IT is driving change at Co-op Financial Services

Co-op bank is going multichannel

The rollout of a new banking system is the core element of a £500m IT-driven transformation at Co-operative Financial Services (CFS) and will play a key role in the firm’s likely merger with Britannia Building Society.

If the merger with Britannia is successfully completed, CFS believes its new IT will ease any challenges associated with the integration process and improve branch-based services.

“Should the merger goes ahead, there are substantial opportunities to create products and extra capability at Britannia’s branches and will drive operational efficiencies for both businesses,” said Clive Elliott, director of enterprise platform at CFS.

“The enterprise platform capability will be a very important component in the process of leveraging integration benefits for the merged organisations. It is central to achieving the targeted business operating models of the merger and therefore the rollout roadmap will be synchronised with the integration plan,” Elliott told Computing.

The implementation of Finacle, the new banking platform supplied by Infosys, is the largest IT project CFS has ever undertaken, said Elliott. It will replace legacy systems at the firm’s banking and insurance divisions, as well as online services to reduce maintenance-related costs and support a move towards a customer-centric operation.

Decommissioning the old systems in favour of Finacle will provide CFS with the ability to improve information capture in actions such as change of address – currently, the bank has to enter new data manually across a number of systems to reflect the changes.

The new system will also offer an integrated multichannel capability, said Elliott.
“Customers will be able to start a transaction in one channel and complete it in another, for example,” he said.

“We will be able to bundle our products more effectively to meet customer needs and price them more specifically instead of just having a broad offering. By recognising customers as a clients of the business rather than clients of the product we are better able to identify their needs and better assist them in fulfilling their financial ambitions.”

Finacle will be rolled out in stages, the first release expected for year-end. But there are challenges ahead, mainly related to ensuring no disruption to service while driving change within the business.

“This is a very large-scale, complex programme and there is a substantial amount of business change that comes with it, on things such as training our staff, getting them used to the new capability then using that to improve service,” said Elliott.

“Another challenge is to ensure that we deliver a quality outcome that does not have any impact to our customer operations and do everything necessary to make this as much as a seamless experience to staff and our customers,” he said.