There was a little resistance among users to change, as usual, and this built up during the first one and a half years when nothing had gone live. However, it was hard for anyone to argue that the old system did not need replacing. As well as supporting Hypo Alpe Adria's own central European operations, ZIS supplies the system on a hosted basis to support a small number of other banks in the region, including Credy Bank, the Serbian subsidiary of Slovenia-based Nova KBM. These banks will ultimately need to move to the ZIS-hosted T24 or find an alternative platform as ZIS will not maintain the mainframe system purely for this limited outsourcing business. For one thing, said Fanzott, the fixed cost for the customers would be prohibitive if they stayed with the old solution but with a reduced number of banks sharing it.
The selection included a detailed RFP that was sent primarily to international vendors. One local supplier to be considered was Slovenia-based HRC with its Oracle-based Hibis system which is used by the bank's Slovenian and Croatian operations. The other main contenders were Oracle FSS, Infosys and Temenos. In fact, the shortlist came down to Oracle FSS and HRC (so not Temenos). A proof of concept study was carried out with Oracle FSS for Croatia but this failed due to the short implementation timeframe required for a scheduled merger of two Hypo Alpe Adria-owned banks in Croatia, combined with the significant customisation efforts that were identified. Croatia is a country that has consistently troubled non-domestic core system suppliers because of country-specific processes which, said Fanzott, will one day disappear but, for the time-being, remain a requirement for doing business in the country.
The selection was running in the latter part of 2007 and by this stage German bank, BayernLB, had acquired a 50 per cent stake in Hypo Alpe Adria Bank. BayernLB also owned 90 per cent of Hungarian bank,MKB, which was installing T24. Although this had been a long and troubled project that had started with a focus on Globus and then ended up with the T24 revamp of this, BayernLB felt it made sense to standardise its Central European operations on one system. As such, T24 was chosen. It was a strategic decision made at the board level.
