As a financial services company, Bank of Ireland UK
needed a highly scalable and reliable system
- Business description Bank of Ireland UK is a
financial services company
- Business challenge Provide a robust and
continuously available IT infrastructure to support a new
mission-critical mortgage application
- Solution Deploy a highly scalable and reliable
system, which is monitored round-the-clock to ensure business
continuity
- Services Technical consultancy, systems
integration and engineering, project management, managed
availability/remote monitoring, technology supply
The phenomenal rise in house prices over the last couple of
years has led to a massive boom in the UK’s lending market. In July
2002, gross mortgage advances hit a record high of £21.8 billion*,
an increase of 41% year-on-year. With so much at stake, the market
has become increasingly competitive with lending providers vying to
gain and retain customers, who are shopping around more than
ever.
Technology has a huge role to play in this battle, as it can
make a massive difference to the customer experience by automating
the lending process, making it simpler and quicker for mortgage
applications to be completed. This increasing reliance on
technology, however, is not without its risks. If a
mission-critical mortgage system were to fail, a company could lose
thousands of pounds for every minute of downtime.
When Bank of Ireland UK decided to roll out a new core lending
application, it needed to ensure that it did not expose itself to
any such business continuity risks. The company brought in IT
infrastructure services provider Computacenter to implement a
highly scalable and flexible system, and to monitor the
infrastructure to ensure it is continuously available.
Bank of Ireland UK provides a broad range of financial services
that range from investment fund management and life assurance to
financial advice and mortgages. These services are offered via a
distinct group of businesses, including Bank of Ireland Personal
Lending, which is an umbrella grouping of all the company’s lending
activities in the UK. This grouping encompasses Bristol & West
Mortgages, Bank of Ireland Mortgages and NIIB, an unsecured lending
specialist.
The increased level of lending activity in the UK means that
mortgages will continue to be an important business stream for the
company in the future. The number of customer mortgages being
managed by Bristol & West Mortgages alone tops the 200,000
mark.
Until recently, the company was using a variety of applications
to provide its mortgage services, as Colin Halsall, Director of IS
Bank of Ireland Personal Lending UK, explains. “As with most
companies, our use of technology has grown considerably in the last
10 years. This growth can be difficult to control, which means
companies end up with a range of disparate systems and applications
that are not suited to delivering the integrated services
increasingly being demanded by the business and customers.”
Reaching the summit
To ensure it was providing an optimum, end-to-end mortgage
service, Bank of Ireland UK decided to embark on a massive overhaul
of the lending systems being used by the personal lending group.
This meant finding an application that could deal with the entire
mortgage process from requesting credit checks to providing formal
offers. “We wanted an integrated solution that could be customised
to our needs and, as a result, enhance the customer experience,”
adds Colin.
The company opted for Summit, a retail banking application that
supplier Lynx Financial Systems recommends runs on a Unix platform.
“This presented us with a massive challenge,” comments Colin. “We
chose the application because we were impressed with its
functionality, but our choice meant we were committing to rolling
out a platform which involved technology that was completely alien
to us.”
Bank of Ireland UK had a mainframe and NT architecture and, as a
result, lacked the in-house expertise to implement the
infrastructure needed to underpin the new lending application. This
lack of Unix infrastructure and integration skills meant that the
company needed to find a trusted IT services partner.
“Computacenter had already worked on other IT projects for
Bristol & West [acquired by Bank of Ireland in 1997], plus we
knew it had the breadth of technical skills we required, and
experience of large-scale enterprise deployments,” comments
Colin.
An infrastructure to rely on
Computacenter’s multi-vendor integration skills were to prove
invaluable, as the lending project not only involved implementing
high-end Sun Microsystems servers, but also a Veritas backup
solution plus assisting with the design of a Citrix server farm and
integrating BMC monitoring tools.
Work on designing this infrastructure began in earnest in spring
2001, as Senior Project Manager David Manders from Computacenter
explains: “Our first job was to determine the most cost-effective
and efficient design of the three main elements of the
infrastructure – the E10000, E6500 and E450 servers – and their
integration with the Summit application and the database. We also
needed to ensure that the infrastructure could scale to meet the
future needs of Bank of Ireland UK. As a result only half of the
E10000’s capacity is currently being used.”
Thanks to its high-performance levels, the E10000 fulfils many
purposes for the personal lending division, including hosting the
development, testing and production environment for the core
mortgage application as well as a Tower Technology imaging
application. All paper-based documents relating to customers’
mortgage applications are scanned into the system, enabling them to
be accessed from the users’ desktop via Citrix XPe thin client. To
ensure such vital information is still available even in times of
emergency, a hot standby database has been deployed to a Sun E6500
disaster recovery server.
Using technology from Oracle, Bank of Ireland UK is able to
replicate data and transactions in near real-time to the E6500,
thereby minimising any risk to business continuity. The E450 is
integrated with Veritas NetBackup and a StorageTek tape library,
which provide efficient backup for the system.
“We opted for a Sun-based environment because we knew it would
give us the robust and reliable infrastructure we needed for such a
mission-critical application,” comments Robbie Clarke, Senior
Project Manager with IS Central Technology Services at Bank of
Ireland UK. “The E10000 is particularly suited to our needs as it
is highly scalable and resilient, therefore reducing the risk of
any unplanned downtime.”
Lighting the flexibility fuse
Although the Sun infrastructure did not require any formal proof
of concept, the company’s plans to distribute the application
through a thin client environment needed to be validated in
advance. “Summit had only been deployed in a distributed
client/server environment, so we needed to prove that it was able
to function just as effectively with a Citrix front-end,” adds
Robbie.
To help Bank of Ireland UK achieve this, Computacenter developed
a bespoke proof of concept lab to replicate the proposed Citrix
MetaFrame XPe platform, based on Compaq [HP] ProLiant DL360 servers
running Microsoft Windows 2000. Computacenter’s Solutions Centre
has eight proof of concept labs that enable businesses to validate
a huge range of enterprise technologies, and test systems
integration in advance of deployment.
Due to bandwidth restrictions, Bank of Ireland UK initially
planned to only use Citrix to deploy applications to non head
office locations. Following the proof of concept testing, however,
it became clear that greater benefits could be realised by using
Citrix XPe to deploy applications to all users. “As well as
reducing the amount of bandwidth requirement, we found that
application deployment and manageability was far easier through
Citrix,” comments Robbie.
To make the lending application even more flexible, Bank of
Ireland UK has also deployed Citrix NFuse Classic, as Steve
Anderton, Lead Consultant at Computacenter, explains: “Not only can
the company centrally manage the new mortgage application, by using
NFuse it can also distribute the software via its intranet, or even
the Internet. NFuse enables users to access the application through
a web-based portal from any device, whether it be a PDA or a PC,
which gives the personal lending group amazing flexibility.”
The flexibility of the system - and its reliability and
scalability - were put to the test in August 2002, when the
solution went live with its first users. “The pilot currently
involves around 220 people, but the system will eventually be used
by more than 1,100 underwriters, case handlers and post workers,”
comments Robbie. “More than 2,000 customer applications have so far
been logged into the system, and we have already seen a significant
improvement in processing times.”
The benefits of the project, which is due to be completed in
September 2003, stretch beyond improved processing times, as Colin
acknowledges: “The business benefits of the implementation are
numerous. By enhancing the capacity, flexibility and scalability of
our IT, we have been able to improve the efficiency of our lending
services both for the business and our customers. Thanks to the
thin client environment, the IT team will also benefit as Citrix
makes managing our desktop estate and applications much simpler and
more cost-effective.”
Preserving business continuity
During the project, Bank of Ireland UK decided to look for a
partner to support the Unix infrastructure. “This system is
mission-critical, and has to enjoy an extremely high level of
availability. Once again our decision to look externally was based
on a lack of internal resources, and a desire to remove as much
risk as possible from our IT operations to ensure business
continuity,” comments Colin.
Despite competition from various other high-profile names,
Computacenter became fully responsible for managing the
availability of the infrastructure in May 2002 – during the
development phase, Computacenter had provided interim support for
the system. The infrastructure is remotely monitored by dedicated
Unix/Sun technologists at Computacenter’s specially designed
Service Operations Centre at its headquarters in Hatfield.
Peter Stafford, Director of IS for Bank of Ireland UK, adds:
“This system is core to the operations of the lending group, and is
leading the way for business change and new processes. With so much
riding on its success, we did not want to have any risks around the
technology, and so looked to Computacenter for help both on
developing the platform, and then managing the ongoing availability
of the infrastructure. We have been pleased with the results, and
have suffered no outages.”
Computacenter’s managed availability service guarantees Bank of
Ireland UK 99.8% uptime during its core business hours. Richard
Brydie, Service Delivery Manager for Remote Services at
Computacenter, explains how this is achieved: “By using remote
monitoring tools, we are able to continuously review the
performance of all the key components of the mortgage
infrastructure up to the application layer, and identify in advance
any problems before they impact the business. Thanks to our close
relationship with Sun, we can react quickly if a disk or processor
needs to be repaired or replaced.”
Such strong vendor links also enable Computacenter to identify
any upgrades or patches required to the infrastructure at a later
stage. This is carried out by a change manager, who has been
specially assigned to the company to ensure that the infrastructure
continues to meet its business requirements.
Skills that guarantee success
There is little doubt that these business requirements will
change as the financial services market continues to evolve, and
the web becomes omnipresent. Indeed, one of the next stages is to
link the new core lending system to the bank’s online mortgage
operation. The system will also eventually be used by Bristol &
West International, with roll-out due to commence in 2003. “This is
probably the largest IT project we have ever embarked on, and one
that we could not have completed without Computacenter’s technical
skills,” comments Colin.
Computacenter’s project management skills and team work are also
singled out for praise by Colin. “In addition to liasing with Bank
of Ireland UK, Computacenter’s project team also had to work with
Sun Professional Services and CMG, who we brought in as overall
programme managers. Computacenter worked extremely well with
everyone involved in the roll-out, and held the infrastructure
implementation together with its solid project management
skills.
“The technology stream of the project has gone extremely well.
Working with Computacenter was a positive experience, and one I
would be happy to repeat,” concludes Colin.
* Source: Council of Mortgage Lenders
This article was part of Computer Weekly's managed services
business channel, sponsored by Computacenter