CASE STUDY

Industry: Banking
Client: Halifax Bank of Scotland
Service Offering: Management and Development of IT Infrastructure

The Halifax is one of the UK's leading personal financial organizations and is the market leader in mortgages and savings. With 21 million customers it has a relationship with 2 out of every 5 households in the UK. The Group, which also includes Clerical Medical and Birmingham Midshires, offers a range of financial services including mortgages, savings, long term savings and investments, home, motor and creditor insurance, retail banking, consumer credit and share dealing.

Halifax developed Intelligent Finance (IF), a multi-channel delivery concept, as a paradigm shift from traditional banking services. Customers will be able to access IF by telephone, Internet, Wide Area Protocol (WAP) mobile phones, GPRS technology or a financial intermediary. IF will offer customers choice, flexibility and the ability to manage their own money effectively.

IES was directly responsible for the management and development of the IT infrastructure revolving around the mid-tier and workflow components that would facilitate the Web B2C initiative. The system uses a great number of third party software components. Some of the major infrastructure components are:

• BEA Weblogic
• Symantec Visual Café
• Oracle – This is the mid-tier database
• Solaris
• SQL 7.0
• Microsoft IIS/Site
• IBM MQ Series
• ActionWorks Metro – Workflow solution
• Shinka eXpand
• Windows NT, 98/2000, UNIX
• Microsoft Office Product Suite
• JAVA, HTML, ASP, Visual Basic 6/7, COM API, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Javascript