Bradford & Bingley IT aims to end on a high

Bentham: “We are building the UK’s best mortgage service

While many businesses plan technology to support future growth, Bradford & Bingley (B&B) is shrinking its IT to continue providing mortgage services at a lower cost to the taxpayer with a view to being wound down in 10 years’ time.

The partly nationalised bank is now running multimillion-pound technology projects in order to transform infrastructure and business services as well as cut spending by half.

Tony Bentham’s main task is to oversee IT and change. His initial brief is to lead two separate programmes which include the completion of the handover of savings-related assets to Santander – the Spanish bank acquired B&B’s savings business and branch network in September 2008 – as well as rationalisation of hardware and software.

“It is all about rightsizing [IT] and ensuring that people do not think we are losing anything – we are actually gaining a huge amount of productivity by streamlining processes and building what should be the best mortgage business service in the UK,” he said.

The rationalisation process will be carried out over 18 months and includes the replacement of B&B’s legacy mainframe estate of around 500 boxes by some 100 Wintel servers provided by IBM, one of the bank’s three technology partners along with Unisys and BT.

Bentham is also looking to make changes to the bank’s telephony and call centre set-up and is considering a range of options, including voice over IP.

B&B is also rationalising its software portfolio and will augment the existing mortgage servicing systems. An example is the rollout of ancillary applications to complement a Unisys-supplied arrears management system.

Bentham is also looking to recruit staff to supplement his small team of 40 permanent workers and contractors to what he believes to be a “very interesting and challenging job opportunity”.

“You could sell this as a mortgage book in decline and ask people to help run it down. Instead, we are saying that we’re building the best mortgage service in the UK,” he said.

“The fact that it is owned by the government means it is a secure opportunity and also that people may have a great career path [across the other government-owned banking assets] if they do a good job.”