Last October ING Direct went live with its new online
mortgage service, in a bid to make an impression on the well-
established UK mortgage market as the first new entrant in a long
time.
New IT director Peter Knight, who joined the firm last summer,
found himself managing a cutting-edge IT system that was relying on
a service oriented architecture (SOA) and the latest web
technologies for its success.
The mortgage IT programme is
ING Direct's biggest and
most complex IT project to date. The Dutch financial services
provider said it was the next logical step for a firm which entered
the UK market in May 2003 and is well known for its online savings
product which it launched in the same year.
ING Direct started an online home insurance range of products
last year, which also depend on web technologies. So far these have
been successful, said Knight. However, the technology that needed
to be put in place to allow customers to specify and buy mortgages
online made for a tricky IT project.
The aim of the IT project was to provide customers applying for
mortgages - by phone or online - with a simpler and faster
experience, backed by a slick IT operation behind the scenes, said
Knight.
The online mortgage system went live in October 2006, and over
the Christmas period demand was strong. The shortest time it took
for people to go through the mortgage pipeline was six days,
compared with 21 for the industry average.
Although the product offering is simple, the ING system needed
to link to several third-party systems, such as the Land Registry
and various solicitors.
"This is a very large and complex programme of work. We are the
first new mortgage issuer in the market in many years and the
hurdles are pretty high. To differentiate yourself you have to
offer something very strong, and you need to take a long-term view
of it and invest in it. A mortgage product is not profitable in the
short run," said Knight.
By employing a service oriented architecture (SOA) from the
start, ING Direct was able to establish a modular applications
platform that it could "plug" interfaces into, and make rapid
changes as required, said Knight. "Because we are a relatively
young business, we do not have a legacy of systems."
The SOA and web services approach means that application
developers can implement small changes rapidly via programming
interfaces that are easy to work with, said Knight.
"I have great hope for the future in changing functionality and
products very rapidly due to the SOA infrastructure. We have
automated every interface you can think of, and that is how we have
managed to keep the process fast - it is all through the
combination of up-front business thinking and intelligent IT."
ING Direct looked at the IT systems in other country branches
where it operated and found that an SOA platform was being used in
Canada. ING Direct's UK operation took the SOA blueprint from
Canada because it did not want to build from scratch, said
Knight.
The system uses a Unix back-end to carry out backroom database
and financial functions, and a Windows front end that the system
managers and users see when they visit the site. The bank also
installed a mortgage origination system called Omiga which it
bought off Vertex, a Canadian financial services provider.
The whole system uses a web services approach to expose the
mortgage system to the front end, fetching and carrying user and
product information back and forth, and the code itself is based on
Java and XML.
To complicate matters further, ING Direct decided to use an
onshore and offshore programming team from Capgemini to support the
bank's 100-strong internal IT team. "We are a relatively small team
in a successful company and Capgemini are helping us develop some
parts of our mortgage system. We just needed the extra skills,"
said Knight.
Paul Coad, the Capgemini account director responsible for the
project, said the bank wanted the application developed quickly, so
a Mumbai-based Capgemini team of 65 people moved over to the UK to
work alongside ING's project team in Reading.
No stranger to outsourcing, ING Direct signed several workplace
services contracts in December 2006.
The deals with Accenture, Atos Origin, Getronics and KPN are
worth a total of £515m, and the seven-year contracts for each of
the suppliers will eventually lead to 430 ING staff in the
Netherlands and Belgium transferring to Atos Origin, Getronics and
KPN.
This type of intermingling of staff made the project both
interesting and challenging, said Knight. ING Direct had to do its
homework beforehand, to see how collaborating with an outsourced
project team at Capgemini in the UK and India might work in
practice.
"Capgemini was a good fit, but we needed to see how they worked
with their people and how they treated them. Would they feel
comfortable working with us on site and us with them in India? We
interviewed people in India to find out," said Knight.
This was all done by Knight's predecessor, as Knight himself
joined the firm as the mortgage project was underway. However, he
was expected to back the project wholeheartedly and see it through
to completion. "The team had worked long and hard I just came in at
the tail end," he said.
Once up to speed, Knight had to stay on top of the project to
see how things were progressing, and also assess the stress and
"pinch" levels.
"We needed to find out how we could ensure that we could
progress the project without burning people out," he said.
The key was to keep focusing on the IT project at all levels,
from the developers up to the chief executive officer. Knight also
held monthly and quarterly meetings with Capgemini and in-house
staff.
"This programme was a very large and complex one, and I had to
get up to speed rapidly coming in near the end of it. I needed to
know how well we were integrating with the Capgemini team, and how
our business partners were doing.
"When you join a new company, it is all about finding the
official forums - and unofficial ones - and how to get things done.
Some organisations work by consensus, and some have direct input
from individuals, so charting a path takes time. Fortunately, ING
was a very welcoming company with a great tech team," said
Knight.
One of the braver moves Knight made was to re-mortgage his own
house to trial the new online system, and to encourage his family
and friends to do the same.
"As with any projects there were some teething issues. I got the
first mortgage myself, and by doing this in a production
environment with friends and family who were happy to go through
the process, we found [the system] was a little clunkier than we
liked. But now we have thousands of customers going through it,"
said Knight.
How other technology projects have boosted ING
Direct
February 2007
ING Direct dealers start using biometric fingerprint technology
on the trading floor to increase security and boost
productivity.
The biometric fingerprint identity management technology and
fingerprint readers enables dealers to access central dealing room
computers quickly and securely.
August 2006
ING Direct strengthens its online banking security with the
launch of two-factor authentication for all its customers. ING
Direct uses RSA's Adaptive Authentication tokenless technology,
which adds an additional layer of security to ING's website.
The technology uses a customer's PC or handheld device as the
second-factor hardware device, and provides a positive
identification based on device and network forensics, behavioural
analysis and other parameters.
January 2005
ING Direct's UK division begins using data integration software
to keep track of its 700,000 customers. The software from
Informatica is used to feed more than one million transactions into
ING's datawarehouse every day, and to help improve ING's
marketing.
October 2004
Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps ING make
an extra £2.8m in its first year of operation in the UK.
The 400% return on investment came as call centre staff used the
CRM software from E.piphany to update customer account information
and help identify opportunities for cross-selling services to
customers.
ING rolls out fingerprint readers
ING outsources workplace services
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