To be successful in an intensely competitive international card payment industry, Intesa Sanpaolo Card needs to be agile and efficient—two qualities it wasn’t previously experiencing with its complex, green-screen type BASE24 interfaces. To boost efficiency and agility, while leveraging its BASE24 investments, the IT organization within Intesa Sanpaolo Card embarked on an initiative that would enable them to deliver access to BASE24 capabilities through a single, intuitive, Web-based interface. To meet these objectives, the organization turned to comForte and its CSL solution.

The Challenge
Based in Croatia and Slovenia, Intesa Sanpaolo Card is a payment card company that serves financial services clients across Central-Eastern Europe and in the Mediterranean basin. In prior years, Intesa Sanpaolo Card had made a significant investment in its BASE24 classic infrastructure, which formed the backbone of a host of core business functions, including transaction overviews, card blocking, terminal maintenance, and voice authorization.

The IT team was tasked with developing new applications for clients and for developing and maintaining applications for the NonStop platform. To unify efforts in these two areas, the IT team would have to integrate old BASE24 Cobol screens with new technologies, an effort that posed significant challenges. However, while integration presented challenges, sticking with the current approach would continue to cost the company dearly in several areas:

•  Training costs. Any time new administrators were hired, the IT organization had to invest a great deal of time and budget in training. 
• Security exposure. The staff had a difficult time ensuring the requisite levels of security when exposing BASE24 interfaces to clients. 
• Cumbersome development. Given the time, effort, and cost associated with the development of new BASE24 functionality, the IT organization was unable to deliver a lot of the capabilities that customers and the business required.
• Administrative complexity. Particularly as the IT organization needed to support more clients across different countries, maintaining user access rights and exposing BASE24 screens was too complex to maintain. 
• Inconvenient interface. Customers were growing increasingly dissatisfied with the complexity and inconvenience of working with the old, text-based BASE24 interface.

The Solution
To address the challenges associated with BASE24 access, the IT organization sought to develop a central Web application that would provide users with a single interface for accessing multiple back-end processes and systems, including all of the company’s BASE24 functions. The department’s management realized that by doing so, they could leverage new technologies, develop new capabilities much more quickly, provide a more intuitive user interface, manage user access policies more efficiently, and streamline administration—all without having to install any software on customer workstations.

For their initiative to deliver optimal benefits, the IT organization needed to have this single Web application use different communication methods, including JDBC, Web services, and JMS TCPIP, to connect to multiple backend systems—including BASE24. To realize these integration objectives, the team chose comForte Client Server Link (CSL). CSL equips the staff at Intesa Sanpaolo Card with a single platform that enables a broad range of client programming and runtime environments to gain secure access to HP NonStop systems and BASE24.

One of the key capabilities of CSL was that it would enable access to all BASE24 capabilities (which are implemented as Pathway servers), including such core functions as card blocking, terminal maintenance, and voice authorizations. In addition to these key solution capabilities, the expertise of comForte staff also played a critical role in the selection—and in the ultimate success of the initiative.

“During our evaluation of CSL software, the comForte team was very helpful, so the final decision to go with comForte CSL was quite easy,” said the Project Director at Intesa Sanpaolo Card. “Thanks to comForte’s solutions and people, we successfully implemented all the capabilities we needed—and did so within the desired time frames.  comForte provided us with excellent support throughout the entire project.”

The Benefits
Since leveraging the CSL solution, Intesa Sanpaolo Card was able to realize a host of significant benefits:

• Improved customer convenience and satisfaction. As opposed to having to interact with multiple systems and complex, text-based interfaces, end users can work within an intuitive, Web-browser interface for accessing all their applications. 
• Streamlined maintenance. Now, the IT staff can manage user access policies for all BASE24 capabilities in a single location, which helps save a significant amount of time.
• Agility and flexibility. With CSL, the IT staff can develop and deploy capabilities that clients need—and do so in a timely, cost-effective manner. Further, by working with modern development environments and interfaces, the IT department can now transfer a lot of ongoing management and maintenance work to partners and clients.
• Maximized return on NonStop and BASE24 investments. By enabling modern technologies and platforms to access NonStop and BASE24 environments, Intesa Sanpaolo Card is able to fully leverage its existing investments in these platforms, while harnessing all the benefits of modern techniques and tools.

About Intesa Sanpaolo Card
Intesa Sanpaolo Card is a payment card company dedicated to developing and managing card business on an international level. Intesa Sanpaolo Card is a member of Intesa Sanpaolo Group, one of the largest European banking groups. Located in Croatia and Slovenia, Intesa Sanpaolo Card serves clients across Central-Eastern Europe and in the Mediterranean basin. The company takes a global, customer-oriented approach, offering a service portfolio that is tailored to meet regional and local markets, as well as individual client requirements and business strategies.
For more information about Intesa Sanpaolo Card please visit http://www.intesasanpaolocard.com/.