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For more than 30 years, TAS has worked at the intersection of technology, infrastructure, and compliance, providing end-to-end managed services to companies operating in highly regulated markets, like financial services. Following their recent acquisition of Experteq, a Cloud, Virtual Desktop, and Enterprise Mobility services provider, they now also serve the government sector, managing and optimising applications, databases, systems, and digital platforms to deliver peak performance.
As COO Jonathan Plaskow explains,
“If you’re in financial services wishing to meet Australian regulations including migrate to cloud – we have all the industry plumbing ready and waiting to plug in, from telco and IT infrastructure to payment gateways, statement houses, cloud and anything you need if you’re a financial services institution. We aggregate several telco services and provide a management overlay on top of this – we provide support and managed telco and IT services to 100’s of bank branches across Australia.”
Building a robust omnichannel foundation
As a trusted technology partner to more than 40 per cent of Australia’s Tier 2 and 3 banks, mutual banks, credit unions, building societies, as well as several insurance companies, TAS needs the right service providers to help deliver reliability, compliance, and convenience to their clients.
The company chose Telstra as their connectivity partner, was one of the first to implement the Telstra Integrated Messaging (TIM) platform, powered by Soprano, over 10 years ago, and still relies on the platform as part of their omnichannel customer communication management today.
“This service has always been a must-have for us because it provides multi-factor authentication and one-time password, banking balance and notifications for our clients, and is one of the many connected elements of the technology landscape we provide – the industry plumbing,” shares Jonathan.
“As early adopters of this platform, we have seen it evolve over the years to become the trusted, reliable, and highly available platform it is today,” adds Mark Perry, TAS’ Head of Architecture who helped implement the service. “Our driving need for a stable, highly available, always-on platform that’s underpinning such critical member-facing services to our clients is why we leverage Telstra and their services, including the TIM platform.”
Stable, reliable and secure digitisation
For over 10 years, TIM has played a critical role in the digitisation of TAS’ customer-facing services. It provides the bridge between the traditional call centre interaction and a completely digital experience, helping build customer trust in mobile banking and self-service platforms.
TIM has also enabled TAS to diversify how they interact with customers and improve the way they service their needs. As customer interactions continue to digitise, the mobile messaging remains a key part of the company’s omnichannel user engagement. Three key benefits of the platform are:
- It provides an extra level of security to financial institutions and their customers
- SMS is a backup solution when other digital platforms fail or when internet connectivity is not available
- It is still part of multi-factor authentication and one-time password solutions for highly secure environments such as online banking.
Reduced complexity in compliance and communications
The portal management platform is easy to use, intuitive, and facilitates simplified reporting. Its modular nature also allows for individual customer billing and reporting.
Aside from incorporating it in their client technology portfolio, TAS started embracing TIM as part of their service management toolset – SMS is a foundational communication channel when others may not be accessible.
“We’ve integrated our IT service management processes so that whenever major incidents occur, we can issue bulletins and updates to customers quickly and efficiently,” explains Jonathan. “We use a suite of communication and notification tools to simplify this process, including SMS.”
TAS chose Telstra as their trusted connectivity partner due to the uniqueness of the TIM platform at the time, the strong working relationship built, and the fact that Telstra’s service met specific requirements for their banking customers. The TIM platform also became a key part of TAS’ protocol implementations, some of which are still being leveraged by the company’s banking platforms today.
“Telstra is an established, mature company with proper escalation protocols,” adds Mark. “We have a single point of contact for escalation 24/7 on this critical platform, as well as the geographical reach across Australia, which is especially important as a lot of our customers are regional.”
The TAS and Telstra partnership continues to play a key role in TAS’ broader ecosystem, powering the company’s capabilities as a trusted, reliable and secure end-to-end managed services provider to the financial and government sectors.
