National Australia Bank (NAB) has chosen Mercator Software to provide business systems integration services for its diverse international operations, including European banking offshoots such as Clydesdale Bank, Yorkshire Bank, Northern Bank and National Irish Bank.
Under the agreement, the software house is to deploy an automated message mapping process to bring greater speed to NAB's transaction processing across a variety of platforms.
The project forms part of the bank's e-commerce strategy to allow customers and staff to access banking transaction information through a variety of media, including the Internet and hand-held Personal Data Assistants (PDA's).
Hugh McGuire, general manager of NAB's European IT division `NSITE', says that expansion into Europe has added a diverse range of servers and databases to the Group. "It is important that we are able to access this information held on disparate systems and feed it back to either a call centre, a teller at the branch, direct to the customer via the Internet or a mobile phone or the next new delivery channel that appears on the market," he says.