Abbey has completed a project to replace 30-year-old
legacy systems with Banco Satander's global banking platform three
years after Banco Santander's £8bn acquistion of
Abbey.
The
integration project, which is now complete except for a few
some small projects on the periphery,
provides the bank with a single view of its customers for the
first time.
The bank has moved its 10 million savings accounts, four million
current accounts and eight million card accounts to the new
platform.
The bank has renewed its branch communications network by
building more than 45 portals for 26,000 employees and third-party
organisations, and has also created a back-up datacentre.
It has moved its payment systems to Partenon and integrated its
back-office processing engines with the global Partenon
infrastructure
The system uses in-house middleware called Banksphere and is
built on an IBM database platform.
The project moves the bank from having separate systems
supporting different parts of the business to a single platform
that can collate all the data about each customer. "In doing so we
have straight-through processing, much better sales tools and
improved administration," said the bank.
Making all customer information available in one place is a key
long-term goal for banks as It allows them to save money and
time and improve customer service. It gives bank staff better
information when making decisions about providing financial
products.
When Banco Santander bought Abbey, it saw Partenon as a key
element in its plans to reduce costs at the bank by £300m
Chris skinner, CEO at financial services think tank Balatro,
said the Partenon platform will transform the bank's IT
infrastructure from that of a domestic player to an international
one. "This gives Abbey the scope to add some of the functionality
that you might see in an internationally focused bank
"It is more likely to mean that they can gain the economies of
scale from the global platform and build in more functionality. It
will be able to offer web banking services similar to international
banks, which a domestic bank would not," he said.