Lloyds TSB's corporate markets operation has cut the
time it takes to complete overnight processing of trades by six
hours after deploying a £3.5m converged network.
The network will also enable it to deploy new applications for
brokers.
The bank went live last month with the data and voice network
from Cisco across three central London sites.
David Morely, senior manager responsible for strategy and
architecture at Lloyds TSB, said faster processing of trade-related
data was a crucial benefit of the 40gbps network.
This has enabled the bank to complete its batch processing of
trades by midnight rather than by 6am the following day.
Morely said that before the network was installed the bank had
been more exposed to the risk of mission-critical applications not
being able to process rising data volumes.
The combined voice and data system is also enabling brokers for
the first time to record, archive and play back all conversations
about transactions with customers instantaneously.
This means that in the event of a trade being called into
dispute, audio logs can be replayed straight away rather than
requiring tape back-ups to be retrieved.
Morely said a key challenge in installing the converged network
was prioritising the quality of voice services against data
services. He said parameters were initially set to give priority to
data applications, but after testing this was adjusted to give more
bandwidth to voice services.
Morely said fine tuning these applications to get the balance
right between voice and data would help speed deployments of more
bandwidth-intensive services, like video, in the future.
"Our increased capacity and experience will enable us to easily
overlay video in applications, which is something we plan to
introduce," he said.
Design, testing, implementation and user acceptance testing were
all carried out in partnership with communications specialist
Affiniti. The corporate markets operation has a three-year
agreement with Affiniti to cover breaks and fixes, but the bank has
retained responsibility for disaster recovery.
"The data we process over this network is so important that if
it failed the bank would come to a halt. We decided it was
essential to have the competencies for disaster recovery in-house,
rather than outsourced," said Morely.
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