India's Canara Bank is down to a shortlist of three vendors - Infosys Technologies, i-flex Solutions and Hewlett Packard - for a $28.7m core banking contract, according to local press reports.
According to a report by India's Business Standard, the shortlist consists of Infosys' core banking technology Finacle deployed by Indian IT services firm Wipro, i-flex's Flexcube product which would be implemented on IBM hardware, and a system supplied by Hewlett Packard.
Senior bank officials says the contract is worth at least Rs 125 crore ($28.7m) although this estimate does not include on-going support and maintenance charges.
The bank says its was seeking a firm that could supply everything required to implement the core banking platform, from supplying hardware and software, running a pilot and setting up a data centre in Bangalore and disaster recovery centre in Mangalore.
Canara Bank says the system will enable it to introduce online banking services to customers.
Bank chairman and MD, V P Shetty, told reporters that he expects to roll out the system to 1053 branches by December 2006.
Last year the bank spent close to Rs 100 crore ($23m), maintaining its existing IT infrastructure.