In his opinion, the presence of external personnel has been an important factor in the success of the venture. 'A bank needs a major part of the team to come from within the bank and then to hire external experts to bring the know-how of other banks and a view of what was done by others,' he thought. 'Sometimes, when people work at a bank for a very long time, they think that what they do is the best and the only right thing; so sometimes you need people from the outside to show them that there are other solutions available.'
A dedicated management team that understands the project and supervises it step by step is also very important, he continued. Another key aspect is the flexibility of the software and its ability to interact with other applications at the bank. 'A supplier has to provide the bank with a converter that will enable it to feed the data into its system from any external application,' he stated. 'This is crucial. Fortunately, nowadays most of the market participants realise that they can do business only if they have standardised set-ups in their applications.'
BHI had an unpleasant experience in this field, explained Gareus.When the bank launched its operations in Singapore and set up the necessary interfaces, it turned out that whilst the interfaces were running problem-free in Switzerland, for some reason they weren't working in Singapore. It took the bank three months to pinpoint the problem and it was finally found (it was some coding difference between BHI's global network provider and a telecom company in Singapore), but more by accident than anything else.
'Overall, I am happy with the project so far,' stated Gareus. Having compared the investment costs and the outcome, the bank concluded that it was a good investment of effort, time and money. 'In terms of throughput time, I'd say that we have 99.7 per cent throughput, which is excellent,' he added.
