System focus on customer

By ADAM GIFFORD

The BNZ is rolling out a $25 million teller system, replacing an ancient "greenscreen" application running on IBM System 4700 controllers.

Project manager Adrian Blair said the new PC-based system was already in use in five branches in Wellington, Christchurch and East Tamaki and the equipment would be put in the rest of the bank's 181 branches during the year by contractor NCR.

"The whole thing is brand new. Nothing from the old system was reusable, so we had to start from scratch," Blair said.

BNZ's parent, National Australia Bank, chose the BNZ's Wellington-based software development team to write the system because of its expertise in the IBM Websphere technology.

The team peaked at more than 100 people during the three-year project. More people were employed in Melbourne to work on some of the hardware requirements, the authentication and networking layers and on the interfaces to the National Australia Bank mainframe, where BNZ customer account data is held.

Once the system is bedded in here, BNZ staff will roll it out at the NAB's subsidiaries in Britain, before it goes into Australian banks.

"It is being rolled out here because of the risks involved in the size of any roll-out," Blair said. "This was a coup for the BNZ."

The system includes a Java client sitting on a PC running a Windows XP operating system, representing a big sale for IBM.

That terminals connect to servers running the Websphere application with the data going through MQ Series middleware to convert XML to mainframe calls.

The bank had keyboards custom-made by British firm Devlin Electronics to incorporate card readers.

"New Zealand is the only place in the world where we change pin numbers across the counter, so we had to deal with that," Blair said.

Apart from moving off obsolete equipment, the BNZ hopes the new system will consolidate improvements in customer satisfaction.

It will also allow more flexibility and make it easier to introduce new services and products.

"This is customer-based, whereas the old system was account-based," Blair said. "Now staff will be able to see all of a person's accounts on screen."