We are pleased to share with you a number of enhancements to our platforms which will be available from Sunday the 15th of June 2014.

The new Account Settings dashboard will provide our clients with quick and easy access to the most commonly used banking functionalities per account type available within a single page.

Clients with qualifying cheque and credit card accounts will be able to access the following functionality, grouped together for the respective account types, on the Account Settings Dashboard:

• View Account Owner Name/Change Nickname
• View Statements
• Stop Cheque
• Redirect to Scheduled Payments and Transfers
• Card options
• Balances

• View Account Owner Name/Change Nickname
• View Statements
• Balances
• Limits
• Card options

The New Credit Card Account Settings Dashboard Page:

In an effort to reduce the time spent by Online Assistance to reroute calls which do not apply to their area of expertise, we have included a set of generic contact numbers related to specific business areas, on the 'Contact Us' landing page via Online Banking.

By including these generic contact numbers for the various business areas, this will lead to:

• an overall improvement to the rate of calls currently being received by Online Assistance
• allow Online Assistant agents to be more Online Banking focused and
• will furthermore improve the overall client experience as they will be able to quickly access the following contact numbers from a convenient central location within Online Banking:

• FNB Complaints Resolution: 087 575 9408 or care@fnb.co.za

  Operating hours:

  Monday – Friday: 8am- 5pm
  Saturday: 8am- 1pm

• Online Banking International Number: 00 27 11 369 1097
• Online Banking: 087 575 0000
• Telephone Banking: 087 575 9404
• Cellphone Banking: 087 575 9405
• Credit Card: 087 575 1111
• App Banking: 087 575 0362
• Business Banking: 087 575 9479
• Forex: 0860 136 739
• eBucks: 087 320 3200
• Loan Queries: 0860 102 631
• Investments: 087 320 4321
• Home Loans: 087 730 1144
• Lost and Stolen Cards: 087 575 9406

We have made the following enhancements to improve our Online Banking Registration process:

• Personal and Business Registration users can edit and correct any incorrect details that they have captured on the registration capture page. 
• We have increased the email address capture field to cater for longer email addresses for both Personal and Business Registrations.
• We have made various text changes to improve the overall flow of the Online Banking Registration process and how clients need to verify themselves after registering on Online banking.

We have enhanced our Balance Transfer functionality on Online Banking by including a new 'Make a Payment' button right next to the 'Finish' button on the Balance Transfer Results page.

Selecting this button will allow our clients to easily and conveniently access the pay functionality in order for them to perform a third party payment once they have completed performing balance transfer.

We have introduced the following new Short Term Insurance sub products:

• FNB Hollard Gold Policy (ZFL HG)
• FNB Vehicle Finance Policy (ZFL FV)
• FNB First Scheme Policy (ZFL FS)
• FNB M & F Gold Policy (ZFL MG)
• FNB Saver Policy (ZFL TV)
• FNB Classic Policy (ZFL TG)

Existing clients of Short Term Insurance products will be able to view their policy details via the Home, Car and Valuables sub tab on Online Banking.

Online Banking clients who do not have any Short Term Insurance products will be presented with a marketing page on the Home, Car and Valuables sub tab with the ability to select a “Get a Quote” button. 

Big 3 was created to increase take-up in selected product offerings by marketing products, services and value adds to existing qualifying clients inside of login.

The Home Loan Lead offer will be displayed to all individual clients (type 01 and 14) allowing them to apply for further loans or switch their Home Loans to FNB.

Upon requesting to take-up the offer, the client will be redirected to SSA to complete the application. Once the client has completed the application, it will be submitted to the FNB Home Loans Call centre who will then process the request.

The annual FNB price increase takes effect on the 1st of July each year. This increase is applied across various FNB products and services for both Consumer and Commercial clients.

Pricing Letters and Pricing Guides will be effective for the July 2014 billing month.

SASFIN Bank is scheduled to go live as a Real Time Clearing (RTC) Participant Bank. We will commence our testing with SASFIN on 15 June 2014 and once successful, our clients will be able to make RTC payments to SASFIN Accounts and visa versa.

A Real Time Clearing (RTC) transaction is paid to Recipients at Participating Banks within 60 seconds.

The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is a United States federal law which requires that all  United States persons, including individuals who live outside the United States, are required to report their financial accounts and assets held outside of the United States.

This means that all South African financial institutions are obliged to identify and report US born citizens to SARS and SARS will then report these to the IRS.

In order for us to cater for this compliance requirement, a new field has been added to our processes to correctly identify US born citizens (for individuals) and US established businesses.

The following changes have been made to Online Banking and Online Banking Enterprise™:

We have created a new 'Country of birth' field for Individuals and' Country of Establishment' field for Businesses who are applying for any of the following products via our Online Banking and/or Online Banking Enterprise™ platforms:

1. Paypal
2. Consultant Registration - Online Banking and/or Online Banking Enterprise™
3. CUAC linking
4. Related Parties Online Banking and/or Online Banking Enterprise™
5. Add a new Cardholder
6. Smart Payroll

As part of these compliance requirements, all US born clients will not be allowed to set up a profile on our systems for any of the African Subsidiaries and our system will block these applications and return the following error message: “Cannot setup customer”.

Should a US born client inquire as to why they are being blocked in the African subs, we will need to inform them of the compliance regulations with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).

We have made small architectural changes including Font, Resolution and Scaling to our framework across all our screens to improve on the overall design of the screens to further enhance our client experiences on Online Banking and Online Banking Enterprise™.

Last month we implemented an IE8 Exit Notification via Banners and Campaign pages on the FNB and FRB Homepage and updated our ‘Software Updates’ page as part of our planned phased approach of discontinuing our support of Internet Explorer 8.

As from 15th of May 2014, these Notifications will be extended to all clients  on all our supported websites including FNB, RMB Private Bank, FirstRand Bank, all of the African Subsidiaries, Discovery as well as our Joint Venture partners: Clicks and kulula.

In addition to this banner Notification, we will also be displaying  a pop up message as soon as a client attempts to login onto Online Banking or Online Banking Enterprise™ from an IE 8 Browser which will inform them that their browser version is not supported.

The pop up message box will allow the client to select an "Upgrade Now" button. Once the client has upgraded their browser version, they will no longer see this message when logging onto Online Banking or Online Banking Enterprise™.

We currently provide a wide range of product and services to all new and existing clients via our online SSA platform. It is a quick and simple way for clients to take up new Accounts and is growing in popularity due to the convenience of applying for these from anywhere at any time.

With these growing trends, we are now implementing SSA on our RMB Private Bank website.

This means that new and/or existing RMB Private Bank clients can now apply to open RMB Private Bank Cheque Accounts, RMB Private Bank Credit Cards as well as other types of Accounts by completing a real time online application via the RMB Private Bank SSA platform.

• RMB Private Bank Cheque Account with Overdraft (DDA 5A)
• FNB Cheque Account upgrades with new Overdraft/ Overdraft limit increase (DDA 5A) on RMB PB
• RMB Private Bank Credit Card (4790 2668)
• Linked Petro card (8888 8863) as a value add

• Money Market Transactor – DDA 2K
• Call account – DDA2L
• 7 Day Interest Plus – TOA 97
• 32 Day Interest Plus – TOA 4E
• MyNotice – TOA 95
• Flexi Fixed – TOA 4F
• Fixed Deposit – TOA 98
• RMB Private Bank Home Loan - MLS WHL
• RMB Private Bank Single Facility - DDA 4A

Due to the amalgamation of Smart Transactional Banking and the Core Business Banking, we will be discontinuing  the Smart Cheque Account and will be offering clients the Gold Cheque account in its place.

We have made the following amendments to the Gold Cheque account to ensure that new account applications meets all the requirements for the market segment:

• We need to amend the qualifying criteria
• Remove the Fee Saver pricing option
• Remove the Mobile Pricing Option
  

We have made an amendment to one of our existing business functions to automatically pass on spouse details captured on the SSA platform from clients married in COP when applying for any credit related product such as Cheque, Credit Card and Revolving Loans to our application database.

This amendment will not just improve our internal processes and efficiencies but it will also have a positive impact on the service experience for our clients as we will have all the necessary information on hand to fulfil their Online credit application.

In order for us to cater for the FATCA compliance requirement, a new field has been added to our processes to correctly identify US born citizens (for individuals) and US established businesses.

The following changes have been made to our SSA Platform:

1. Created a 'Country of birth' field for Individuals and' Country of Establishment' field for Businesses who are applying for new applications in South Africa, including our partners Clicks and kulula.
2. Created a 'Country of birth' field for Swaziland and Zambia product applications and included a new business rule to block these African Subsidiaries to setup profiles for any US born individual and/or US established Business.

The online Home Loan Bond calculators provide a convenient way for clients to perform quick calculations and insights with regards to what they qualify for and how much they can save. Currently, the client has to toggle between different calculators to calculate the following:

• The maximum bond they qualify for
• How much interest and term saved by paying a lump sum amount
• How much interest and term saved by paying additional monthly repayments
• The repayment amount based on the selected interest rate, term and loan amount requested
• The loan term based on the selected interest rate, repayment and loan amount requested

We have redesigned and combined the various calculators into one calculator, the “Home Loan Bond Calculator”. This new improved Home Loan Bond Calculator will provide our clients  with a summary view of calculations results calculated in a graphical format.

These  graphs aim to assist our clients in better understanding the various aspects with regards to their home loans and to provide them with ways in which they can service their loan quicker.

Paypal has made technical upgrades to their system and due to these system upgrades we were required to make some technical upgrades to our back end systems(updated http 1 to http1.1 and upgrade of SDK tool kit) which interfaces with PayPal to enables us to offer the PayPal functionality to our clients via Online Banking.

We are continuously assessing the risks associated to people, systems and processes as well as the most appropriate ways to mitigate the identified risk areas. In one of our recent risk assessments ,we identified an area of high concern relating to the dependency of having a single RPG developer resource to perform changes on RPG code, the programming language used for our Batch Archiving process.

In an effort to minimise these risk concerns, we have rewritten the Batch Archiving process in Java. Java is a computer programming language which was specifically designed to have far less implementation dependencies.

In our continuing efforts to increase product, service and value-add take up across existing Product Houses within FNB, a number of Product and Card Rule changes are being implemented.

1. Updating the descriptions for the following VBS accounts:

2. Updating the Access Allowed Rules to block acccess to individual profile functionality

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FNB will never ask you to login to online banking via a link in an email.