Celeriti
The launch of Celeriti in 2010 can perhaps be seen as a response to these types of sentiments. CSC claimed that Celeriti would be a new suite of banking products which offered end-to-end services rather than focusing specifically on the core functions, as CSC had done in the past with Hogan and CAMS II. Paul Leadbetter, CSC’s CTO of banking and credit services, stressed that Celeriti was a ‘brand new product suite’. Nevertheless, while components would ultimately be offered as standalone products, the full suite had Hogan at the center. CSC was keen to move into the mid and lower tiers of the banking market, and into new geographies (Latin America and Africa were cited by the supplier). For Hogan users, Celeriti was offered as part of an upgrade to newer versions of Hogan, or for progressive replacement of functionality. Being able to offer something other than a ‘rip and replace’ upgrade path, both to existing and new customers, was seen as important by the vendor and a lower risk alternative.
The Celeriti functionality was divided into five groups,
comprising customer, deposits, loans, cards and merchants. As well as these five areas, surrounding products were also envisaged, including for mobile banking and internet channels, business process management and business rules management, integrated business intelligence and warehousing. All would be based on an SOA model, and on a single code base and relational database. Some of this was still an aspiration. As stated, the first customer to go public about its choice of Celeriti was First Tennessee Bank, part of First Horizon National Corp, in November 2010. First Tennessee had first licensed Hogan in 1994. Bruce Livesay, CIO of First Horizon National, said that, since the bank was not looking at a rip and replace option, ‘CSC was the only vendor with a solution complementary to our existing core banking system’. It signed for the customer and deposits components with a web portal and SOA business processes and web services. The customer part of the suite had apparently been completed in 2010, as had a first phase of the deposits functionality. A second phase was due to be completed in March 2011. One year on, the bank had received delivery of the Celeriti components but had not gone live, apparently because this would follow an overhaul of its branch platform that was taking place with US supplier, Argo. By early 2011, CSC was reconsidering its roadmap to speed up the development of the loans functionality. For the cards and merchants functionality, CSC planned to leverage the earlier CAMS II product. Loans and cards functionality was to be finished in 2012. The incorporation of the PTS payments system’s capabilities was under discussion in early 2011. Further aims were to incorporate social media tools, enable virtualisation, and support different tiers of the architecture to run on different platforms (.Net, Linux, Unix etc). IBM components had a major role
within 38 Celeriti, including Websphere, the Cognos BI tools and ILOG business
process management (BPM) solution. The partner from the perspective of achieving portability for the Cobol core was the aforementioned Micro Focus, opening up the option of new platforms, albeit still with DB2. If a customer stays on the mainframe, as is the case with First Tennessee Bank, then there is no role for Micro Focus. By Q1 2012, there were around 300 staff working on Celeriti-related activities. There was a collaborative development model across centers in the US, Indonesia and Vietnam. Around early 2011, CSC’s Leadbetter claimed that the vendor was in talks with more than ten existing clients. In Australia there were some movements within the Hogan user base. Westpac acquired Hogan user, St George Bank, in 2008 and decided to adopt Hogan itself to replace its own legacy systems. However, in 2010, ANZ finally sought to grapple with standardisation across its Australian and New Zealand banks, opting for the former country’s FIS’s Systematics in preference to the latter country’s Hogan as the target. Leadbetter confirmed Australia as a market of interest for Celeriti, as well as South Africa, where First National Bank and Nedbank were Hogan customers. By March 2012, Leadbetter said there were talks with nearly all of the 50 or so Hogan/CAMS users (some of these support multiple banks so the end number is considerably higher) and pointed out that most remained on the systems despite often ‘very aggressive pricing from other providers’. Some of the users were viewing a move to DB2 as a first step. User appetite to move to a standard release varied, he said, with some keen to do so but with others of the belief that the competitive edge was in the customisation. With Celeriti’s business rules and BPM, he pointed out, there would now be other ways to customise. He felt only two of the users at this time were seriously considering alternative long-term options. CSC was touting the progressive modernisation message and the potential to retain the IBM z System for scalability and reliability. However, whether the roadmap and components within Celeriti could persuade any non-users to look at CSC’s platform as an option looked to be a much bigger leap, despite the supplier’s ambitions. One interesting twist to mention was the arrival in Q1 2012 of Mike Lawrie as president and CEO of CSC. By virtue of joining after five and a half years as CEO at Misys, he had a strong background in core banking systems (and 27 years at IBM before this) so it might be expected that this would have been an area of early interest for him. At the same time, he had some immediate larger issues to tackle as the company had experienced difficulties in the previous year or so, including a shareholder class action related to a disastrous UK health service project and generally lacklustre financial results. Whether or not it had Lawrie’s finger prints on it, in May
2013, CSC and SAP extended their long-standing partnership to include co-selling of their banking solutions, and CSC becoming an authorised reseller of SAP products, services and support. CSC would also act as a global services partner of SAP
US Financial Services Technology Market Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
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