said, because of its reliability in delivery, ‘both in a qualitative sense but also in making timelines and keeping to budgets’. DSB did not regard Infosys’ newness to the continent as a risk, rather an opportunity to ensure that the bank is ‘making the system exactly the way we want it’. This might not be the case, he added, if it had ‘a very large and old customer base in the region’. DSB also took comfort in the company of other recent Infosys clients, van Goor citing BBVA as an example. The project started soon after the contract was signed in Q3, and by early 2009 van Goor stated that it had gone very smoothly so far. ‘We will go live with loans and securitisation parts probably in April or May,’ he said, and the payments and savings functionality should be in place by the end of the Summer. Some customisations to Finacle had been required in Europe, with van Goor mentioning SEPA requirements as a ‘well-known example’. ‘It was not a problem but, of course, you have some specific regional issues, especially from legislation.’ DSB had recently made an entry into the Belgian and German domestic markets. ‘We haven’t made a detailed project plan for that yet,’ he said, but once the project in the Netherlands was complete, ‘we will make plans for other parts of Europe’. DSB would then look to launch an online savings bank. The business had 15 branches at this point, but had


recently shut some, ‘to become more and more an internet bank’. Van Goor could not go into what enhancements the bank planned to make to its existing e-banking platform when the online savings bank was launched, for reasons of competition. He described its activity as ‘a very classical type of banking. We attract savings from customers. We give mortgages and loans to consumers in the same country. We don’t have any investments we don’t understand.’ He reported that DSB had seen a significant increase in new customer numbers recently, attracted to the bank’s ‘low risk profile’. This turned out to be somewhat ironic as the bank subsequently became a high profile failure, brought down by questionable lending practices and with other Dutch banks and the government declining to bail it out. In the UK, Co-operative Financial Services (CFS) was a major capture for Infosys. The roll-out was expected to take several years and SAP was the other supplier on the shortlist. The project came within the context of the Group’s overall


transformation project, summed up as ‘Catch-up,


Compete and Conquer’, and its aim was to be the ‘most admired financial services provider’ in the UK (somewhat ironic, given what occurred). The ‘Catch-up’ phase included gaining control of the cost base and processes, putting in place a robust infrastructure, ‘re-energising the brand’, providing proper marketing tools, and providing front-line staff with the right information to support their sales activities. It also wanted appropriate access to capital and to compete within the Co-operative Group as a whole (the food side of the business was considerably larger than financial services). There was a stated plan to make sustainable savings of £100 million ($150 million) from operations during 2008, with similar goals for 2009. These represent fairly big numbers for a


relatively small organisation (albeit one that was about to grow markedly through merger with another mid-tier UK entity, Britannia Building Society). The strategy was defined a few years earlier, said enterprise


platform director, Clive Elliott, and the focus was on customer- centricity, improved flexibility and a much better customer experience. There had been a considerable amount of process reengineering and there had also been a push to ‘join up the banking and insurance businesses with a CRM layer to enable the customer-centricity’. For retail banking, a review was undertaken of the infrastructure that had been built up over 40 years and this was felt to be a ‘major constraint’. The decision for Finacle was made in July 2008 and a


delivery programme was established in September, at which point active work kicked off with Infosys, although the actual licence agreement wasn’t signed until Q1 2009. Finacle was very much top in terms of meeting CFS’s needs, said Elliott. The fact that Infosys had a strong channel offering as well as the core system was an influence as CFS was looking to replace both, so sourcing them from one supplier was felt to be a way to reduce the integration. Infosys’ resources and track- record with Finacle were also cited. CFS talked to a number of people who had successfully implemented Finacle or who were ‘substantially along the journey’. Once Finacle had been selected, ‘there was then around two months more kicking the tyres to validate’. The length of time to sign the contract was all about detail but the important thing was that it didn’t cause a delay, he added. ‘One of the core principles is that, as a package, we should


take it as much out of the box as we can,’ said Elliott. He felt that Finacle would meet a significant number of CFS’s core needs and that CFS-specific changes should be kept to a minimum. As the first full implementation in the UK on this scale, he acknowledged that there would clearly need to be changes relating to regulations and country-specific practices. Despite that lack of a comparable UK reference, Finacle is ‘a completely fit for purpose UK product’, he felt. The first release would be focused on SME and corporate banking, with this on track for delivery by the end of the year, said Elliott in May 2009. This would include the internet front- end. The overall project was expected to be completed by 2012, with a series of core banking system releases in 2010 and 2011. The total team was expected to be around 200 staff, both on-shore and off-shore. There would be some third party involvement, added Elliott. Key challenges would be scale and complexity, he said, with this larger than anything CFS had done before. There would be a considerable integration workload, linking the new applications to the rest of CFS’s systems. And there would also be a major training exercise, particularly for CFS’s front-line staff. The process definition and reengineering that had been done to date should aid CFS hugely, said Elliott, providing a ‘very clear base-line’ and enabling the Group to identify its operational controls as it sought to automate as many of these as possible. Of course, the reengineering and system


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