Britannia Building Society is migrating one million
Bristol & West savings accounts on to its IT system following
the acquisition of the building society's branch
network.
Britannia plans to spend £15m to ensure a smooth migration of
Bristol & West's customer accounts. However, analysts have
warned this could involve a lot of manual work.
The savings account data will be transferred between Bristol
& West's IBM mainframe and Britannia's Summit system, which was
supplied by Attentiv.
Both organisations use the same software supplier - Fineos - for
their service centres, which should help the migration.
As well as data, Britannia will migrate the PCs used in Bristol
& West's 65 branches from NT4 to Windows XP. The branches will
also have to be included in Britannia's self-managed wide area
network.
Martin Ellison, Britannia's group head of strategy and planning,
said of the society's systems, "It is all Sun Solaris with front
ends that use Microsoft desktops. There is some detail to be worked
through with Bristol & West."
Jost Hoppermann, financial services analyst at Forrester
Research, said, "There are a lot of question marks whenever a large
migration of this sort occurs."
When financial services companies migrate customers' accounts,
they can adopt one of two approaches, said Hoppermann.
The company that is being acquired can replace its systems with
more modern systems and use middleware to provide a common
front-end. This allows staff in the merged organisation to access
records, regardless of where they originated.
Alternatively, the data can be migrated on to the back-end
systems of the new owner. Replacing the existing IT systems is
generally easier than migrating the data on to the new owner's
database.
Hoppermann said companies that opt for the latter approach need
to ensure the migration is successful in three areas:
- The back-end IT systems have to be compatible
- The rules used to migrate information from the old database to
the new one have to transfer the information accurately
- The front-end system has to accurately represent the original
data.
Hoppermann said, "How can the data model of Bristol & West
be transferred to Britannia? A lot of manual or semi-manual work
might have to be done."