Jakarta 29 September 2000
Bank Niaga transformed to click-and-brick through ASP Bank2Home.com
JAKARTA (September 29, 2000) : Living up to its customer commitment to provide Unlimited Access (Akses Tanpa Batas), publicly listed Bank Niaga today signed a long term agreement with application service provider Pacomnet (Pacific Communication Networks) to provide eBanking services to its customers.

As banks exploit electronic-enabling technologies to their competitive advantage, visionary Bank Niaga takes it one step further by leveraging the benefits of the application service provider (ASP) solution to deliver virtual banking services. As a growing number of companies worldwide have discovered, working with an ASP offers valuable business benefits including the potential to reduce information technology (IT) costs by 30 to 60%, reduce time to market for new products and services, and more effectively allocate scarce resources.

Online banking via the Bank2Home.com ASP, accessed from Bank Niaga's corporate site, allows the bank to offer its services and products to customers at any time and at any location. Customers can make their transactions from the comfort of their web browsers. They can make balance inquiries, transfer funds, pay bills, and generally manage their personal finances through the Internet or from wherever there is Internet access.

Providing eBanking services was the next logical step for Bank Niaga, having put in place other delivery channels - ATM, PC banking, and phone banking - in its bid to continuously provide better service to its customers.

"Asia is emerging as an Internet and eCommerce force, though the Asian experience will be unlike that of the US and Europe. We recognize that the Internet lets our customers save time and money, making their banking experiences a convenient one. This is why it became imperative for us to be online. In order to achieve greater speed to market at lower costs, we chose to outsource the eBanking application to Pacomnet," stated Bank Niaga CEO Peter B. Stock.

According to Pacomnet managing director Constantin Papadimitriou, there are many reasons why companies would choose to work with an application service provider like Pacomnet but the bottom line is speed to market and reduced investment and operational costs. "We provide a turnkey solution: the application, the IT infrastructure, and the integration to banking operations necessary to deliver eBanking to Bank Niaga's customers. We host the application at our data center which interfaces to the bank's back office system via a private link and deliver the eBanking application to the customers via the Internet. With an ASP solution like Bank2Home.com, the bank can focus resources on core business issues, instead of IT concerns. So, you're looking at a lower cost of IT ownership, greater predictability of IT costs and increased IT flexibility. But more importantly, with Bank2Home.com, we afford financial institutions the opportunity to compete globally."