HP to implement 'integrated customer engagement' systems for Leeds Building Society

UK's fifth largest building society to build internet and mobile banking systems after HP Helion cloud migration

HP has started an implementation programme of "integrated customer engagement" systems for Leeds Building Society after completing a migration of the organisation's core banking platform to HP's Helion managed virtual private cloud.

HP will maintain the company's banking platform after shifting it from the data centres of Leeds' local rival Yorkshire Building Society, which developed and hosted the banking software, dubbed Libra, for Leeds, as well as a number of other building societies.

The next step, though, will enable Leeds to add better customer-services software on top of the platform, including internet and mobile applications.

Under the 10-year agreement with HP Application Transformation Services, Leeds Building Society will implement software from Tibco, to streamline the organisation's business processes, as well as numéro and Infor to provide it with its integrated customer engagement capability hosted in the HP Helion cloud. This is intended to help the building society streamline its mortgage and savings processes, as well as handling new regulation and intensified competition.

HP Exstream, meanwhile, will provide leading-edge customer communication, such as statements, notices and renewals, via customers' preferred channel. Infor's multi-channel campaign management software, Infor Epiphany, will deliver personalised communications and enable the building society to focus on customers more effectively.

"We're implementing integrated customer engagement systems for the Leeds Building Society, a set of new systems that will sit on top of the core mortgages and savings system. It will provide an omni-channel experience, to integrate new channels, such as web chat and mobile, then integrate those with the existing channels in a seamless way," said David Rimmer, director of UK financial services at HP Enterprise Services.

"Like all financial institutions, our future is dependent upon delivering the right services for current and future customers," said Leeds Building Society CIO Tom Clark.

The integrated customer engagement capability, he added, "represents the cornerstone of our long-term strategy to deliver significant productivity and customer communication channel improvements, while reducing costs and meeting regulatory requirements. HP already hosts our core application for mortgages and savings and, with a proven track record of delivering large-scale hosted services and innovative technology, can help us to achieve our business objectives."

The go-live date for the first of the customer-engagement applications will be the end of the year, said Rimmer, with the rest following during 2016 and 2017.

For HP, the software it acquired from the Yorkshire Building Society will enable it to concentrate know-how in facilities in Yorkshire and the North-East, and to offer the software in the cloud to other building societies and mid-tier financial institutions in the UK.

"The system had been managed by the Yorkshire Building Society and, essentially, it's been a 'lift and shift' of that product, and there was some change involved," Clark told Computing.

"We took it from a physical hardware environment managed by Yorkshire into the cloud. The approach we took was to test it in the cloud environment over several months, so when we went live we knew it performed and acted exactly as we wanted it to.

"The migration piece in April, then, was really just about moving data across. We took it across on the Saturday morning and continued to run in the Yorkshire environment until Monday," said Clark.

The whole IT department worked over that weekend to check and make sure that both the system performed as expected, and that the integrity of the data was maintained, he added.