Cash Solutions: Securing Collections and Banknote Validations

IQ was set the challenge to assist in the secure collection and validation of banknotes environment in a major cash operator within retail and banking environments.

The Business Challenge

While the customer experience in secure cash was a good one where same day service was being achieved, our client - the financial institution - was experiencing losses when the containers it received in the cash centers and branches were of a lower value than the amount that they had credited to their clients. The system was fairly new, and the process needed to be explained and controls put in place to prevent these potentially crippling fraudulent losses.

The Solution

IQ first started work on the project in September 2009. Our engagement involved realigning the bank’s process around the secure cash operation, assessing their accounting practices and investigating losses in the process. The solution included:

• Doing past and present investigations
• Designing an entire end-to-end process for the whole cash operations that would cater for growth
• Assisting the bank to educate their clients more effectively
• Phasing in permanent staff to take over business as usual
• Providing training on the process to the country-wide cash centres and managers
• Developing an IT interface for client queries

The Benefits

We were able to assist the client by dramatically decreasing their losses in their cash operations. This was done by constantly meeting with the suppliers, correcting their processes on the ground and constantly evaluating and correcting any anomalies. As a result we were able to curb the losses dramatically, decrease outstanding amount s owed to customers by 93% and refund their clients R4 million rand of monies due to them.

Due to the success of this project, we were asked to broaden the scope of the cash solutions to include other cash operations. This dealt with the issue of clients’ not always receiving their cash, and meant that we needed to have a look at surplus amounts, and deal with the customer interaction side of the transaction thoroughly.

At the same time, IQ also bought in a team to finalise the historic transitions where there were larger than acceptable losses and surpluses, investigating the losses and transferring the surpluses to the correct clients. IQ was also asked to design a reporting system and re-engineer processes for faster turnaround time.

This project provided our clent with a holistic IQ solution,  saving our client millions by concentrating on what is important and systematically correcting problem areas.