Cap Gemini Ernst & Young has landed a £25 million contract with UK financial services group HBOS to create a unified multi-branded platform for the sale of life assurance, savings and pension products.
The programme centres around an extension of the Equitable Life platform to support the total range of HBOS life, savings and pension products, sold under the brand names of Clerical Medical, Halifax Financial Services and St James's Place.
HBOS says the finished product will offer the first example of multiple products and multiple brands being supported by a single customer service system, with uniform, standardised processes. The completed solution will also support the multi-channel marketing of the full range of products and is expected to cut customer service costs by 25%.
John Edwards, chief executive officer of HBOS Life & Pensions, says the project will meet simultaneous demands for quality customer services and lower costs. "Our deployment of a single service platform for multiple products will be a real breakthrough for the whole industry and for HBOS, and one with important benefits for our customers and our business," he says.
CGE&Y has been brought onboard to manage the programme and to work in partnership with HBOS teams to provide systems integration expertise and to develop key components of the new applications software.
CGE&Y says it won the contract in competition with several other leading consulting and technology multinationals on the back of its systems integration capabilities, which allowed for a higher degree of re-use of HBOS's existing investment and skills in IT. The project will be run by joint consultancy/client teams based at HBOS sites at Aylesbury and Bristol and at a Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Accelerated Delivery Centre in Aston, Birmingham.