Case Study

North American Financial Giant Installs PrintSoft Card Issuance System

The CEO of AMEX, Ken Chenault, in Business Week stated, "The credit card industry is in the midst of the biggest fight in its history for share of a saturated market. All the major brands and banks are in a frenzy to woo and retain fickle high spenders. It’s now a matter of how to steal share from one another, innovate, and tap new markets.”

Presented with more available card types and products than ever before, card customers are driving issuers to bring new card programs to market faster. Global growth in credit, debit and smart cards is putting increasing pressure on card issuers to invest in more flexible, robust card-issuing technology.

One of North America’s largest issuers of VISA and MasterCards recently installed PrintSoft’s Card Issuance Production System (CIPS) in its card production environment.

The benefits of this system can include:

• Increased output by as much as 100% with existing hardware!
• Reduced costs associated with pre-prints and forms management
• Increased production automation, control, accuracy and reporting
• Flexibility to address client demand for personalized communications at the cardholder level

Problems Posed by Legacy Card Issuance Systems
Typically, legacy card issuance systems are unconnected or otherwise limited in their ability to communicate with modern IT infrastructures. These systems also lack logic capabilities and are unable to be driven by business rules for document composition. Another shortfall is their inability to generate dynamic special-offer marketing messages without manual manipulation of data structures—often a time consuming process. Legacy systems pose significant limitations. Among them are:

• Limited ability to generate dynamic, data-driven, targeted documents
• Limited page sizes, formats and page counts
• Costly manual management of carrier templates across multiple issuance systems
• Costly and inefficient manipulation of data structures when changes are requested
• Dependence on high cost pre-printed forms
• Inability to provide piece tracking and production status information for each stage of the process (embossing, affixing and inserting)
• Cumbersome processes for the support of intelligent inserting functions

How to Increases Productivity Using Existing Hardware
Utilising a centralised data management and document composition approach, PrintSoft’s Card Issuance Production System provides the ability to:

• Base the creation of dynamic, targeted carrier production on legacy data structures
• Improve efficiencies through maximized job batching and significant reduction of job change-over time
• Create job tickets to improve quality assurance and operator productivity
• Capture and display itemised job and piece-level status information
• Reduce costly pre-prints through dynamic document production that includes terms, conditions and other changeable elements
• Create production reports for management available via the web
• Full reconciliation of all production processes
• Converts card carriers to fully variable, highly personalised, targeted marketing pieces
• Reduces costs associated with forms management (purchasing, printing, warehousing and obsolescence)
• Complete visibility of all production processes for management purposes
• Ability to seamlessly integrate new high-speed card personalisation and issuance systems into existing environments

The customer—whose name has been withheld due to confidentiality agreements—is among the top five card issuance operations in North America. PrintSoft’s CIPS system is the driving force within the card production environment supporting 48 DataCard - UltraForm 9000 and multiple Bowe Bell+Howell High Speed Plastic Card systems. In-line print capabilities will be provided by Oce.

David Frenkel, PrintSoft Americas’ CEO notes, “PReS-based systems have been installed in card issuance operations throughout Europe, Asia and North America. The system we’re implementing for our new client is the most productive and far-reaching that we’ve ever implemented. There’s no question that it will make our client the envy of the card issuance industry.”

Summary:
The new card production system enables card production operations to respond to market demands faster, more cost-effectively, with fewer defects and with greater flexibility.

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