Yorkshire Building Society (YBS) has partnered with HP Enterprise Services to launch a cloud-based IT platform that will be used to provide other financial institutions with access to retail banking applications
Built on HP Enterprise Cloud Services, the new Shared Services Alliance will provide building societies and banks with data centre, service management, application development and client support via the vendor's private cloud, while the Yorkshire will contribute its core application software, industry expertise, regulatory compliance and financial services knowledge.
The virtual private cloud will deliver fully hosted core applications for mortgages and savings, regulatory reporting, business intelligence and business process outsourcing, says the partners.
The Yorkshire - the UK's second largest building society - already provides outsourced services to smaller institutions through its IT subsidiary Yorkshire Key Services. The alliance with HP takes this service to another level, providing a scalabale infrastructure and a potentially profitable source of annuity revenue.
David Henderson, general manager, group change, and chief information officer, Yorkshire Building Society, says: "Although the Yorkshire is already a successful provider of IT services through our Yorkshire Key Services subsidiary, this cloud-based Shared Services Alliance will offer a new way of working for the UK financial services market by moving away from a capital model to a service model, reducing costs and time to market."