Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank has completed the final stage of a project to migrate the bank's lease administration system to a fully hosted service from TietoEnator.
Under the terms of the agreement, the bank will continue to use the TietoEnator Instalment Credit Suite lease administration system to manage its portfolio of asset finance contracts, with TietoEnator now providing full support for the application management of the system for the next five years.
The bank will be utilising resilient Citrix thin-client technology connecting to servers hosted within TietoEnator offices over a secure, encrypted network. Alongside the migration to a managed service, the bank has also completed its upgrade to v10 - the latest version of the TietoEnator Instalment Credit Suite.
"This project marks a highly important phase for Alliance & Leicester, within the wider Commercial Asset Finance Development Programme," says Martin Evans, Director of Lending Operations, Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank. "One of our key objectives has been to provide staff within our business with a fully supported lease management system and operating platform from which to manage existing agreements and facilitate business growth over the next 3 to 4 years. Both TietoEnator and the bank's technology team have worked tremendously hard to support delivery of this key objective."
Hosted Service brings benefits
Alliance & Leicester has managed its asset finance contracts using TietoEnator's Instalment Credit Suite for a number of years and now takes the opportunity to bring further efficiencies to the organisation with a managed IT model.
"A fully hosted managed service brings a number of benefits to the bank," says Dave Storey, Systems Administration Manager, Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank. "We now have a one-stop service from TietoEnator with the organisation taking full responsibility for all aspects of running the Instalment Credit Suite from software development to system infrastructure, reducing the bank's need to rely on more than one third party for support. In addition, we also benefit from fixed IT costs; improved disaster recoverovery with the business able to recover almost immediately from a break in service; and a faster, more robust system which ensures continuity of service to our customers."
The project has seen the bank migrate its platform from VMS to Unix, creating a more integrated IT infrastructure on one of Alliance & Leicester Group's core operating platforms.
Product upgrade facilitates growth
Forming part of the project, Alliance & Leicester also upgraded its lease administration system to v10 of the TietoEnator Instalment Credit Suite. The upgrade will provide a platform on which to implement software changes necessary to comply with Consumer Credit Act changes due in October 2008. The platform will also enable the bank to introduce additional products and services for customers and introducers including a new front end proposal system and at some stage a fully automated stock system.
"These changes will enable us to further simplify our processes, which in turn will allow us to provide additional tailored products for the Commercial Asset Finance markets," comments Dave Storey.
Commenting on the product upgrade and migration to a managed service, Richard Gammon, Managing Director, TietoEnator Banking and Insurance UK says: "Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank now has a world-class platform on which to further develop its commercial asset finance business and by operating the system under TietoEnator's Managed Service facility, they have taken the intelligent and progressive step of placing a major component of their business infrastructure where it can be managed most efficiently, to the benefit of the business as a whole."