Rochford Thompson’s Eclipse helps ING Direct “save your money”

ING Direct is the world’s leading direct savings bank. The savings bank offers high rates of interest, possible not only because ING Direct does not have expensive branches to support but also because of a continuous commitment to increasing efficiency of all back-office processes and systems. As the advertisements say, “It’s your money we’re saving”.

Launched in the UK in May 2003, ING Direct has enjoyed runaway success attracting more than ¾ million customers. Existing systems for cheque reconciliation and lodgement were working well, though before sending for clearing, operations staff would manually remove exception items from batches and ensure cheque sequence matched the batch reports. The rapidly expanding customer base and increasing number of cheques received required assigning more people to this process step. ING Direct realised further efficiency gains could be achieved by automating much more of this process.

ING Direct selected the Eclipse remittance processing system from Rochford Thompson, which includes application specific cheque scanners/readers, Panini document transports and Rochford Thompson’s world leading payment processing software. The system creates larger batches and automatically sorts all accepted cheques, sequentially matching remittance reports, ready for banking.

“We were aiming for at least 50 per cent efficiency improvements with a new system,” said John Harrison of ING Direct, “but Rochford Thompson’s Eclipse system enabled us to achieve nearly five times that! We were looking for a return on this investment within 33 months but actually achieved it in nine months.”

Because the system is so fast and accurate, ING Direct staff are now continuously assigned to value-added tasks and because of its scalability, ING Direct is assured of system performance however many more customers open accounts.

John Harrison said, “Eclipse has allowed us much greater work flow flexibility as the reconciliation process can be started much later in the day. Large efficiency gains have resulted even across other parts of the Operations department so we are delighted with the results.”

Rochford Thompson is proud to say with ING Direct “It’s your money we’re saving”.

January 2005

"We were aiming for at least 50 per cent efficiency improvements with a new system, but Rochford Thompson’s Eclipse system enabled us to achieve nearly five times that! We were looking for a return on this investment within 33 months but actually achieved it in nine months."

"Eclipse has allowed us much greater work flow flexibility as the reconciliation process can be started much later in the day. Large efficiency gains have resulted even across other parts of the Operations department so we are delighted with the results."

John Harrison
ING Direct