In the 10 years since the successful launch of
Egg, it has grown into the
world's largest internet-only bank. In the decade since the
internet revolutionised banking,
internal processes, fraud protection and risk management have
also been overhauled by technical developments.
Ken Woghiren, head of architecture and innovation at
Citigroup UK, which now owns Egg, has worked for the internet
bank since it was launched. In this time, there has been a massive
change in consumer technology to allow access to banking services
online. "From our customers' standpoint, the change has been
staggering. When Egg launched, internet banking was moving out of
being a 'crazy idea'. We were there at the right time and the
company said, 'This year we're going to do it'."
Since the launch, customers' PCs have become much more powerful.
And whereas 10 years ago, the more powerful PCs were at work, now
they are in the home, Woghiren says. Bandwidth too, has been
revolutionised. "This was the age of the 56k modem. It's almost
impossible to believe now."
Private computer
Now, people have a private computer - the laptop, Woghiren says.
A desktop machine might be for all the family, or the office. But a
laptop is private, and this helps online banking, he says.
Inside the banks, too, change has been colossal. In security,
the threat is now very different. Ten years ago, hacking was a
mischievous sport for "script kiddies", whereas nowadays it is a
serious activity for organised criminals. Banks have had to respond
with massive investment in security architecture.
According to Woghiren, Egg was a leader in internet banking
architecture. "We were 10 years ahead of our time. We decided we
were going to build a banking platform around the customer. Since
the '50s and '60s all banking applications have been built around
accounts, not customers."
To achieve this goal, the advent of service oriented
architecture was vital, Woghiren says.
"We needed this architecture to harness existing banking
platforms, adding sophisticated middleware to create a service
tier, allowing customer centre top tier.
Egg started with a system called Top End, which was bought by
BEA. Four years ago,
the bank moved onto Microsoft .net and active server pages. Since
the firm has been bought by Citigroup, it is moving to a Java
platform.
Although 10 years ago, application development teams would have
been terrified of mixing Microsoft and Java technologies, the
advent of web services has eased compatibility issues. Woghiren
says, "The service tier is used to communicate with the back
end.
That's the thing that has saved the industry: web services allow
you to be technology agnostic. I don't lose sleep over
compatibility any more, so long as everything is written to the web
services standards."
Flurry of publicity
Last year the bank, launched in a flurry of publicity in 1998,
was taken over by Citigroup, a sign that its online business model
was working.
Citigroup director of change, Robin Young, says, "The last year
has seen gargantuan change, Egg has always been about a great
customer experience, but now Citigroup is bringing more resilience
and scalability and back-up plans."
Citigroup is now enhancing back office transactional system to
support the Egg model in a worldwide roll-out.