As technology advances, so do the applications of that technology for banking systems. Misys Retail Banking wishes to remain at the cutting edge of new product development and is shortly to roll out two major new suites of products. Paul McNamara spoke to their CEO, Andrew Derrer.
Anyone with even a passing interest in retail banking systems will already know the two main offerings from Misys Retail Banking (MRB) - Bankmaster and Equation. They are used by over 400 banks across the globe and many of these are in the Middle East. And now, amid much fanfare, the new generation of these products is shortly to be rolled out.
MRB has a new growth strategy and central to this is the creation of a new banking software architecture, Equation Plus, that has been designed to help banks respond to the shifting boundaries between retailing and banking. MRB is also hoping to meet the needs of smaller ambitious banks and offshore institutions with the acquisition of IDOM UK to create Bankmaster Plus.
MRB will continue to support existing customers but allow both existing and new customers to prepare for the future. Some of the design criteria of Equation Plus included lowering the cost of IT infrastructure, creating opportunities for banks to drive profitable differentiation without costly bespoke work, and addressing compliance issues across the bank rather through a series of tactical initiatives
About Equation Plus
Equation Plus is a multi-layered, multi-channel architecture founded on the migration of Equation to a new, standards-based open Java platform. It can cut IT operating costs by providing more vendor choice on hardware and operating systems, by making integration projects faster, easier and cheaper, by giving access to a far wider skills pool and by fitting in with the long term strategic intent of many of the world's banks.
With no end-of-day, real-time analytics and all-the-time banking, Equation Plus enables the bank to have a single view of each customer, and vice versa, providing sophisticated relationship management both for sales and service and for market analysis.
In addition to the full suite of banking services and analysis tools, the Equation Plus architecture also introduces a whole new layer - Business Process Management. This enables banks to create new, uniquely differentiated products and services and fully automate them providing an error-free, low-cost competitive edge.
There will be a phased release of these new products.
Equation users will be able to stick with their current systems and add the Multi-channel and Relationship Management Platform this year if required. Equation users wishing to move over to open, multi-platform Java-based Equation Plus will be able to do so at any time from the end of 2005 with no data migration and no changes to business processes. In addition to running on an IBM iSeries, Equation plus will also run on open Unix systems using a choice of DB2 or Oracle 10g database technology.
About Bankmaster Plus
Bankmaster Plus integrates the Bankmaster LAN suite with sophisticated front-end technology from IDOM UK to create a new banking technology designed specifically for smaller banks. An out-of-the-box suite, featuring an easy to use Windows interface and flexible reporting capabilities, Bankmaster Plus is multi-channel, easy to use, and fast to implement. It enables smaller banks to compete with larger banks across their entire portfolio.
Andrew Derrer joined MRB in April of this year in order to implement the release of these new products.
What is new that made these new products possible - and necessary?
The key is interoperability and standards. More and more institutions are moving towards open standards and open systems. Unix platforms, Linux platforms in terms of hardware. Standard databases if you go to the next level of technology, Oracle 10g, DB2. These are the two industry standard databases. And the next level of software like XML and BPEL, added to our 20 years of knowledge as a company, means that we know what is going on in banks and how to help them do it better.
The big change has been that we are seeing a shift from retail banking to bank retailing. What this means is that the action that is critical is in the front and mid-office and not in the back office. Banks used to be very product centric as opposed to customer centric and they would supply products they thought their customers would want like loans and mortgages. But now, due to deregulation and greater competition, banks need to sell themselves just like a retailer has to sell products.
The problem that arose was that all the fancy front end products being offered did not integrate with the back office at all well. Massive disintegration between the front and the back office has meant massive customer dissatisfaction and projects not being completed. So the emphasis has gone back to real time back and front office integration.
How do you go about educating the bank that they need these new products?
Well, in many ways what we are doing is offering to banks the products that they have told us they need. So we are not forcing anything on them. We are supplying what they have asked us for. And they have asked us for products that have greater back to front and front to back integration. So what we are offering is an integrated suite for banking that no one else has even thought of and it comes from talking to our customers.
How much hand-holding will there be for customers who want to move up from one product to the other?
We will offer a variety of different services and propositions to our customers. The first thing to do it to build this in such a way that makes migration simple. So we will be providing automated migration tools to allow people to move their existing environment to the new environment as programmatically as is possible. Of course since some of the products are completely new - then it can't be completely automated. What will happen then is that people will take our standard off the shelf processes and then look to see how they need to configure that for any specific business process that they require for their particular bank. How long that will take will depend on each case.
Do you have a sense of how you think the Middle East will respond in terms of uptake?
Based on some significant input from customers in the Middle East we believe the area is going to be one of the fast adopters. There are two reasons for that. The first is that the banks in the Middle East are very sophisticated. They have adopted electronic channels pretty quickly. However the other factor is the rise of Islamic banking. This is huge force for change within the banks. The kind of modular architecture that we are proposing is very close to what is needed to create a full Islamic banking working solution. And indeed we are live in the Islamic Bank of Britain with Islamic banking components.
© Banker Middle East 2004
