Unkapt is an alternative lending, cross-border capital raising platform offering APAC small and lower middle market issuers (SMEs) the opportunity to use innovative financing to raise capital among a network of accredited investors.

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  Business challenge
  
• 
  Solution
  
• 
  Solution Components
  
• 
  Results
  

Business challenge

Unkapt was looking for a solution that could efficiently deal with incoming inquiries and provide accurate and immediate answers to the customers who are filling in a complex set of registration forms. The registration forms require a good understanding of financial literature and terminologies.

Unkapt wanted to simplify the customer onboarding process that could be implemented quickly and used to help customers in commonly asked questions while filling up the form.

Solution

Unkapt chose Nexright to implement IBM Watson enabled Chatbot solution to automate it’s platform support FAQ, by providing contextual answers to customer queries quickly, efficiently and round the clock.

Solution components

• IBM Bluemix
• IBM Watson Developer Cloud
• Conversation Service

Watson Conversation service

IBM Watson ™ Conversation service, that understands natural-language input and uses machine learning to respond to customers in a way that simulates a conversation between humans.

Product Q&A

A knowledge base driven FAQ solution allowing customers to easily ask questions and receive immediate answers without leaving the registration process.

Context Driven Solution

Chatbot understands the user context, for example what section of the form the user is filling in.

Result

• Reduce Customer support cost

Minimize dependency on higher cost support channels by letting Watson Chatbot handle customer queries.

• Improve User experience by simplifying customer onboarding

Self-service to deflect and resolve simple queries while allowing customer support to focus on more complex issues.

• Resolve customer concerns and scale the business globally with round the clock support

Real time support by solving the most common customer issues on the first touch.

Nexright’s IBM Watson enabled Chatbot solution simplified our customer onboarding journey with immediate answers to hundreds of frequently asked questions.

Yanese Chellapen, Director at Unkapt

Nexright helped a federal agency to implement and secure and effective business integration solutions utilizing IBM Websphere Datapower Appliances

Adopting a B2B strategy can streamline business processes and cut costs by enabling Government organizations to communicate electronically with other federal agencies. The emergence of XML and Web Services as the standards for B2B interoperability allows business information to be exchanged via a variety of technologies, from a simple web browser to a fully integrated solution, to suit the size of the enterprise.

• 
  The Challenge
  
• 
  The Solution
  
• 
  The Benefits
  
• 
  Nexright Advantage
  

The Challenge

• As the client build B2B value chains, they must open up systems which were previously never available outside the firewall to partners’ access.
• Multiple servers, proxies, and other products in the DMZ for security, breaking the fundamental principal that the DMZ should be an uncomplex, barren, hostile environment to any potential intruder.
• Complex environments are also difficult and expensive to administer, often requiring different skills, teams, and product knowledge.
• Security behind the DMZ and in other areas (private, trusted zone, extranet) is important as well, and often weak or neglected due to expense and integration challenges.
• Technology stacks running in silo environments that can’t exchange security, services or messages, lack of true enterprise-wise single sign-on.
• They decided to use XML, Web Services, and SOA as their standards-based approach in order to speed delivery of business value, but they found that it was natively insecure. This approach was introducing risk and reducing overall performance.
• Secure information exchange was a high priority, but it was a complex topic which slowed down their projects. They wanted a simple way to secure, manage, mediate, and protect messages.

The Solution

• Nexright helped the customer in start using the DataPower appliance to quickly mitigate the problems inherent in XML. This resulted in lower costs and faster value because on-boarding new users no longer placed such a burden on both sides. It also relieved an anticipated performance degradation.
• With a more efficient and flexible system in place, the agency has expanded its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) infrastructure and achieved integration with the other partners, while increasing customer satisfaction. The solution provides a higher degree of security and compliance, which are crucial in this industry.

The Benefits

Key to any successful engagement is to facilitate integration with existing applications by exposing enterprise applications as Web services, and defining and implementing XML security, data transformation and data validation.

Nexright WebSphere DataPower Consulting Services are the perfect complement during any phase of the project. They include:

• Security: Moving more applications into Web services and SOA means greater exposure to XMLspecific threats. Nexright implemented IBM WebSphere DataPower solution to protect against vulnerabilities by acting as a proxy and performing security checks. Additionally, DataPower natively has full encryption/decryption capabilities, and enables the use of digital signatures.
• Access Control: DataPower implementation inspects all incoming messages, performs authentication and authorization for each message, and reject and log invalid requests, to help ensure that only valid requests reach the backend servers. Instead of implementing access control in each XML application, centralizing access policy enforcement, DataPower provides an architecturally sound, easy to manage, and cost-effective solution.
• Speed: Nexright increased overall efficiency with a DataPower XML routing solution which offers improved manageability, performance and reliability routing XML messages based on message content, SOAP headers, and network-level metadata. Additionally, it can inspect XML documents or SOAP requests and, based on XML payloads, direct them to appropriate backend servers. It can also perform wire speed XML transformation to re-format incoming messages.
• Compliance: With the increase of compliance issues and regulations, more and more companies are having to re-think their infrastructure to avoid steep fines or worse. Nexright implemented DataPower solution which will adhere to regulations and by offering a central point to provide the security to protect networks, encrypt sensitive data, filter for common virus and hacker attacks in addition to being the central place to monitor compliance.

Nexright Advantage

• A team of dedicated Datapower certified consultants. The consultants have very strong Integration, Security and Java skills. Consultants have many years of Datapower experience.
• Strong experience in Identity & Access Management & SOA security solutions
• Nexright’s pre-built integration and security Datapower modules saved a lot of time in building foundation framework.
• Datapower Automation Framework

Unkapt is an alternative lending, cross-border capital raising platform offering APAC small and lower middle market issuers (SMEs) the opportunity to use innovative financing to raise capital among a network of accredited investors.

• 
  Retail foundation & SOA drives a smarter shopping experience
  
• 
  Complete view of the customer
  
• 
  Challenge overview
  
• 
  Results
  

Retail foundation & SOA drives a smarter shopping experience

• Retail Customer is a leading Australian fashion house specializing in female & junior ranges.Following the successful growth in Australia, Retail Customer is expanding aggressively in UK, Asia & e-Commerce channels.
• Retail Customer went through a major digital transformation initiative, which involved leveraging Service Oriented Architecture to consolidate data from various systems to build the foundation for future application.
• This will allow Retail Customer to improve sales, increase margins and align with its global expansion strategy as it provides a single source of the data, which is always current.

Complete view of the customer

• Retail Customer implicitly understood that to successfully implement the kind of customer centricity envisioned, a comprehensive customer data strategy was a pre-requisite and developing one would not be easy.
• Its first order of business was to consolidate the data repositories duplicated in multiple business applications. Realizing the importance of this foundation work to its long-term customer data strategy, Retail Customer turned to service oriented architecture (SOA).
• Retail Customer engaged Nexright as their MuleSoft partner to implement a retail service bus leveraging SOA principles to allow a dynamic, data driven and integrated e-Commerce solution.
• MuleSoft ESB was the solution of choice because it has an extensive list of out of the box connectors and data mapper components which can be used to quickly and easily integrate On-Premise and SaaS applications reliably and securely.
• With the first stage of its transformation virtually complete, Retail Customer has already started working toward putting in place the architectural elements it needs for its most fundamental capability: a 360-degree view” of its customers, product, inventory, pricing, voucher and promotions to support a strategy of multi-channel integration.
• This will mark an important milestone in Retail Customer journey and will allow Retail Customer to operationalize it in a way that personalizes and enriches the customer experience.
• This is also expected increase in sales and revenue per customer due to closer engagement, stronger retention and targeted promotions and strengthened the brand via a more consistent and integrated cross channel customer experience and connected marketing.
• With the ability to use real-time site information including inventory and sales information enabled the company to develop more targeted—and ultimately more profitable pricing and promotional programs. This also improved decision making via the seamless integration of consistent, high-quality data from across the enterprise.
• With complete visibility into customers purchased products and channel partner relationships to drive more personalized marketing campaigns and improve cross-sell and up-sell, available-to promise across channels.

Challenge overview

• Information silo and lack of visibility
• Process inefficiency & higher operational overhead
• Speed to market

Result

• Expected increase in sales and revenue per customer due to closer engagement, stronger retention and targeted promotions.
• Strengthening of brand via a more consistent and integrated cross channel customer experience and connected marketing.