KUALA LUMPUR: CIMB Investment Bank Bhd’s installation of Cisco’s TelePresence conferencing solution has reduced travel costs for its executives and increased their efficiency.
The bank said there was now less need for its executives to travel across the region for face-to-face meetings.
CIMB has installed a TelePresence system at its Bangkok, Jakarta and Singapore branches, as well as at two of its branches in Kuala Lumpur.
TelePresence is a high-definition video and audio solution that allows live meetings to be held with people in different locations, and even from multiple organisations.
The system, which can typically connect six to eight people, uses large high-definition monitors, digital cameras and 3D-audio to give users the impression that they are meeting in a single location, like a boardroom.
Iswaraan Suppiah, head of group information and operations at CIMB, said the banking group used to cram a lot of meetings into a day, whenever a regional trip was made. He said this left the executives exhausted at the end of the trip.
“TelePresence has allowed us to be much more efficient because we can now have regional meetings without having to leave the country,” he said. “It is also easier to meet with many different executives in many other countries in one day.”
CIMB’s two TelePresence set-ups in Kuala Lumpur are at its consumer banking head office and its investment banking office.
“We also discovered that employees at the two branches are saving a lot of time with TelePresence because they don’t have to brave the KL traffic when they need to hold discussions,” Iswaraan said.
The bank spent RM9mil on the Cisco solution. Systems integrator CSC Malaysia Sdn Bhd helped install TelePresence for CIMB in March.
Isawaraan said the solution has been in use these past few months. He said he could not quantify the time and money that CIMB has saved through TelePresence yet.
