Systematics FIS
Originally launched in the 1970s, FIS’s high-end retail offering, Systematics, is based on old technology. This has prevented it from reaching some shortlists but it continues to gain some business from its existing users, alongside the continued quest for new sales.
Origins
Systematics began development of its retail banking solution in the US in 1967 and launched it as Integrated Retail Financial Software (IRFS) on the mainframe in the 1970s. In 1990, Systematics became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alltel Corporation. Alltel itself was founded in the early 1980s through the merger of two US telephone companies. Following the Systematics acquisition, it diversified and part of it became the Information Services division. This, in turn, was acquired by Fidelity/FIS in 2003 in a deal reputed to be worth $1.05 billion. Systematics is now positioned by the vendor in its vast stable of offerings as the batch mainframe option.
A number of client elements were added to Systematics
around the back office core. These included a loan origination application, workstations for call centers and sales support, and a data warehouse layer. The warehouse and notebook elements were piloted by Chemical Bank. Both Chemical and Chase Manhattan were users, with conversions starting in 1996 to support the merger of the two banks. The loan origination component was implemented at a pilot site in the US and the customer service workstation had been installed at six client sites by the end of 1996. The notebook and warehouse were acquired by HSBC in Argentina in early 2000 (this operation was previously long-standing Systematics user, Banco Roberts). Towards the end of the decade there was CRM-related work at Chase. The system is intended to be international, with multi-currency and multi- lingual support. There was a large, dedicated team, and Alltel continued to invest in the system. A project was then started with Chase Manhattan to
jettison the original flat files and move to DB2 but this did not succeed. Alltel had planned to commit $50 million over three years to a new initiative, code-named Orion, designed initially
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to come up with a common architecture spanning its ageing wholesale banking system, TVS (which is no longer marketed), and Systematics but it was hard to spot any deliverables. The system covers retail and commercial banking. Modules include customer information, relationship pricing, deposit accounts, current accounts, consumer, commercial and mortgage loans, general ledger, business intelligence and collections.
In early 2006, FIS outlined a new strategy for its vast array
of offerings, including Systematics. The vendor committed to retaining all of its systems as strategic products and added a middle layer which allowed them to interoperate and also formed the platform for a number of new components that could be shared by the other applications. The middle layer was the Sanchez-derived Xpress, now dubbed Xpress Enterprise Services (XES). It started in 1998 as an integration and aggregation engine to link Sanchez’s own products to those of third parties. It would now support multiple delivery channels and included an XML gateway and load balancing facilities.
It was intended to handle
customer authentication and security, and provide facilities for customer-centric alerts, account aggregation services and customer correspondence management. This would now provide the front-end layer for Systematics and others. The company’s future plans included the extraction of common functions from the core banking engines and populating the Java middle layer with generic components to be used across different platforms.
By the early part of 2006, a ‘universal customer’ component
was in production at a Systematics user, according to FIS. The next development was a ‘product hub’, to allow users to catalogue and package products and to create both greater flexibility and faster time-to-market. Other changes included the move of cash management and overdraft areas to the middle layer, according to the vendor.
US Financial Services Technology Market Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
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