Discovery Limited is a leader within the insurance industry. Present across Europe, Asia and its native region of South Africa, the group specialises in Health, Life and Wellness insurance. Discovery employs over 50,000 people and owns brands such as Vitality Insurance and Standard Life.
To build on their brand promise of ‘doing it different’, Discovery wanted to enter into the retail banking market within South Africa. In order to optimise the opportunity, Discovery turned to technology providers SAP to build and implement the world’s first ‘behavioural bank’.
The appeal of Discovery working with SAP was ‘the concept of banking in a box,’ which allowed them to excel delivery with a focus on integrating the SAP banking solution with the South African National settlement system. However, SAP’s banking platform did not allow for any direct credit card processing; the SAP model was premised on banks relying on card processing specialists to manage their card portfolios on their behalf and not to be directly integrated with the card provider. According to Discovery CIO Jerome Frey, "That model simply wouldn’t work for us — we wanted SAP’s systems to process the information."
In order to meet the requirement of being directly integrated with the card provider Visa, SAP needed a solution to allow bank users to view, issue and manage Visa issued credit and debit cards on behalf of its clients. As a licensed SAP partner who has worked on SAP Banking Services since its foundational release, Bancon was enlisted to support SAP with the discovery, design, development and delivery of the Card Management enhancement.
Bancon gathered functional requirements from the bank and aligned these to existing functionality within the SAP core solution and was able to build an extension to an existing product that brought valued innovation, and would streamline client’s internal processes.
The implementation of a product that includes features such as direct integration with the Visa network (ISO 8385), virtual card capability and a Fiori based user interface to track payments, cards and user information. This product now features as a standard SAP product offering, SAP Card Management on S/4HANA. The Card Management solution was seen as a real win for Discovery.
