Alliance and Leicester to overhaul core systems

Alliance & Leicester has announced plans replace many of its core banking systems with Accenture’s Alnova Financial Solutions banking platform under a three-year IT-led business transformation programme.

The programme is intended to bring major back-office efficiencies and give the bank a single customer view.

The bank will spend the first year of the programme working closely with Accenture to align the system and its business processes before beginning to roll out the platform across all business units.

Ian Buchanan, A&L’s director of technology, said the new platform would enable the bank to increase its flexibilty and to simplify operations by removing duplication and complexity in its use of technology.

“This programme will change how the bank operates and enable us to become even more customer-focused,” he said.

“Once the Alnova platform is in place, we will be able to bring new products to market more quickly and be more agile.”

The change programme will see the bank move to a more component-based infrastructure and to shift its internal resources away from maintaining legacy systems such as mainframe technologies and towards web- and java-based technologies.

Buchanan said the programme was not just needs-driven but had a clear return on investment built into it, centred around the benefits brought by a business transformation that will see A&L retire some of the nine technology platforms it currently runs and trim its systems portfolio made up of 300 applications.