Allied Irish Bank AIB and customers praise value of XMLdation validation services

Allied Irish Bank AIB has been an XMLdation customer for years, successfully implementing the XMLdation Validator service to provide first-class support to their corporate customers. Receiving raving reviews from their clients, AIB managers and help desk staff praise the cooperation with the Finnish software specialists – a success story for the bank and its customers.

“During my long career developing interoperable systems, I would say that AIB technical support for SEPA messaging was the best as they saved us significant time and effort”, Edmund Gray, Lead developer at Tubbercurry Software Ltd, says. And continues, “my interface was with a person on a help desk who had access to a great system.”

AIB’s Payments Change Manager Keith Davis is pleased to hear such feedback. Keeping end users satisfied by speeding up implementation work is the main objective in the support team’s day-to-day work. And while clients are happy with XMLdation Validator’s quality reports, his staff describes the service as critical to the operation of migrating users to XML and setting up new customers on payment file services. After all, using a specialised validation service for XML payment messages has eliminated a lot of complexity from their daily tasks.

The service is utilised mainly in the early testing stages during SEPA migration projects, where AIB uses the Validator to weed out most major issues before commencing production testing. Customers also send in corrupt files when facing issues in production systems and the XMLdation validation report provides a quick path to resolve the problem.

Large file validation and multicurrency support

The recent addition of large file validation to the XMLdation Validator has greatly reduced workload at the help desk. Where the team previously had to run large files through their production system – an obviously inconvenient and complex effort – the XMLdation service today handles such validations with ease: “Streamlining the procedure regardless of file size makes our work easier and enables more consistent reporting to the end user,” Davis summarises.

Apart from SEPA, the service is also being used by another AIB unit, where testing for multicurrency transactions has been going just as smoothly: “I am yet to receive the first complaint about the Validator,” Paul Rohan, Head of Payments and Cards Strategy at AIB and in charge of the overall transaction banking operations, smiles.

An approachable partner to rely on

“The XMLdation service plays an important role in AIB’s customer onboarding”, Rohan explains, “we are able to forward the reports from the XMLdation service, which are of outstanding quality and contribute to the professional service we want to provide our clients.” Empowering customers to quickly proceed in their software migration adds to a memorable customer experience and reduces workloads on both ends.

Rohan highlights the importance of involving a third party with specific expertise on the messaging protocols: “XMLdation has hands-on-experience with XML payment practices at banks all over Europe – what better partner to review and consult on our own implementations”. With PSD2 and other new regulations ahead, AIB expects to further benefit from XMLdation’s pan-European insight and experience.

Intuitive tools for great customer care

Payments Change Manager Davis and his team find the service very easy to use. As AIB are looking at businesses not yet submitting XML to be migrated in a second phase by the end of 2015, the team of six support specialists is approaching the endeavour with calm: Davis has not received any requests for training – the workflow is so straightforward that everybody is confident to deliver consistent support quality, just as Lead developer Gray at Tubbercurry Software witnessed.