The Secure Financial Transaction System Community Banking (C-banking) is an online, real time near/in house banking system that is completely new built for Communities.

C-banking’s Basic Functionalities:

	Support of the front and back office
	Wide range of banking products
	Client handling during all phases of their lifecycle
	Different channel deals (phone, internet, post etc.)
	Support for the internal needs of the banking administration
	Multiple reports ranging from account statements to Profit & Loss reports
	Different user profiles defined to realise the proper separation of functions

Virtual Communities (VCs) may soon change the dynamic of our whole vendor/consumer relationship. Virtual communities are about people interacting with each other. These are electronic forums where people pay attention to identify themselves as the members of a group. VCs are intentional about the creation of their community, the building of member identification, value relationships and encouragement for interaction.

Both Virtual Community Owners (VCOs, exp: Telcos, ISPs, Portals, large content providers, etc.) and the members of VCs play an important role in our new economy. They change dramatically the current way of doing business and collaboration. One of the driving forces behind this is the complete products and service offerings towards the VCs’ members.
Initiatives of VCs taken by front-runners envisage this clearly. They already started with building front-end and back-end industry solutions, which support these thoughts. Further analyses of the current service offering show us interesting results. These are generally applicable to any Virtual Community.

At some point all products and service offerings by virtual communities involve payments which, until today are costly for both members and VCOs.
Community Banking (C-banking) offers a cutting edge solution to VCOs.
With C-banking, the community owner enhance their members with the so called
Community Accounts (CAs). A community account is an on-line, real-time, secure, white and bank labelled account. Offering this payment solution, the VCO actually becomes an Internet Payment Provider (IPP).

C-banking empowers the VCO with the possibility to have real time, web based, white and bank labelled Internet payment within its community based upon virtual accounts which reside under ONE base account, the base account of the VCO.

New or newly divided money streams will occur. They will make business cases sounder. Besides that, every transaction is guaranteed and the VCOs can start managing their risks in stead of avoiding them.

VCOs not only bring services and products of merchants / content providers to
their end users, but also the related transactions will be part of the VCOs total service offering. New beneficial money streams will occur for VCOs and its members.
With the offering of the “traditional” payment services for the new economy, like credit card, invoice on tap, cash on delivery (COD), etc., the disadvantages of time, delivery and credit risk are growing by the day. Besides that the VCOs can only charge for the payment service offering and is not involved in the revenue sharing models on top of it. These disadvantages are minimised with C-banking.

The system was designed keeping in mind the needs of the communities for banking functionalities. It is distinguished with maximum level of flexibility to make sure that the changing needs (exp: new market segments, new products, and new reporting functionality, etc.) of the VCs are met.