Originally published May 2000, ABA Bank Marketing, By John J. Coffey, CPA and Gene Palm  www.profitres.com

What is an interface and why it is important?  What data elements should be used within your MCIF? How long does it take to install your MCIF?

In our last column we discussed how to purchase an MCIF.  We compared an MCIF to your brain.  Without your brain, you wouldn’t be able to combine the information from your five senses into a holistic perspective of the world around you.  Just like your brain, your bank needs an MCIF to combine information from multiple sources to produce a holistic perspective on its customers.

Let’s take this analogy a step further.  Why do you need your five senses?  If you couldn’t see, hear, touch, taste or feel, no information from your own body, let alone the outside world, would be communicated to your brain.  Just like your five senses, your bank needs a way to communicate internally and externally generated information about its customers to the MCIF.  If there is no interface, or connection, to this information, your MCIF is useless.

So, exactly what is an interface?  Simply stated, an interface is a method of translating data from one format to another format.  (i.e., your eyes translate light and send it as nerve impulses where chemical changes take place within your neurons.)  In the banking industry, an example of an interface for an MCIF would be one where data is translated from a mainframe format to a personal computer format.  An MCIF interface is written by a team of programmers and is specifically designed to translate data from a particular data provider (e.g., M&I, FiServe, EDS, Kirchman, etc.) into a format that their MCIF understands.

An interface needs to do two basic functions:

1.      It needs to translate the characters (e.g., alpha-numeric from a mainframe EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange) format into a personal computer ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) format).

2.      It needs to communicate where each piece of data is located and how these pieces of data are separated from each other. 

After the interface has translated, located and separated the data, the data elements from each account may be strung together as one line of data in a “flat-file” format, or it may be loaded into a relational database as tables of data with a common “link-key,” most commonly the account number.

To make sure all of your bank’s senses are communicating, there needs to be a unique interface for each system within the bank.  Typically, a bank will build an interface for its Core Systems.  And, often the MCIF vendor may have an interface available for these Core Systems:

§         Savings

§         Checking

§         Certificates and Retirement (CDs and IRAs)

§         Consumer Loans

§         Mortgage

However, a special interface might need to be custom programmed for these functions:

§         Sold Mortgages

§         Credit Cards

§         Trust

§         Mutual Funds and Annuities

Data Elements

The banking industry is probably one of the most data rich industries in the world.  After all, each customer has many data elements that describe their account, the types and numbers of various transactions they have made over time as well as where they have made these transactions.  However, even though your core systems have generated this wealth of information about your customers, whether that data is useful to the MCIF is another issue.  Just as your brain cannot absorb every bit of data that is communicated to it, your MCIF should not be expected to maintain all the data already on the core systems.  As such, you must be selective of which data elements to bring into the MCIF.

That pretty well covers internally generated data.  However, a bank also needs to interface to externally generated data such as:

§         Demographics

§         Credit Scoring

§         Historical Funds Transfer Pricing (FTP)

Typically, this information can be purchased from third parties directly by you or your MCIF Vendor.  Then, an interface can be built so that this external data can be added or “appended” to your accounts or households.

In the following exhibit, you will find a very abbreviated list of the data elements and their source:

Installing your MCIF

Installing an MCIF is a complex exercise.  Even if your vendor has a standard interface available for your core systems, it can still take 8-12 weeks to install your system.  If you change data vendors or add another major function within your bank, it can take another 8-12 weeks to make sure everything is working correctly.

If your senses are telling you to market smarter, you will need an MCIF with a good interface!

John J. Coffey and Gene Palm are the principals of Profit Resources, a consulting company that specializes in MCIF technologies.  www.profitres.com.  © Profit Resources 2006