Credit Suisse Boosts Transaction Printing with Kodak Versamark VL6000 Inkjet Printing System

STUTTGART, GERMANY—March 25—Credit Suisse, a global financial services company headquartered in Zurich, is fast establishing itself as a pioneer in transactional printing. The company has installed a Kodak Versamark VL6000 Inkjet Printing System which, together with the two Kodak Versamark VL2000 Printing Systems installed 12 months ago, has dramatically increased the company's inkjet production capacity.

Credit Suisse operates an ultra-modern Print Center at its Uetlihof Administration Center, which is currently being extended with a new, 14-storey building and will eventually house around 8,000 employees in Switzerland's biggest city. The facility—which typically operates round the clock, six days a week—is among the three largest of its kind in Switzerland. Each year it produces more than 200 million A4 pages of personal and confidential information.

The Print Center is responsible for all aspects of printing, enclosing and outward handling of the transaction documents produced in private and investment banking, as well as in asset management. These include portfolio reports, asset statements, securities trading statements, debit and credit advice, account statements, and general documents linked to personal customer communications or for internal use.

"For us, process optimization is an ongoing task, particularly when it comes to our printed output. In each of the last three years, we have cut our costs in this area by between six and eight per cent," says Heinz Frei, Vice President, Global Data Center Operations, Credit Suisse.

The Kodak Versamark VL6000 Printing System, which prints the web at a speed of 150 m/min with 600 x 600 dpi resolution, is playing a key role in this process optimization strategy. The system gives Credit Suisse a huge capacity boost, and follows in the footsteps of the two Kodak Versamark VL2000 Printing Systems, which were installed at the company in 2008 and proved an unmitigated success.

Greater flexibility, higher capacity, lower costs

The new Versamark VL6000 system can print more than 1,000 A4 pages a minute, while each of the two VL2000 systems has an output in excess of 500 A4 pages. A Kodak Versamark CS300c System Controller is installed upstream, which controls the individual systems and supplies them with output data. These controllers process AFP (IPDS) data streams, which are generated in the Computer Center that directly adjoins the Print Center.

Credit Suisse uses low-cost, water-based dye inks on all three systems. The high productivity of Kodak's inkjet printing systems is a compelling benefit for the company. Credit Suisse has also been impressed by the consistently high quality in one, four and full-color printing, which is automatically monitored on every page by image inspection systems in the three inkjet presses.

All three Kodak Systems—which can print in four colors in 2-up simplex or 1-up duplex–have already made their mark at the Print Center. They have replaced four out of the original nine monochrome laser printing systems at the facility.

Efficiency gains add value to transaction documents

Beat Noser, Director and Manager Global Print at Credit Suisse, describes full-color printing as the key to successful and optimally efficient production. The personalized charts and graphics—which in the past were printed as gray scale elements—can now be rendered more vividly through the low-key use of color in accordance with the CI. This adds value to transaction documents and improves the quality of the financial services provided to the company's demanding clients.

In the future, Kodak's full-color inkjet systems will enable the expensive preprinted offset shells (forms)—on which often no more than a company logo needs to be printed in color—to be eliminated in favor of white roll paper.

As Beat Noser explains, the outcome is a huge increase in flexibility and efficiency: "Thanks to full-page variable color, we can now use unprinted paper. Color logos and branding elements can simply be printed on the Kodak Systems, together with the transaction data. This has the additional advantage of allowing mixed production of identical document types for different companies in the Group—such as Credit Suisse, Neue Aargauer Bank, or the Clariden Leu private bank.

“It goes without saying that we also take advantage of this flexibility for our external customers. We previously had to bundle print jobs separately for each client and were forever changing the roll."

On the subject of paper, 90 g/m² is the standard grammage here—at least for simplex, which predominates at the Credit Suisse Print Center because most financial documents are only printed on one side.

Encouraged by the new streamlined operation facilitated by Kodak's inkjet color printing systems, Beat Noser and his team are busy preparing for the next step–loading inserts digitally rather than as physical objects.

"The idea is for customer communications to be printed on white paper in a single production job, along with other preprinted documents, like payment slips," continues Noser. "This will make it far easier to enclose the documents, plus it will enable us to trim our costs because dual channel processing will be a thing of the past. Until now, we’ve been forced to merge two components of a document set during the packaging process."

Successful nine-day race

When it comes to the KODAK Systems’ reliability, the acid test for Credit Suisse is its annual year-end processing–and the 2009/2010 year end was no exception. Starting on New Year's Eve, some 18.5 million pages for all client segments were printed day and night in a marathon nine-day race against the clock. The Kodak Systems proved their worth and made a vital contribution to this output without any issues.

Beat Noser is in no doubt about the future direction: "Our ultimate aim is to print on just four inkjet lines and get rid of the remaining laser systems."

And he already knows how – with another Kodak Versamark VL6000 Printing System.

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