London Scottish Bank

Sector

Financial Services

Skills / Platforms

"Oracle 10g database, Oracle Developer Suite 10g, MS VSS 6.0, Windows 2000 Server, Microsoft Office 2000, Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional, Windows XP Professional, Sun Fire 210, Apache Web Server, JDeveloper, CVS server, Eclipse Java Development Tools v3.0.1, Java language

Size

Loan Brokerage Application 3,600 days over 18 months
Customer Accounts Processing 3,800 in 12 months
Mortgage Administration System 2,000 within 8 months

Background

London Scottish Bank (LSB) is a specialist financial services company established more than a hundred years ago in the UK. Over 2,000 staff provide a range of commercial and retail services though a nationwide network of over 100 branches and a state-of-the-art call centre.

Requirement

A new IT strategy required new technology but while LSB had some internal capability it did not have enough to meet the requirements to develop new applications. The bank was faced with two choices: rapidly hiring new people in order to build internal capability, or partnering with another organisation that would design and develop the systems on its behalf. Harvey Nash Offshore Software Services was selected for its proven expertise and demonstrable capacity to develop applications rapidly and cost-effectively.

Solution

Loan Brokerage Application

The first project Harvey Nash tackled for LSB was to create a bespoke loan brokerage administration system supporting the whole lifecycle from application, underwriting, processing and reporting. Key to project success was ensuring the system not only met their own unique needs, but also the reporting requirements of the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA).

It was important to LSB that the system provided extensive functionality while being easy-to- use. As such, our solution was:

• Intuitive – allowing new and existing users to adopt the system with minimal end user training.
• Efficient and Flexible – The primary channel usage of the application is for inbound calls. The user interface design provides both efficiency in terms of throughput of a scripted call, but also flexibility of navigation to allow the user to follow calls where the applicant may be providing information or asking requests in a non sequential or ad hoc manner.
• Intelligent – The GUI is ‘intelligent’ i.e. process flows are dynamic based upon the evaluation of the data captured through the prior steps of the process flow.

The total project required 3,600 man-days of effort and was successfully delivered within 18 months, meeting all the FSA requirements on-time.

Customer Accounts Processing (hand-held and back office)

After acquiring a home-collected credit business, LSB wanted to replace the incumbent 3rd party service providing customer accounts processing with an in-house system. The new system was specifically written to support selling a wider range of financial products to new and existing customers via a Field Sales force and other channels such as direct mail and telephone marketing. Thus the new system provided facilities for:

• Recording sales at the point of sale
• Tracking all cash movements associated with those sales
• Managing the Customer base with timely information and an effective method of communications, so as to increase sales and reduce bad debt
• Managing the Field Sales force with timely information and providing incentive schemes to increase sales

Essentially, LSB had to be independent of the legacy mainframe computer within a year; ensuring 14 years of data was transferred across, and supporting modern GPRS-based PDA devices as the existing hand-held supplier was withdrawing support during that year. The total project required 3,800 man-days of effort delivered within an aggressive 12 months.

Customer Accounts Processing (hand-held and back office)

After acquiring a home-collected credit business, LSB wanted to replace the incumbent 3rd party service providing customer accounts processing with an in-house system. The new system was specifically written to support selling a wider range of financial products to new and existing customers via a Field Sales force and other channels such as direct mail and telephone marketing. Thus the new system provided facilities for:

• Recording sales at the point of sale
• Tracking all cash movements associated with those sales
• Managing the Customer base with timely information and an effective method of communications, so as to increase sales and reduce bad debt
• Managing the Field Sales force with timely information and providing incentive schemes to increase sales

Essentially, LSB had to be independent of the legacy mainframe computer within a year; ensuring 14 years of data was transferred across, and supporting modern GPRS-based PDA devices as the existing hand-held supplier was withdrawing support during that year. The total project required 3,800 man-days of effort delivered within an aggressive 12 months.

Mortgage Administration System

London Scottish Mortgages (LSM) is a subsidiary of London Scottish Bank (LSB) and specialises in Mortgage and Secured Loan products aimed at the sub-prime market. LSM product range includes Residential, Commercials and 2nd Charge/Home Owner loans. LSM also offer Bridging Loans that are either Residential or Commercial. The Residential and Commercial products may be regulated or unregulated.

Harvey Nash were commissioned to write a bespoke Mortgage Administration System to replace a combination of legacy computer applications, manual procedures and external interfaces to 3rd parties.

The new unified system needed to support:

Pre-completions. Comprising enquiries, application processing, and offers

Completions. This includes all the necessary steps to finalise the legal work and release the funds to customers

Post-completions. This is the step that starts up the account, allowing it to be managed throughout the life of the account. This is where most of the system functionality is required to support the lifecycle of a mortgage from account activation to closure, namely:

• Inception
• Interest calculation
• Payment capture – direct debit, standing order, cheque, card payment and cash
• Early redemption, lump sum payment and partial redemption
• Customer letter generation
• Customer fees
• Arrears chasing, litigation, for-closure, short fall management
• Term extensions/ arrears arrangements/ capitalisations/ repayment type switches
• Diarised work-items to assist in account management

The benefits to LSM/LSB are that the new system:

• Removes dependencies on an external mortgage administration service
• Enhances the in-house capability for managing accounts
• Generates substantial cost savings
• Standardises the platforms which LSM operate from to secure improved support

The total project involves over 2,000 man-days of effort delivered within 7.5 months.

"Pursuing the partnership route allowed me to concentrate on building our internal capability to the point that we could handle it ourselves. Harvey Nash were there and ready and capable of providing what we needed at a time when we ourselves weren’t. They delivered a very professional service and product in a rapid, cost-effective manner, helping us plug a real gap in our capability."
Jeremy Rodwell, IT director, London Scottish Bank (LSB)