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The ICICI Game won the award in the ‘Education & Training Campaigns & Programs’ category at the 19th Annual APEX awards, announced in the USA this month.
According to Tata Interactive Systems (TIS)’s Manisha Mohan, the criteria for the awards were based on excellence in graphic design, content and the success of the entry in achieving overall communications effectiveness and excellence. Some 4,916 entries were evaluated, with 311 in the Campaigns & Programs category.
“Learning through games, simulations and even virtual reality scenarios is becoming a highly popular – and most effective – way of using technology to deliver the knowledge and skills that people need in order to be more effective and efficient at their jobs,” explained Alan Samuel, head of TIS’s UK operations. “Increasingly, our partners and clients around the world are asking TIS’s award winning content developers to provide creative, engaging and motivating learning materials in these formats.”
ICICI Bank is India’s second-largest bank with total assets of more than US$ 79bn. It offers a wide range of banking products and financial services to corporate and retail customers through a variety of delivery channels and through its specialised subsidiaries and affiliates in the areas of investment banking, life and non-life insurance, venture capital and asset management.
The award-winning programme was the result of the bank commissioning TIS to design and develop a game-based learning programme for its Regional Processing Centres (RPCs). Cheques collected at individual bank branches are deposited each day at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), where they are sorted. After an automated tallying process, the cheques are manually scrutinised for discrepancies by bank officials or vendor staff.
This is a time sensitive process – the bank needs to tell the RBI about its decisions on honouring or not honouring cheques, along with the necessary justification before a specified time each day - after which the payments are deemed complete.
The Mumbai RPC processes anything between 40,000 to 1,000,000 cheques every day for inward clearing. Each day, each verifier processes some of 375 to 400 cheques every hour for nearly four hours.
Though the necessary training, instructions, and tools are provided to the verifier, the manual process can be prone to error because of the repetitive and monotonous nature of the task – for the bank, an incorrect decision has severe legal, financial and other implications.
“So, ICICI commissioned this game about the importance of performing technical scrutiny with the utmost diligence and care,” Mohan commented. “The objective was to strengthen the whole process and eliminate payment errors.
“It’s being used across RPCs all over India to train and provide practice to bank and vendor employees involved in the inward clearing process.”
The game that TIS devised was developed using Macromedia Flash MX 2004 and specifically aims to help players to:
- Reduce occurrences of payments on discrepant checks
- Reduce the time taken to process and check cheques for discrepancies
- Create awareness of the implications of incorrect verification and decisions
- Provide training to inductees on the technical verification process
The game challenges the learner to a rapid-fire round of the check verification process by presenting a series of correct and incorrect cheques that need to be categorised as ‘Pass,’ ‘Reject,’ or ‘Referred’ on the basis of the identified technical discrepancies.
About the APEX Awards
The APEX Awards for Publication Excellence is an annual competition for writers, editors, publications staff and business and nonprofit communicators. It is sponsored by Communications Concepts, Inc., publishers of business communication reports, including ‘Writing That Works’, a subscription monthly for professional communicators, and special reports on topics such as ‘Writing for the WEB’.
In the 19th Annual APEX Awards, this year, awards were given in 105 communications categories, in 11 main categories including: newsletters; magazines and journals; ‘magapapers’ and newspapers; annual reports; brochures, manuals and reports; electronic and video publications; web and intranet sites; campaigns, programmes and plans; writing; design and illustration; and one-of-a-kind publications.
About ICICI Bank
ICICI Bank is India's second-largest bank with total assets of Rs. 3,446.58bn (US$ 79bn) at 31st March 2007 and profit after tax of Rs. 31.1bn for the financial year 2006/07. ICICI Bank is the most valuable bank in India in terms of market capitalisation and is ranked third among all the companies listed on the Indian stock exchanges in terms of free float market capitalisation.
The Bank has a network of some 950 branches and 3,300 ATMs in India and presence in 17 countries. It offers a wide range of banking products and financial services to corporate and retail customers through a variety of delivery channels and through its specialised subsidiaries and affiliates in the areas of investment banking, life and non-life insurance, venture capital and asset management.
The Bank currently has subsidiaries in the UK, Russia and Canada, branches in Singapore, Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka and Dubai International Finance Centre and representative offices in the United States, United Arab Emirates, China, South Africa, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
About Tata Interactive Systems (TIS)
Tata Interactive Systems (TIS), a global leader in e-learning, is a part of the $22bn Tata Group. Truly international, TIS has a presence across the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Japan, India, and mainland Europe. TIS offers corporations, universities, schools, publishers, and government institutions a diversified and innovative bouquet of learning and training solutions including Simulation-based Learning Objects (SimBLs™), Story-based Learning Objects (StoBLs™), courseware and curriculum design, special-needs education, assessments, electronic performance support systems (EPSS), mobile learning, along with other corporate training and consultancy services. Our multi-disciplinary expertise and 16 years’ experience across domains helps us design e-learning programmes that are unique to clients’ requirements and specifically crafted to boost knowledge retention and application.
Apart from holding ISO 9001 certification, TIS is the only e-learning organisation in the world to be assessed at Level 5 in both the SEI-CMM and P-CMM frameworks. TIS’s quest for excellence is reflected in numerous prestigious industry awards, including a Silver Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Award 2005 and 2004, APEX Award of Excellence in 2005 and 2006, BETT Awards in 2004 and 2006, and two Business World–NID Design Excellence awards.
Further information from:
Alan Samuel, Tata Interactive Systems, 020 7905 0156
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bob.little[.]dial.pipex.com 
