Comerica’s Banking Center Help Desk and the Branch Assistance Administration groups needed the ability to send broadcast messages to approximately 500 banking centers.

The existing technology used by the bank was outdated and required dedicated workstations with mainframe connectivity. This technology lacked flexibility, a user-friendly interface, and did not conform to the bank’s security requirements.

Comerica identified the following requirements for the replacement product:

· Provide a “user-friendly” graphical user interface 
· Provide the ability to send notification to select banking centers, regions or all banking centers
· Provide a success/failure status message back to confirm whether a message was sent and received

Information Security also identified the following requirements:

· Restrict access by user id and role (e.g. Administrator) 
· Able to integrate with Active Directory for user authentication

“We evaluated three vendor products based on our requirements. After reviewing all three products we found that NetSupport Notify provided the best overall solution that met all of the banks needs.”

NetSupport Notify is used by Comerica Banking Center Help Desk to send notifications to approximately 500 Banking Centers and 2,500 workstations. The notifications vary from informational messages to urgent high-level alerts. Comerica has documented procedures that categorize the messages and how the Banking Centers need to respond to them.

“NetSupport Notify needed to integrate with our existing Teller application. We started a major project to migrate the Teller application to new hardware, from OS/2 to Windows Vista. Implementation of NetSupport Notify and integration with the Teller application was part of this effort.

One of the challenges that we encountered was how notification messages would be displayed on the screen while the Teller application was active. A key factor to consider was how to display the messages and not disrupt the work that the teller was doing. We provided some customization to our workstations to minimize the Teller application window when a notification message was displayed and restore it to full screen after the message was acknowledged. We were able to effectively use NetSupport Notify to categorize our messages in terms of priority and when the recipient would need to acknowledge them.”

Key benefits identified by Comerica are:

Access 
“The Banking Center Help Desk has identified this as one of the primary benefits. We have customised the product to allow the groups to remote access the Notification Console from any workstation once they have properly authenticated.”

Graphical User Interface 
“The product GUI has been deemed to be very “user friendly” and intuitive to use. The Notification History and searching capabilities are popular features.”

Flexibility 
“The ability to configure groups and hierarchies for sending messages is a very important capability. We have implemented a group hierarchy for sending messages including markets and regions based on location, banking centers, and workstation types within banking centers (e.g. tellers and management).”

“Comerica Bank is extremely pleased with NetSupport Notify and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to install and use. We are looking forward to future releases of the product and new features that it may provide.”