Oman Arab Bank achieves revenue growth and ROI from SMS based banking services

Oman Arab Bank implemented BANKSMART from Acette Technologies, which is powered by Derdack's message master xsp.

The bank's new "Tawasul" SMS based mobile banking service is a key tool for customer acquisition and retention, and increasing market share in Oman.

Mr. Hassan Abdul Ali Al-Lawati, Deputy General Manager IT-Head at Oman Arab Bank said,

"We selected BANKSMART™, powered by message master® xsp, as it has the flexibility to be configured to meet our sophisticated requirements. We now have a system that uniquely delivers both English and Arabic mobile banking functionality and has powerful features for exploiting SMS as a two way communication channel."

Oman Arab Bank's mobile banking service allows customers to access their accounts using any standard mobile phone device.

Customers are notified of account activity and other bank advices and confirmations are sent automatically by SMS.

Alerts are generated on predefined events such as salary credits, account transactions or ATM withdrawals.

The bank has also found message master® xsp's ability to support 'Push and Pull' marketing campaigns to be invaluable.

Marketing and other bulk messages are sent via a high speed interface to multiple mobile operators via SMSC links and inbound SMS requests are automatically processed.

This gives the bank a highly cost effective, responsive and targeted customer communication channel.

Oman Arab Bank has differentiated itself from competitors in its use of SMS as a key enabler of banking and payment services.

It is the only bank in Oman that offers a range of options that can be accessed using SMS, e.g. account transfers, utility payments, smartcard top-ups and real-time payments to mobile operators.

Oman Arab Bank has devised a unique strategy for using BANKSMART™ and message master® xsp to validate customer SMS requests using secure authentication tokens.

This ensures that only genuine transactions are processed, and enhances overall security.

Oman Arab Bank has also simplified the process of transferring mobile prepaid credits.

Topup credit can be purchased through a retailer, who can then securely transfer the credit, in real-time directly to the customer via SMS.

"We are the only bank that provides a top-up service for both mobile networks in Oman and this has opened up a new revenue generation channel," said Mr Al-Lawati.

"The project to implement our Tawasul mobile banking services has been a big success. We have seen a positive return on investment and our highly flexible infrastructure means that we now have the ability to develop new SMS alerts or services quickly," concluded Mr Hatem Ali Executive Manager e-Banking.

Sunil Sivanand, Managing Director of Acette Technologies added, "The bank has pushed the boundaries of what can be achieved using BANKSMART™ and message master® xsp. We have continually improved product flexibility to address the mobile banking, multi-lingual and multi-cultural banking needs of the middle-east region."

Matthes Derdack, Managing Director of Derdack commented, "Oman Arab Bank has shown what can be achieved by combining expert local knowledge, an innovative vision of how to exploit the SMS channel and the latest technology for mobile banking, to achieve revenue and customer growth."