IBS Journal May 2015
Trade finance: National Bank of Canada
For National Bank of Canada, trade finance operations came to the fore, as the bank’s legacy set-up could not offer any online capabilities to the customers. It opted for CGI’s Trade360 hosted offering.
In 2010/11, National Bank of Canada embarked on a project to replace its leg- acy onsite deployed trade finance system with an online portal. Patrice Roy, senior manager, international services at Nation- al Bank of Canada, says that the bank had no online capability to offer to its trade finance customers and so ‘what really drove us to modernisation was the client’s need for a modern, easy to use online platform’. An upgrade of the legacy system was con- sidered but it was felt that it would not be able to cope with the new requirements, ‘so we decided to leave that trade appli- cation behind and go for a truly online solution’, Roy comments. An in-house built solution was not a viable option either, he adds, so the bank went to tender to find a new product. CGI was already on the list of National Bank of Canada’s strategic sup- pliers, having been supplying a range of solutions and services to the bank for over
a decade (in 2014, the contract, worth over CA$100 million, was extended for anoth- er six years, and another five-year contract was signed around the same time for CGI to manage the bank’s security infrastructure). However, the team from the bank evaluat- ed ‘pretty much everything on the market’, Roy says, including onsite deployed solu- tions, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options and services offered by other banks. It was concluded that a SaaS offering from a spe- cialist vendor would be ‘the best fit for this type of business’. The selection took about a year. The
work was done largely internally, as the bank ‘has a competent team in the trade finance sphere with plenty of expertise’. The project was business-driven (‘we had our customers in mind first and foremost’), so the project team comprised the spe- cialists from the relevant business depart- ments, and also the IT.
‘Our main criteria focused on the
online portal: that it was easy to use, mod- ern, functional and could evolve with the market,’ states Roy. Costs were a considera- tion, but not key in the selection. The implementation of Trade360 was
not rushed. There was a thorough, detailed gap analysis, he said, resulting in ‘a long list of gaps, most of which were very small’. There was some customisation of the sys- tem to the bank’s business requirements and interfaces to other systems at the bank, and there was also a review of the bank’s processes to align them with the best practices and standards of Trade360. ‘It was a great opportunity for us to evalu- ate our own processes, to benchmark them against what’s being done in the industry,’ Roy observes. Data migration was another major
task. ‘The first step was to review the legacy data we had, to ensure that when we start
‘It was a great opportunity for us to evaluate our own processes, to benchmark them
against what’s being done in the industry.’ Patrice Roy, National Bank of Canada
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© IBS Intelligence 2015
www.ibsintelligence.com
case study: national bank of canada
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