The company
Financial Market Service Bank emerged from the Direkt Anlage Bank (DAB) in 1998 as a separate service company for banks and financial services providers both within and outside the group. Michael Klosin, who is in charge of logistics at Financial Market Service Bank, describes what the company does by saying: "Financial Market Service Bank is a pure insourcer. Its core business consists of handling security fund deposit transactions for outsourcing companies." Financial Market Service Bank refers to these as clients.

The growth rates are exceptional: In 1996 Financial Market Service Bank (which at that time was still part of the DAB) sent out 30,000 envelopes a month. Now, in the spring of 1999, the same quantity leaves the company every day.

Financial Market Service Bank presently has a staff of around 180. With its new premises in Leipzig, the number of employees is set to more than double in the next two years.

Customer-specific documents
Financial Market Service Bank works for a number of different clients, each of which in turn has many of its own customers, whose financial transactions are reflected in Financial Market Service Bank 's documents. This means that the output management centre, which is how Financial Market Service Bank refers to its print and dispatch centre, must keep a large number of document forms for each of its clients.

Each client also has its own paper for printing and its own franking block, which is used in the enveloping machine.

Roland Welser, operating manager of the output management centre, says of the way Financial Market Service Bank sees itself: "Our clients 'customers are unaware of Financial Market Service Bank 's involvement."

Printing requirements
The raw and printed data is transferred from different computer centres linked up in a heterogeneous network environment via data line several times a day to Financial Market Service Bank's output management centre for processing. The sort criteria are document types and customer names.

The print centre must plan its capacity based on regularly recurring production peaks. These occur as of 4 p.m.every day, depending on the stock exchange times. Financial Market Service Bank processes around 10,000 stock exchange actions alone every day, both buying and selling transactions, which all result in a document. In addition, there are particularly large print jobs at the beginning of every month and at the turn of the year.

Production solution with Océ
Klosin: "We now have a genuine production operation with production printers. We have a highly flexible environment, which we use for our various requirements: The PCL spooler from Océ Printing Systems allows us to direct the data to different printers—to cut-sheet or continuous forms printing systems. At the same time, this gives us a working backup system."

The quality of the printed output is important to Financial Market Service Bank: All the printing systems print at a resolution of 600 dpi. Klosin: "The documents we have developed are simply top notch. For us, this is something that really marks us out from the competition."

Financial Market Service Bank is also well prepared when it comes to using colour in letters and mailing campaigns: The Océ Pagestream 200 DSC has a colour station with blue toner.

Post-processing and reprinting with bar codes
Bar codes are applied to the paper during printing. These have two functions at Financial Market Service Bank: They encode the information on the number of pages in the document and on the number of enclosures, which is required for post-processing. They also encode the document number, security ID number, account number and so on, which are copied to a separate file.

As Andreas Birkmeier, who is in charge of form and form control development of Financial Market Service Bank output management centre, explains: "This allows every document to be identified in the workflow, and its status to be verified. The file created indicates which documents have been completely processed for which customer. In the event of an error, a message is sent to the reprint manager of the control software, and a reprint is initiated automatically." Financial Market Service Bank thus has a continuous history of every single document: how it was processed, when, and who was responsible for it. This information is archived.

Rapid access to print data In parallel with the printing process, Financial Market Service Bank regularly archives essential parts of its printed output with Océ Imagestream as indexed tiff files. The downstream CD-ROM production system Rimage™ saves the images on CD-ROM. This permits repeated printouts of the same quality. Fax output is also possible.

The data converted with Océ Imagestream is application-neutral.

Océ Imagestream and Rimage™ have allowed Financial Market Service Bank to broaden its portfolio of services for its customers: Securities account statements are created on CD-ROM for the annual reports of some Financial Market Service Bank clients, for instance.

The CD-ROMs also bring Financial Market Service Bank's clients many other advantages: The indexing allows them to access specific documents directly.

Cooperation in a spirit of partnership
The installation of the Océ Pagestream 200 DSC continuous forms printing system required Océ Service to put in some extra work. And as Roland Welser recalls: "The Océ Service people are quite simply good to work with. Weekends, nights, awful weather conditions— they really showed their flexibility."

The regular production peaks, the large number of form variants involved, complex post-processing and daily print job archiving on CD-ROM are all handled by the various components of the printing solution at the Financial Market Service Bank output management centre. Says Welser: "The Océ Pagestream 200 continuous forms printing system with double-sided printing, the rewinder from Stralfors, the continuous forms feeder on the enveloping machine from Pitney Bowes – these give a fast, problem-free production for heavy load in a very short time-frame." This sophisticated workflow was designed and implemented by Financial Market Service Bank and Océ Printing Systems.