its new Bridge family of ATM-software products as a solution.

 

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"Bridge - it's an uncompromising approach because it's not carrying any baggage from the past," said Nigel Walsh, executive chairman of Level Four. "Right away we're talking about applications that can be used at the ATM. We create a service that is completed as it goes along. This approach is fundamentally different from manufacturers, because the solution is more about solving a problem from the point of business implementation."

 

Madhavi Mantha, an industry analyst at Boston-based Celent LLC, says FIs have invested time and resources into making multivendor ATM software and hardware, a reality; but they have a long way to go.

 

"It hasn't been as easy for banks to implement multivendor software," Mantha said. "The reality of being able to benefit from the promise of time-to-market for functions, etc., has not been realized, at least not yet."

 

Hardware vendors have touted and promoted "open software," she said, but most have yet to fully live up to the idea.

 

"The vendors have been more focused on trying to get their FI customers to commit to one hardware provider, more than trying to promote the open-software side," Mantha said. "I think we've not made as much progress as originally predicted. But I think the adoption of Windows ATMs has been slower than we initially thought, and that has had an impact."

 

Walsh agrees manufacturers have had trouble meeting market demands from a software perspective.

 

Most original equipment manufacturers, he said, have developed solutions that reside on the ATM, rather than on a server making translation across a network or even an enterprise difficult, especially when networks comprise hardware from multiple vendors.

 

"Wincor, at the moment, from the manufacturer's perspective, has the most open vision," Walsh said. "But they have a lot of legacy applications written into their software.

 

The advantage to Bridge, Walsh says, is that it is a third-party solution developed from scratch.

 

"We don't have all of those applications out in the market that need to be upgraded. For us, we have a clean slate of paper," he said.

 

Some of the manufacturers' hiccups in the software space have played a role in the slower-than-expected migration to Windows, Walsh said. But once the industry makes the leap to open standards like IFX (Interactive Financial eXchange) and XFS, new approaches to ATM deployment will emerge.

 

"When IFX starts to take hold, there's a chance for a different approach," Walsh said.

 

As more ATMs move to Windows, Level Four is working to expand its market reach, and Walsh says Bridge's "unique" architectural approach is expected to have an impact.

 

And Walsh reiterated Mantha's point - that the ATM channel's stagnation has more to do with the way FIs approach building and deploying new ATM services than it does with software or function limitations.

 

"The banks' real problem is on the business side," he said. "They come up with new ideas, but they have no way of testing and building those prototypes in a timely manner. It really is more of a business problem than it is a technical problem."

 

By approaching ATM services and solutions holistically, with architecture in mind and testing integrated into the overall offering, FIs can more easily make changes and additions, Walsh said.

 

"They don't have to have software written specially for the bank," he said.

 

What's different: Thick client versus thin client

 

Bridge includes five pieces: Bridge:author, Bridge:test, Bridge:install, Bridge:deploy and Bridge:control. Each piece oversees a specific part of the solution cycle.

 

Author is a graphical development environment for ATM applications and content that can be used by technical and business staff; test enables automated end-to-end testing; install mans integration and installation; deploy allows for the deployment of service bundles across networks without requiring ATMs to be taken offline; and control, Bridge's newest component, is an ATM-monitoring solution based on KIXOperator, which is supplied by Salzburger Banken Software.

 

In February, Level Four announced plans to work with SBS to leverage its global customer base and adopt SBS's KIXOperator. And North American and European FIs are being targeted by Level Four, Walsh said.The monitoring component from SBS, he added, has taken Bridge to the next level.

 

"We think branching out this way will be important for our business," Walsh said.

 

Although Walsh would not discuss specific clients, he did say that Level Four has signed its first U.S. client as well as a customer in Canada.

 

"It's a different architecture approach. All others are two box - a host and an ATM, like (ACI Worldwide's) Base24. And they work in the old NDC or 912 environment, where the control is in the ATM," he said. "What we are proposing is a thin-client approach. So when a customer puts his card into the ATM, his information is dynamically pulled from the server. If you do that, all you have to do is update the server when you want to make a change."

 

Walsh said he expects and hopes the industry will follow the Bridge lead.

 

"What we're doing with Bridge is putting a stake in the ground," he said. "Others may be able to follow our architecture, but we do claim to be unique at this point."