Intellect Design Arena, part of the Polaris group, has a broad product suite, much of which has its roots in Citibank. An Indian spin- off from the bank, Orbitech, was relatively swiftly acquired by Polaris and this supplier set about trying to evolve and position the software. The takeover prompted Polaris to drop an under-performing retail system of its own, BankNow. The efforts with what became the Intellect Suite saw problems at a few early sites. In the end, a number of banks went live with particular portions and the strengths and weaknesses of what Polaris had inherited started to become clearer. The product evolution was meant to have a strong Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) slant and, by the end of the first quarter
2009, Polaris was claiming that it had a fully integrated product set via this route. It was also claiming completion of the Java rewrite of the suite.
National Bank of Abu Dhabi was an important broad taker, with a couple of banks in Vietnam signed after this. However, most early sales were of components, in areas such as debt management, liquidity management, and portals. A low-end, broad Indian system was acquired in 2009, with a company called Laser Soft, and its software became part of Polaris’ main universal banking suite, complemented by the Citibank-derived components. Within a restructuring in 2014, the software part of the company was rebranded as Intellect Design Arena and was split from the consulting and services side, which retained the Polaris name.
