Banco Edwards, a leading Chilean bank, has embarked on pivotal front- and back-end technology initiatives to boost its business and customer base. It has laid the foundation for these initiatives with the purchase and deployment of three Unisys e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 systems.
Banco Edwards is undertaking a major electronic banking conversion as the first step to launching a new Internet banking and marketing programme.
Capitalising on the mainframe-class scalability and reliability of the three Unisys ES7000 servers, Banco Edwards has consolidated the workload of 28 commodity servers and enhanced the existing customer database.
Two servers will be used to expand Banco Edwards` financial and customer service offerings by handling administration processing and powering a comprehensive customer database. The third ES7000 will support the company`s Web-based banking initiatives from one centrally managed source. The partitioning of the ES7000 will enable Banco Edwards to manage its three key business initiatives, including e-business, bank administration, customer relationship management (CRM) and electronic multi-channel integration simultaneously
Banco Edwards provides a broad range of banking and other financial services to over 300 000 personal and business clients throughout Chile. Founded in 1866 as Chile`s very first private bank, Banco Edwards today has 67 branch offices throughout the country, and ranks fifth in the league of Chilean banking and financial organisations, based on annual sales. An active focus on technology distinguishes Banco Edwards from its competitors. As many as 100 000 customers use the bank`s extensive Web site to obtain a broad range of services; and customers can communicate with the bank through a multitude of other channels, including the telephone, mail and face-to-face sales, automatic teller machines, self-service centres, videoconferencing and information access through mobile telephony.
"By looking at our technology needs holistically, we knew we needed high-availability, high-power systems to handle the essential components of our business," says Fernando Risco, CIO Banco Edwards. "Moving to a strong, robust platform has been very important for us because we finally have acquired the incentive and means to carry out our long-range expansion goals."
Banco Edwards commands 8% of the Chilean market and hopes to enlarge its banking practice in the next few years. As the bank continues to expand its e-business and service offerings, the scalability of the Unisys ES7000 servers will enable the bank to handle increased data processing demands resulting from its expansion. In addition, the ES7000 will empower customers to check balances, transfer funds and make bill payments from anywhere at any time, via the Internet.
To kick off its high-growth expansion initiatives, Banco Edwards will also improve its internal back-office processes. Before buying the Unisys ES7000 servers, Banco Edwards relied on a host of commodity Intel-based servers to handle daily administrative tasks. To reduce the size of its large server farm, the bank chose to consolidate on the highly scalable Unisys ES7000, which is handling the workload of its 28 existing servers.
Banco Edwards uses one Unisys ES7000 to handle administrative processing. The second server runs a Siebel CRM application and COM+ object management. The third supports key Web applications, including the www.mundoedwards.com Web portal and the database and transaction manager associated with the portal.
"To exert influence in any competitive industry today, companies need to incorporate solid technology backbones into their IT infrastructures to drive future growth," says Peter Samson, VP and GM, Technology Sales Development, Unisys Corporation. "By adopting a smart, integrated front- and back-end strategy with the easy-to-manage, cost-effective Unisys ES7000 server, Banco Edwards will reinforce its global reputation for its smart, streamlined approach to business."
The Unisys ES7000 is based on the Unisys Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) server architecture, which provides an array of computing capabilities required for enterprise-class e-business computing - capabilities that are well known to users of large-scale computers, but unprecedented in computing environments using Microsoft and Intel technology.
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