Barbados National Bank

About the Customer:

Barbados National Bank, a subsidiary of Republic Bank Ltd., was established in 1978 as an amalgamation of government-owned financial institutions. The products and services provided by the Bank includes suite of savings, personal banking, commercial services, mutual funds, merchant banking, international services and credit cards. The subsidiaries of the Bank include Barbados Mortgage Finance Company Limited, BNB Finance & Trust Corporation Incorporated and BNB Funds Incorporated.

Challenges:

To enhance customer service and improve profitability, BNB embarked on a major strategic initiative designed to transform the way they did business. Named ‘Project Evolution’ for its implications for banking in the future, the transformation encompassed three strategic pillars: business, operational and physical.

Business Need:

The BNB business transformation involved replacing their aging legacy application. They needed a cost-effective, flexible and powerful technology infrastructure to support their new core banking application called Finacle Universal Banking System from Infosys.

Business Solution:

A project of this size and scope could only be successful with a trusted partner. Based on their existing relationship with IBM, BNB chose the IBM Power System platform using two p570 servers with PowerVM and an IBM System Storage DS4700 Storage Area Network (SAN) disk subsystem with three Storage Expansion EXP810 enclosures. First, the platform was installed, then Infosys installed the application, and finally implementation with the clusters took place. Other components of the solution included:

• IBM 2005-B16 SAN switches, Cisco 3750 Ethernet switches
• Virtual I/O Server
• AIX 5.3
• High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP) (PowerHA)
• WebSphere Application Server
• Oracle Database

Business Results:

With the new system up and running BNB is benefiting from an enterprise solution that meets their operational and business transformation goals. They benefited from the on-site expertise of IBM and Raven Bay personnel who implemented the infrastructure in just two weeks, including documentation and a training session on the new environment for the IT department.

The Customer View:

BNB already enjoyed a trusted working relationship with IBM, and now benefits from a new banking system that significantly improves their operations and service quality. Thanks to the trust and great working relationship that developed, BNB extended the scope of the work to include remote support for their disaster recovery environment, which includes virtualization and some AIX partitions