Swiss. The shortlist came down to the core systems of Avaloq, Finnova and TCS Financial Solutions. Although the latter is Indian, its Bancs/Quartz system was developed in Switzerland by a local company, TKS-Teknosoft. The fact that the requirement was not for private banking meant a number of Swiss solutions were discounted; although the Avaloq system started in private banking, it was felt to have moved sufficiently into retail banking to be worthy of consideration. There were a few outsource options considered, including IBMand a company called B-Source.
The Avaloq and Finnova systems were both felt to be suitable but there was a difference in price, with Avaloq considerably more expensive. There was also a much more readily available hosted option for the Finnova system. Finnova was able to promise the sort of timeframe that AXA Bank was seeking, with this backed up by its track-record. 'It had done this many times before,' saidWidmer. AXA Bank decided to use the version of the Finnova system that is hosted by a bank-owned association, Esprit.
Finnova is a long-standing supplier on the Swiss market. Esprit was set up in early 2005 by an initial eleven regional banks which had decided to come off the system of another Swiss service bureau. They selected the Finnova system as their shared platform, particularly based on its multi-entity capabilities. Those banks went live in September 2005 and from the start of the following year the solution was hosted by Swiss service provider, Comit, a subsidiary of Swisscom.
Implementation
As a starting point for AXA Bank's implementation, a copy of the Finnova system from one of the other banks was taken and this was then modified via parameters. The one area where there was a need for development work was at the front-end. An online account opening application was built by a software development partner of Finnova. This feeds data into the Finnova back-end. The reason such an application was not available was that all of the other Esprit banks are based on traditional branch networks; while they clearly offer internet banking, there wasn't such an emphasis on automation. AXA Bank is the only purely direct banking user within Esprit.Widmer said: 'A lot of banks in Switzerland capture data [via their internet banking] and rekey afterwards,
