FST Awards 2009 Shortlist

Best use of IT in retail banking:

Allied Irish Bank
By deploying a voice recognition solution with biometrics for its high-value Relationship Managed customers, AIB has greatly enhanced the customer experience by eliminating layers of IVR touchtone procedures, speeding up the process of reaching the intended person or function. Developed and implemented by eircom and SpeechStorm, the hosted solution has allowed in-branch staff to focus more on value-add activities and reduced the load on contact centre staff.

Barclays
Barclays deployed a HP-based ‘thin client’ architecture across its new 700-branch retail network in Spain. Using its data centre resource has lowered acquisition costs by four million euro, while operational cost savings of 10 million euros over four years are forecast. Business processes, security and customer service have all been improved.

Nottingham Building Society
In 2008 Nottingham Building Society completed the overhaul of its IT systems and infrastructure. In order to streamline the Society, operate with maximum efficiency and create a customer-centric rather than product-centric organisation every single piece of hardware and software has been refreshed. Various systems have been installed including mortgage admin software, savings, and deed and arrears management software from Tieto, alongside new servers, and virtualisation and replication software.

RBS – Bankline project
RBS has introduced the Bankline online channel for its UK corporate banking customers. The single service replaces a number of legacy electronic banking products and payments options, enhancing ease-of-use and customer satisfaction, which has gone up 10 percentage points. Free onsite training and payment tracking are possible and its scalable design enables new functions, such as Faster Payments, to be easily added.

RBS – Electronic Customer Comms Strategy
RBS customer communications have been transformed to exploit the online banking channel. A new alerting platform and single source of contact data, plus new procedures, have switched off 1.4 million paper statements so far and saved over 22 million sheets of paper.

Wonga.com
Wonga.com is a new internet lender offering UK consumers short-term loans. The start-up has already processed over 50,000 cash advances worth £6 million so far, using its online banking technology and risk/decision analytics.

Best Use of IT in Wholesale & Investment Banking:

Citi
Citi has installed the Thunderhead Now document generation system in its Global Retail Structured Products business. The platform has increased the automation and accuracy possible in the production of complicated term sheets and legal documents for derivative instruments, reducing legal costs by 80 per cent per transaction, while increasing productivity and growth potential.

Credit Suisse – Adapt project
Credit Suisse’s global equity derivatives IT team has delivered an integrated front office software platform using an open-source style development methodology, which enables the incremental, quick and seamless creation of front office trading tools. It is highly customisable to user and regional requirements and uses smart deployment controls to minimise business and development risks, while providing a more cost-effective and collaborative process than the existing spreadsheet-orientated development cycle.

Deutsche Bank – AcS FX project
The AcS Foreign Exchange (FX) London Re-engineering project introduced a real-time sub-ledger capability and streamlined the front-to-back trade flow of the central booking hub for FX, covering trading activity in London, New York, and Sydney, which is 90% of db flow. The aim is to reduce costs and increase capacity and scalability.

Deutsche Bank – Integrity platform
Introducing the global account substantiation integrity solution from BCS, which reconciles over one million client account balances worldwide to ensure accuracy, has increased efficiency and transparency at db. The platform also provides an early warning system for high risk balances.

JP Morgan Chase & Co
JPMC began a Compute Backbone project back in 2003 by installing a single-purpose grid, shared by seven applications in its investment banking division. This High Performance Computing (HPC) capability has now been rolled out to many more applications and the firm is now building a comprehensive internal cloud infrastructure to serve new applications and business departments, increasing flexibility and efficiency.

Penson Financial Services
The STARS project (Solution for Transaction Administration and Real Time Settlement) is designed to replace increasingly unstable and disparate legacy systems which previously supported Penson’s correspondent clearing services. The project uses syn~ technology installed by Coexis and has delivered improved business and IT agility, and enhanced straight through processing.

Best use of business-to-business ecommerce:

Bright Grey
Bright Grey, a division of Royal London, has developed a bespoke customer-facing quote & application component for use across the internet by intermediaries and plan holders. It is underpinned by an innovative in-house system that underwrites protection insurance online, providing real-time decisions, independence, flexibility, and an ability to transfer all client data directly into administration systems.

HSBC
HSBC Securities Services (HSS) has installed an open source business intelligence and reporting tool solution from Actuate to enable it clients to access investment data online in various formats and customise the delivery stream to suit them. The B2B solution frees up internal staff from constant reporting activity and allows clients to seamlessly integrate with HSS’ systems.

Man Investments
In the summer of last year, the MI Trade secondary market for selected Man Investment products was rolled out allowing investors to actively manage their hedge fund portfolios on a daily basis, instead of having to adhere to monthly or quarterly limits. Clients can now check product inventory availability, make decisions and place orders online, or by phone or fax, plus plans are in place to deliver STP execution services.

Bluefin
Part of Axa, the newly-created Bluefin Group, including Orbit Benefits as was, provides pension and employee benefit technology internally and to third party ‘white label’ clients. Working with Upco it has overhauled its technology using Java Spring and an open source framework to ensure better integration with clients and end users, and greater capacity and flexibility.

Standard Life
Standard Life’s Adviserzone dedicated extranet website provides a secure B2B e-commerce service for independent financial advisors. The system also includes askTech, an online technical support facility powered by Transversal software that provides a web-based FAQ help and support function.

Best use of CRM technology:

Deutsche Bank – OPAL platform
The new Operations Portal (OPAL) at db is a web-based client relationship management platform intended to measure and monitor improvements with respect to strategic key performance indicators and key risk indicators. It consolidates multiple tactical and workflow initiatives in each region/product line into a global strategic cross-product data warehouse.

Egg
Egg needed to ensure that their telephone customers received the same service as their online ones, so they implemented an integrated Sabio speech solution with CRM capabilities for the agent. This has cut call times by approximately 50 seconds, improved customer satisfaction, enhanced ID and security procedures and increased first contact resolution, while assisting agents with relevant and timely screen information.

HgCapital
The old CRM system at HgCapital was making it hard for the private equity firm to manage its large contact database, oversee key relationships and track prospective deals. The new Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution, installed by Aspective, enables its employees to track relationships and reduce time spent on administrative duties.

Wesleyan Assurance Society
In order to improve the customer experience and increase business efficiencies, in 2008 Wesleyan launched a new customer sales system that uses state-of-the-art technology. It includes software created exclusively for Wesleyan to enable the firm to provide a greater level of service and security, and deliver more insight to its niche market professional client groups.

Best use of IT in insurance:

BNP Paribas Lease Group
BPLG, the commercial equipment financing subsidiary of BNP Paribas, is providing 200 sales representatives with BlackBerry smartphones to increase responsiveness and productivity. It’s also upgrading its connectivity and synchronisation application to help reps in the field.

Bright Grey
Bright Grey, a division of Royal London, has developed a bespoke customer-facing quote & application component for use across the internet by intermediaries and plan holders. It is underpinned by an innovative in-house system that underwrites protection insurance online, providing real-time decisions, independence, flexibility, and an ability to transfer all client data directly into administration systems.

Confused.com
Using online customer service technology from Eptica has enabled Confused.com, to manage a significant increase in transactions, drive down costs and increase the quality and speed of customer response. A 50 per cent increase in quotations has been achieved, raising the opportunities for profits as the site receives a fee for each completed transaction from its 100 insurance partners.

Legal & General
Legal & General With Profits implemented the eg operational intelligence software suite and the vendor’s principles of operational management in its Customer Services business areas during 2008. The project has cut costs, while delivering measurable improved performance and efficiency.

PGGM
A large income protection provider in the Netherlands, PGGM also administers the Dutch healthcare and social workers' pension schemes. It has EUR69 billion under investment and recently installed hp ProCurve networking technology, which has reduced total cost of operation by 30 per cent for its network, while increasing the security and scalability of its technology offering.

Wesleyan Assurance Society
In order to improve the customer experience and increase business efficiencies, in 2008 Wesleyan launched a new customer sales system that uses state-of-the-art technology. It includes software created exclusively for Wesleyan to enable the firm to provide a greater level of service and security, and deliver more insight to its niche market professional client groups.

Best Trading Platform:

Bluenext
Bluenext is an environmental exchange in Paris. NYSE Euronext and Caisse des Dépots owned, it will play a key role in using market dynamics to price and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and already offers CO2 spot and derivative products. Trayport’s GlobalVision software provides the electronic trading capabilities.

Chi-X Europe
Chi-X was the first pan-European equity multilateral trading facility (MTF), having launched seven months ahead of the EU’s MiFID change. It now offers trading on 16 European indices and aims to drive down trading costs with its technology offering.

Credit Suisse
Mamba is a new client application for Credit Suisse’s Prime Services Managed Lending business. Built over three-and-a-half years to replace a legacy terminal-based securities lending application, the platform opens up the potential for product innovation and growth, while removing dependence on third party suppliers.

EMXCo
The EMX Message System is the de facto standard for the communication of funds trading in the UK. To maintain this status, EMXCo is continuously adding new functionality; the latest of which is the client nominee re-registration message set, which speeds up interaction between fund managers, distributors and clients.

Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International
MUSI installed the Sybase Rap:Trading Edition platform to deliver faster, timely and reliable market data and analysis to meet the needs of its traders.

Turquoise
A pan-European multilateral trading facility (MTF) established by nine investment banks, Turquoise offers an alternative equity trading platform that is different from the traditional European exchanges. The firm says its platform, based on Cinnober technology, provides improved trading functionality, latency, capacity and resilience, compared to rivals.

Security / Anti-fraud strategy of the Year:

Barclays – Encryption project
Recent high profile data breaches across the industry, coupled with regulatory compliance demands, led Barclays to review its existing security strategy and implement a centralised encryption infrastructure using PGP technology, which both defends data privacy and safeguards the bank’s reputation. Good key management procedures also ensure encrypted data can be easily recovered for business continuity purposes.

Lloyds Banking Group / HBOS
Halifax Bank of Scotland, now of course part of the Lloyds Banking Group, has developed online authentication, monitoring and anti-fraud systems with RSA that are now deployed across several business units including retail banking, debit cards and new user credit cards, successfully reducing phishing incidents by 85% and sopping £13 million of attempted fraud.

Newcastle Building Society – AML programme
Over the last year the Society has bolstered its defences against financial crime with the installation of anti-money laundering software from 3i infotech and overhauled its procedures.

Compliance project of the Year:

Deutsche Bank – MTA policy
To make fraud more difficult Deutsche Bank has introduced a Mandatory Time Away policy that enforces an obligatory period of two weeks’ absence from the desk for employees in sensitive positions, backed by a solution that prohibits the use of operational IT systems (except email) and can raise alerts.

Deutsche Bank – FCL Feeds programme
The Feed Consolidation Layer (FCL) Feeds programme delivers a mechanism to collect data from front-office trading systems and provides a pipeline to the risk engines and to finance, ensuring that regulatory capital requirements are more easily met.

Markit
Markit Document Exchange is a web-based documentation library that transforms the way financial institutions share compliance, counterparty credit, and regulatory documents. The service acts as a central repository for buy-side documents, ensuring there is a single location that the sell-side of any transaction can access, to retrieve up-to-date compliance and regulatory documentation as required.

RBS – Email Journaling platform
A major initiative to enable the automatic capture and storage of all email within the RBS Estate so that the group can now more easily respond to requests for evidence, in relation to emails, from regulators or the courts. The Email Journaling project involved the migration of 47,000 mailboxes to the new platform and required considerable teamwork and organisation across the organisation.

Turquoise
The new equity trading venue needed to gain authorisation from the FSA as a multilateral trading facility (MTF), and prove it could operate in accordance with MiFID and the Code of Market Conduct. Working with AppLabs as its testing partner and Detica the exchange achieved this, and developed a range of market surveillance and observation tools to investigate potentially abusive behaviours and establish audit trials as required.

VocaLink – EuroCSM
The Euro Clearing and Settlement Mechanism from VocaLink is a clearing payment service that complies with the guidelines set out at the European level. It offers banks a ready-made solution to achieving compliance with the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), using scalable technology.

Systems integration project of the Year:

Deutsche Bank AG – POS Infrastructure
Deutsche Bank has developed a new service orientated architecture and workflow-based Point of Sales (POS) infrastructure for credit sales financing. Part of the consumer Financing Platform the development increases automation, integrates with existing systems and aims to optimise credit processes to create significant cost savings.

Newcastle Building Society – Email conversion
The Society has converted all of its email and office system communications over to Microsoft from Lotus Smart Suite integrating all of the old documents into the new architecture.

NYSE Euronext
With the acquisition of Archipelago and Euronext, the exchange group faced the challenge of integrating its varied trading platforms to produce a simplified and optimised architecture. By using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Network to respectively run and manage its platform the group is moving towards a common structure, while retaining the flexibility that is necessary in such a fast-moving marketplace.

Penson Financial Services
The STARS project (Solution for Transaction Administration and Real Time Settlement) is designed to replace increasingly unstable and disparate legacy systems which previously supported Penson’s correspondent clearing services. The project uses syn~ technology installed by Coexis and has delivered improved business and IT agility, and enhanced straight through processing.

RBS – UKFPS compliance
The UK Faster Payments Service is the country’s first new payments scheme in over 20 years and was a major compliance challenge for the banks. The successful integration of 53 technology projects over three years resulted in RBS Group being able to accommodate 100 per cent of internet and telephony payments on day one.

Outsourcing partnership of the Year:

Barclays Wealth
By outsourcing the management of its end user PC and print technology environment to hp, Barclays Wealth has realised substantial benefits. These include an equipment refresh, improved operational efficiency, increased staff productivity, higher standards of customer service, and annual cost savings of over £1.5 million.

Co-operative Financial Services
CFS took the strategic decision to outsource its administration operations to Capita in order to build a sustainable, customer focused Life & Savings business. Project Signature was supported by the eg operational intelligence software suite which was used to provide management information (MI) for initial contractual benchmarking and to monitor ongoing service achievement.

Deutsche Bank – LASER programme
Deutsche Bank’s Investment Banking IT team started the Leveraged Application Service and Rationalisation (LASER) programme to provide a uniform worldwide production support and change model framework for business IT applications. Working with HCL, the team has succeeded in packaging and commoditizing the often complex process of application management and support by grading the level of support required, passing it on and thereby freeing up internal staff for business-enhancing IT projects.

Investec
In under 20 days Investec, by outsourcing to Outsourced Professional Administration Ltd, was able to design, launch and administer structured products for sale direct to consumers or via intermediated sales. This required no capital investment, nor additional resources at Investec.

Lloyds Banking Group
LloydsTSB engaged with Cognizant Technology Solutions to transfer the delivery of its enterprise-wide quality assurance function. Over the last 18 months the partnership has grown to a 600-member organisation and reduced the cost of supply by 27 per cent.

VocaLink – BGC partnership
The payment transaction specialist, VocaLink, signed a groundbreaking new deal with Bankgirocentralen (BGC) to process the majority of Sweden’s automated payments. This is a world first, as it is the first time the processing of a national payments scheme has been transferred to a non-domestic provider – an event that is likely to happen more and more as the Single Euro Payments Area takes hold.

Networking/cabling project of the Year:

BGC Partners
The inter-dealer broker has deployed an IP/MPLS core infrastructure to create a platform for its customers’ mission-critical applications. The infrastructure uses Juniper Networks technology and provides carrier-class continuous systems availability and automated network operations, enabling easier access, VPN services and less complexity internally.

CLS Bank
The foreign exchange clearing platform has completed a new data centre project to become more regionally resilient. Working with IBM and Vtesse Networks, CLS Bank has established a long distance synchronous replication system to enhance its business continuity, without adversely affecting latency or other operational parameters.

Market Harborough Building Society
The Society has implemented advanced switching technology from ConSentry to control network access more thoroughly and better protect crucial customer financial data.

NAG
The 2nd Data Centre programme at National Australia Group, owners of the Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks, involved building a new Tier 3+ data centre and a subsequent ‘lift and shift’ migration over a long weekend from the old facility into the new data centre, including all associated cabling. The project has enhanced network capacity and continuity, while providing cost savings and operational benefits. It required good teamwork and management from the bank’s Technology Division to ensure the project was delivered on time and under budget.

PGGM
A large income protection provider in the Netherlands, PGGM also administers the Dutch healthcare and social workers' pension schemes. It has EUR69 billion under investment and recently installed hp ProCurve networking technology, which has reduced total cost of operation by 30 per cent for its network, while increasing the security and scalability of its technology offering.

Best payments deployment:

RBS – Bankline project
RBS has introduced the Bankline online channel for its UK corporate banking customers. The single service replaces a number of legacy electronic banking products and payments options, enhancing ease-of-use and customer satisfaction, which has gone up 10 percentage points. Free onsite training and payment tracking are possible and its scalable design enables new functions, such as Faster Payments, to be easily added.

RBS – UKFPS compliance
The UK Faster Payments Service is the country’s first new payments scheme in over 20 years and was a major compliance challenge for the banks. The successful integration of 53 technology projects over three years resulted in RBS Group being able to accommodate 100 per cent of internet and telephony payments on day one.

Travelex
Travelex has deployed a new network of ATMs to dispense multiple currencies and introduce dynamic currency conversion transactions. The project has extended the range of Travelex channels through which customers can access foreign currency, generating extra revenues. In addition, the firm has expanded the service to provide outsourced FX dispensing ATM networks to other banks.

VocaLink – UKFPS infrastructure
Working in partnership with Apacs and 13 participating banks, VocaLink built and implemented the hub of the UK Faster Payments Service. Launched last year, the FPS is revolutionary and is the first application of the VocaLink Real-Time Payments Platform. It operates on a 24x7 basis, providing near real-time interbank transfers for internet and telephony banking, eliminating the previous three-day payments clearing wait.

Environmental Initiative of the Year:

Barclays Wealth – Managed print network
Deployment of a managed print network in its UK and offshore island operations has saved Barclays Wealth £1.25 million annually and lowered print-related energy consumption by 73,000 kWh. In addition, paper use has dropped by 20 million sheets and CO2 emissions have reduced by over 500 tonnes.

Bluenext
Bluenext is an environmental exchange in Paris. NYSE Euronext and Caisse des Dépots owned, it will play a key role in using market dynamics to price and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and already offers CO2 spot and derivative products. Trayport’s GlobalVision software provides the electronic trading capabilities.

RBS – Electronic Customer Comms Strategy
RBS customer communications have been transformed to exploit the online banking channel. A new alerting platform and single source of contact data, plus new procedures, have switched off 1.4 million paper statements so far and saved over 22 million sheets of paper.

Data centre excellence award:

F&C
A virtual test bed environment, based around PowerConvert from PlateSpin, makes streamlining and testing procedures easy and means that physical hardware in the data centre no longer has to be provisioned, as the testing procedure is now automated. System downtime and service interruptions have been cut, and uptime and dynamic recovery enhanced.

Fidelity
To support the technology demand generated by business growth, Fidelity launched a strategic programme at the end of 2005 to deliver data centre capacity for a seven to ten year horizon and to streamline its architecture. The first of two tier 4 data centres was completed on 20 June 2008 and the second is now under construction.

HSBC France
Since installing Diskeeper defragmentation software HSBC France has experienced decreased support calls, as well as quick, more reliable back-up processes from its data centres for business continuity purposes. The bank benefits from cost savings, more flexible centres, and better overall productivity.

NAG
The 2nd Data Centre programme at National Australia Group, owners of the Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks, involved building a new Tier 3+ data centre and a subsequent ‘lift and shift’ migration over a long weekend from the old facility into the new data centre, including all associated cabling. The project has enhanced network capacity and continuity, while providing cost savings and operational benefits. It required good teamwork and management from the bank’s Technology Division to ensure the project was delivered on time and under budget.

Polygon Investment Partners
The global investment management firm recently undertook a project to review its data centre and infrastructure strategy. By outsourcing to a high-density hosting environment within Telecity Group’s data centres, it is aiming for optimum reliability for its trading platform, seeking increased scalability and hopeful of attaining reduced running costs.

Best Business Continuity Implementation:

Banco Sabadell
Banco Sabadell has distributed 5,100 BlackBerry smartphones for its employees and installed a NeverFail clustering solution to ensure the high availability of services and applications, and the protection and recovery of data.

CLS Bank
The foreign exchange clearing platform has completed a new data centre project to become more regionally resilient. Working with IBM and Vtesse Networks, CLS Bank has established a long distance synchronous replication system to enhance its business continuity, without adversely affecting latency or other operational parameters.

HSBC France
Since installing Diskeeper defragmentation software HSBC France has experienced decreased support calls, as well as quick, more reliable back-up processes from its data centres for business continuity purposes. The bank benefits from cost savings, more flexible centres, and better overall productivity.

Newcastle Building Society – Secondary site
The mutual built a data centre and synchronised secondary site that can accommodate 500 people with high availability telephones and computer systems, replicating applications as needed to satisfy the Society’s, and its third party clients, requirements, both now and in the future.

IT team of the year:

Advantage Finance
The small IT team has re-engineered its systems and customer correspondence to deal with the recent changes to the Consumer Credit Act and introduced a digital telephone system with a VoIP kit for homeworking and recording capabilities.

Deutsche Bank – Application Infrastructure Services
The newly enlarged AIS team works with the core IT team and application teams to prioritise tasks better, offer support and increase efficiency. It has been involved in a number of projects throughout the last year, including capacity upgrades, establishing a utility approach to source configuration and software management, setting up a centralised document repository, and assisting a physical data centre move for the Global Banking segment.

HPB Croatia
HPB bank in Croatia wants to target younger customers and provide a broader spectrum of banking services to grow, so it has installed Infosys’ core banking Finacle treasury solution to drive its transformation. The overhaul involved 35 people from HPB and Infosys, including project managers, risk and IT experts, technical architects and software engineers, so good teamwork was essential.

Lloyds Banking Group – Process Design & Solutions team
The team of 70 at LloydsTSB have been busy designing forms, letters and procedures for end users as usual, but a new online draft approval process has reduced delivery times by 11 per cent. Assessment periods for new work have been cut by 50 per cent and the efficiency of the task management system, which directs customer requests, has been overhauled. Specific large tasks undertaken over the last year include providing the complex business processes necessary to incorporate the Faster Payments Service into the bank and ensuring better navigation across the retail division’s library of 6,800 procedures.

NAG
The 2nd Data Centre programme at National Australia Group, owners of the Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks, involved building a new Tier 3+ data centre and a subsequent ‘lift and shift’ migration over a long weekend from the old facility into the new data centre, including all associated cabling. The project has enhanced network capacity and continuity, while providing cost savings and operational benefits. It required good teamwork and management from the bank’s Technology Division to ensure the project was delivered on time and under budget.

Newcastle Building Society
The enlarged IT team at NBS has overseen a site relocation over the last year and a changeover from Lotus to Microsoft email and documentation systems, while maintaining its ‘everyday’ service desk, operations and systems developments. In addition, three internet savings platforms have been delivered for third party ‘white label’ clients and the financial meltdown has caused extra work – for instance, Icesave was a big client of the team’s and ensuring the return of savings to UK investors via the FSCS process is time-consuming.

RBS – Email Journaling platform
A major initiative to enable the automatic capture and storage of all email within the RBS Estate so that the group can now more easily respond to requests for evidence, in relation to emails, from regulators or the courts. The Email Journaling project involved the migration of 47,000 mailboxes to the new platform and required considerable teamwork and organisation across the organisation.

VocaLink – UKFPS infrastructure
Working in partnership with Apacs and 13 participating banks, VocaLink built and implemented the hub of the UK Faster Payments Service. Launched last year, the FPS is revolutionary and is the first application of the VocaLink Real-Time Payments Platform. It operates on a 24x7 basis, providing near real-time interbank transfers for internet and telephony banking, eliminating the previous three-day payments clearing wait.

Outstanding contribution to the industry by an individual:

The winner will be announced on the night of the awards.

Overall winner:

The winner will be announced on the night of the awards.

• If you wish to make any suggested alterations to your project summary please contact neil.ainger@fstech.co.uk