Bank of India (BoI) is one of India's largest public sector banks with over 2600 branches across India, and a network of 21 branches at key financial centres across 10 countries. BoI has branches for Commercial & Personal Banking, Corporate Banking, Overseas Banking, Capital Market, Merchant Banking and specialised branches for asset recovery, small scale industries, hi-tech agricultural finance, lease finance and treasury.

In its attempt to provide its existing and new customers with a Core Banking System (CBS), BoI has deployed a range of solutions from HP. It has signed a 10 year contract with HP to provide services ranging from customer service and managed services to consulting integration along with network management, disaster recovery, business continuity and availability and system integration.

Core banking drives the need

Competitive pressures from private sector banks and multinationals compelled Bank of India to go ahead with its own technology-enabled transformation. The Bank evaluated the option of choosing an IT partner to manage all its infrastructure and application requirements including an IT transformation around Core Banking.

According to P A Kalyansundar, GM, IT, BoI, “With 1050 branches spread across the country, it is very difficult to manage them. With distributed database, separate LAN and no centralised system among the branches, the top level management faced several problems while taking any decisions. To effectively meet the ever-growing challenges and competition, the Bank made a good headway in bringing about technological up-gradation. MIS and critical functions of controlling offices were computerised. Further, the bank wanted to move to the next level of IT enablement through the implementation of Core Banking System (CBS) thereby making a paradigm shift from branch automation to bank automation.”

Mission critical approach

The primary requirement of the bank was to have a flexible, scalable and innovative technology infrastructure that would provide the business agility to respond to the changing market dynamics. With the coming up of various private banks in the banking scenario in India, BOI wanted  a customer centric, customer aware infrastructure that would enable the bank to substantially boost its existing customer service levels and attract new customers.

Along with mission critical applications from HP, BoI has implemented Finacle, the financial software from Infosys. HP is providing the application services for Finacle and also OFSA (Oracle Financial Service Architecture) DWH product. “We have a good relationship with HP and have selected it as our IT partner through a transparent open global tender. Overall, it is HP's responsibility to maintain and upgrade the software for core banking, telephone banking, Internet banking and DWH for the entire tenure of the project. The total cost of the project is $120 million for a period of 10 years,” states Kalyansundar.

As part of the overall project, HP will implement and manage a data warehousing and document imaging solution and provide integrated channel management including Tele Banking, Internet Banking and ATM. It will also manage IT infrastructure and networks across branches of the bank and maintain technology products including servers, desktops and peripherals across the branches and provide asset refresh and obsolescence protection for IT assets.

The mission critical applications include data centre to ensure business continuity for core banking operations. For a large bank with so many branches around the country, business continuity has to be maintained at all times and downtimes can rarely be afforded. HP data centre consolidation solution will help to reduce risk, improve security and lower management and operational costs.

Better banking environment

The consolidated data centre will help to reduce capacity, costs, improve manageability and enhance business continuity. With fewer interruptions and less downtime, the Bank can lower costs and gain competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The total process of implementation was completed one year ahead. “It was made possible due to the support from each and every level of executives. The project model was also followed very well. IT redundancies are eliminated and server, storage and application sprawl have been overcome by consolidating data centre and networks into fewer, centralised locations. Most of our branches are now providing core banking and we are in the process to bring all the branches under the system. In this process, BoI has planned to centralise its 500 ATMs spreading across the country. As a part of the contract, the overall costs of BoI will be reduced by15-20%," concluded Kalyansundar.