IBS Journal September 2015


‘As one back office user recently observed, it will be like moving from an old Nokia phone to a new iPhone.’


Jean-Philippe Bailly, Nordea Luxembourg


and client reporting and archiving. Deloitte helped with the pre-selection study and was chosen, through a separate selection process, as the implementation partner. The complexity has been more or less


as expected, says Bailly, with this eased by a firm decision to fit the bank to the systems, rather than the other way round. The bank put in place a change control board which rules on any proposed changes to the standard T24, with these having to be justi- fied by the business owners. As such, there has been little customisation, with those changes that have been needed being car- ried out by local T24 specialist, Syncordis. The project management team com-


prises a director from each of Nordea Lux- emourg, the bank’s Nordic head office, Temenos and Deloitte, to oversee the efforts. Below this are project teams for core banking, front office, finance and con- trol, infrastructure, change management and migration. There has been real teamwork across


the three main companies, says Bailly. ‘Obviously, we are ultimately responsi- ble but it is with the huge involvement of Temenos and Deloitte.’ The only area that was under-estimated, he feels, was testing, with an initial expectation that this could be handled in-house. The bank is currently in the first round


of User Acceptance Testing (UAT), with a second phase to follow from mid-August to mid-October, ahead of a planned ‘big bang’ go-live around the end of October. That cutover will be for all systems as it was not felt feasible to do so with some but not all applications. An order flows into Triple A then to T24, then feeds the MIS and AML,


explains Bailly, so ‘you can’t go live with only a piece of the software’. User train- ing will take place from mid-September to mid-October. Bailly believes that users will see big- ger benefits than originally expected. ‘As one back office user recently observed, it will be like moving from an old Nokia phone to a new iPhone.’ The integrated platform will remove the current disjoint- ed set-up whereby information is spread across multiple systems. Triple A will pro- vide the single user interface and will con- stitute a single tool for relationship manag- ers rather than the nine or so that are used today.


Nordea Luxembourg has been using


Triple A since 2010, which is the year that it was acquired by Temenos. The fact that both systems reside with one parent has been a benefit, bringing tight integration and optimised performance, says Bail- ly. He confirms that Nordea Luxembourg will be the first bank with this close cou- pling, although he believes that Temenos has subsequently won a couple of other deals. Even in areas where T24 will be the main processing engine, such as loans and deposits, Triple A will be the interface for the users. In terms of the goal of improved oper-


ational efficiency, in part this stems from the technical refresh. Out the door goes the AS/400, with the bank standardising on a Microsoft stack for the new core banking system, including SQL for the database. Tri- ple A remains on Unix but Nordea Luxem- bourg will move to Release 14.03 (Temenos has realigned the release numbers with those of T24). For T24 itself, the bank is


© IBS Intelligence 2015


moving to Release 14.08. There are five main areas of improve-


ment between the new version of Triple A and the old, says Bailly. R14.03 promises stronger performance analysis, the ability to consolidate portfolios at a client level, the ability to personalise screens, cover- age for all product types that are used by relationship managers, and a dashboard containing all daily tasks that they need to perform. There has been a degree of process


reengineering to coincide with the first cutover, such as moving some processes from the front to the middle office. After the go-live there will be a next phase of process improvement, including further removal of manual processes. ‘We will lev- erage a lot of what we have implement- ed,’ says Bailly. In the October cutover will be internet banking, via Temenos Con- nect, and this will mark a fairly significant upgrade over the bank’s current offering, he says. Only then will the bank turn to mobile banking, as a next step, looking to bring multiple device support both for cus- tomers and staff. Nordea Luxembourg cannot yet be held up as a success story but, if everything goes to plan in October, it is likely that Temenos will seek to trumpet it from the rooftops. After all, it will be five years on from its $100 million+ acquisition of Lux- embourg-based Odyssey Financial Technol- ogies, at which point Temenos was loudly talking up the opportunities for cross-sell- ing. The instances are few, the live sites are nil, but with its integrated combination, Nordea Luxembourg looks set to finally turn the theory into reality.


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case study: nordea luxembourg


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