EC|Wise, Inc. - Case Study: eBPP Vendor

The client is one of the largest combined billing and remittance processing service provider in the United States with both paper processes and industry leading electronic bill payment and presentment processes (eBPP).

Situation
The client needs to improve their business operations in a number of ways, including: increasing operational efficiencies; reducing the cost of development; positioning themselves for new vertical services; and improving their operations for migration from paper to the electronic services. They have numerous national printing and processing locations, which allow their customers to realize enormous postal savings.
Challenge
The existing methodologies for the printing services had separate applications running at the distributed locations due to business mergers and acquisitions. Data storage between clients, and for the same client, was also distributed. Larger clients, often the product of mergers and acquisitions themselves, added to the complexity in that their data file structures and multiple data feeds from various divisions were usually very different. To provide higher value services, the client recognized the need to compare and normalize data used for presentment (billing) with that used for the remittance processing (checks and credit cards, etc.) The client also had a need to more efficiently address the migration from paper processes to electronic, which were being handled by separate applications.
Resolution
The client and EC Wise arrived at a solution to capture, centralize and normalize the data. Together the client and EC Wise also decided to simplify and centralize the application design allowing for very large cost savings. The EC Wise Team then built a high availability centralized print processing platform to support the high volume multi-site print needs. EC Wise then architected a new enterprise data model for the Clients data warehousing initiatives that would consolidate data feeding in from both the presentment and payment sides of the business including the legacy print applications. EC Wise implemented state-of-the-art Pervasive Data Integrator ETL tools in support of the new data warehousing structures. The Pervasive tools are multi-threaded allowing for support of hundreds of time compressed SLAs, billions of monthly source records, nightly aggregation/data feed to the BI data warehouse and potentially 1000s of applications running at the same time. Pervasive DI is able to pass engine resource parameters at run-time. DI can integrate conceptual, physical and logical models (with the importation of IRWIN and Power Designer schemas). The new database houses more than 2 billion records. The client now has a robust, redundant, centralized application processing engine. Most of the application development is parameter driven and the extraction of data from customer data feeds has become more structured and standardized. The paper and electronic bill presentment and payment processes are using the same data allowing virtually effortless migration and transition for the clients customers from paper to electronic on an as needed basis. One of the key features of the data warehouse at a later stage will be its ability to represent the economic behavior of millions of consumers based on the delivery of statements to common addresses and receipt of payments drawn on common bank accounts. Capitalizing on this wealth of information in place, EC Wise has designed analytic models, built with the 3rd party data mining toolsets, to determine critical associations and enable improved targeting of customer offers. The EC Wise team has also begun construction of a management reporting capability. The client will be able to offer a full range of reporting and analytic options, from providing operational reporting on historic and current print and remit activity to dimensional analysis of customer behavior. The system gives the client a 360 degree view of household economic activity that will be unique in the industry. They will be able to offer new market analysis and demand generation services that significantly differentiate them from their competitors.

Centralized Processing for Billing and Remittance