Newly renamed high-street bank Abbey is counting on a
new IT infrastructure to underpin a fundamental refocusing of its
business.
Chief executive Luqman Arnold, who last month admitted Abbey had
“lost the plot with the retail bank”, has promised to refocus the
business on its personal banking customers.
“We have 18 million customers and we want them to do more
business with us and recommend us,” Arnold told the City last month
when he announced the rebranding of the business.
Abbey is completing the first stage of the technology foundation
later this month when it finishes the roll-out of an IP virtual
private network operated by BT Transform across 750 branches.
It will provide IP telephony and data services across the branch
network to support Abbey’s One-on-one customer relationship
management programme, which aims to increase customer retention and
improve revenue by boosting the average number of products sold to
each customer from two to 3.5.
Abbey has configured and implemented Siebel’s eFinance
multi-channel CRM system to support internet, telephone and
branch-based banking. By the end of the year, it plans to have
7,500 users running the software.
The network will be used to transmit e-learning material to
Abbey staff when the CRM programme goes live.
“The immediate impact will be felt in the branches,” said Bill
Gibbons, Abbey’s director of technology services and support.
“Abbey can improve customer service by deploying new applications
to support its customers.”
The IP VPN uses network management software from Intelliden,
which will allow IT staff to configure the network on the fly
according to the bank’s needs.
This means that upgrading the network to support
bandwidth-intensive applications can be achieved overnight, rather
than the 75 days it took on Abbey’s old networks, Gibbons said.
“If we wish in the future to pipe enhanced video into branches
or run promotions at specific locations, the IP VPN can be upgraded
through software without requiring network engineers to log into
every router on the network,” he added.
The network will handle up to 750,000 internal voice calls and
1.2 million calls from the public each month, along with
inter-branch network traffic, making the network one of the biggest
IP telephony roll-outs in the UK.
Besides immediate cost savings, IP telephony promises to deliver
improvements to business applications such as contact centre
software, workflow and unified messaging, said analyst Andy Rolfe
of Gartner.