You can bank on IT
You can bank on IT
Examining the IT infrastructure that has helped facilitate ING Direct's meteoric rise in the Australian financial services market from day one. By Stuart Finlayson.
In 1999, ING Direct launched its Internet and phone-based retail banking service. The company's Internet and call centre service provided the key interface with customers, as the bank chose to operate without physical branches. Four years down the track, the take up has greatly exceeded the company's own estimates, with growth continuing unabated. A major contributing factor to the growth of ING Direct ñ and an integral partner in the bank's plans going forward - is Hewlett-Packard's (HP) technology. With a partnership developed over several years, HP and ING Direct have been able to chart a course for the bank's business growth.
The business challenges
ING Direct is part of the Netherlands-based ING Group, one of the world's largest banking and financial services companies, operating in more than 65 countries.Since the outset, ING Direct in Australia has focused on building a highly available, robust and secure IT infrastructure, so pivotal is it to the success of its services. Close attention to a flexible technology platform has helped the bank manage the increasing number of customer transactions required each day, with about 300,000 transactions processed each day through the main production system. Savings Maximiser, the bank's core retail product offering, has a customer base totalling 500,000, and the figure is rising by 20,000 a month. About 40 percent of new clients apply for the account via the Internet.
The initial technology rollout had included the deployment of HP 9000 D390 Enterprise Servers as the Unix platform, powering its core application, Financial Network Service's (FNS) Bancs-24. In 2000, it had further extended its infrastructure with the installation of an HP N4000 Enterprise SMP four-way system and the redeployment of the D390 servers to other parts of the business.
"To keep up with the growth in the business, the bank needs to ensure it maintains a high availability IT environment," stresses ING Direct's Chief Information Officer (CIO) Brian Parker.
"We generally operate on a three-year hardware technology cycle, and it is really important to make infrastructure changes with minimal risk.
"ING Direct has used HP technology since the mid-1990s and we have developed a consistent infrastructure based on HP with technology upgrades and enhancements completed seamlessly."
Ongoing support
HP continued its teamwork with ING Direct to ensure that the bank's infrastructure supported its business growth. To maximise and adapt to the demands of a rapidly evolving online business, the bank looked to HP for a platform that would provide additional power for its core business application Bancs-24 and a general ledger application. Bancs-24 manages ING Direct's savings and mortgage transactions, providing real-time data and updates to its customers via its principal Internet and call centre gateways, which use Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and .NET technology.
Banking in general terms is a very data intensive industry which requires a high volume of information to be retrievable at all times. Given the nature of ING Direct's set up, with no physical locations, HP was confronted with additional challenges to those normally faced when dealing with the IT systems of traditional banks.
"Because ING Direct doesn't have a retail network, with ING accounts linked to customers' other bank accounts, when, for example, you want to transfer money from your ING account into your regular account, you go on the Internet and make the transaction. The unique challenge then is that each night, they [ING] have to turn it around, so that they money is in the customer's normal account the next day," says Sam Karatasas, who leads the ING Direct account for HP. "With a traditional account, your money is always there, but with ING, if you make a withdrawal, that money goes into your traditional account and that has to happen by the next day, so that's a pressure situation where they have to meet that service level to their customers."
HP works with ING to ensure that from a capacity standpoint, as well as from an application standpoint, it can meet those challenges, so that if a customer gives an instruction that they want their money to be in their bank the next day, it's there.
Having already opted for SMP technology, the bank upgraded to a high performance HP rp7410 four-way server linked to the bank's front-end systems via a wide area network. The new server provides the flexibility for ING Direct to extend its computing power to eight-processors if future business demands require it.
"The SMP technology provides an ideal platform for creating a highly available environment," says Parker.
"We have configured the server for maximum redundancy by including fail-safe options such as dual power supplies and fans.
"We have also built a multi-channel gateway with our middleware which enables switching between resources and insulates the front end from the back end systems."ING Direct has secured its infrastructure with a business recovery strategy involving the redeployment of its HP N4000 server to an off-site location. In the event of a system going down, the bank's core system automatically switches to its off-site location.
"The durability and reliability of all the HP servers we use means that they can be efficiently redeployed into other areas of the business once they have been replaced in their primary role," said Parker.
"It makes for very cost-effective computing and enables us to efficiently adapt to our evolving business."
Value delivered
ING Direct's decision to build its infrastructure around HP technology has ensured it has adhered to a cohesive strategy of upgrades and enhancements. The partnership between the companies has also enabled ING Direct to take advantage of an easy to manage, standardised platform.
"Remaining with HP has allowed us to make the necessary IT upgrades and changes while minimising the amount of disruption to our system," explains Parker.
"It means we can work with HP to continuously improve and adapt our platform as the business demands For instance, in 2004 we plan to purchase an additional HP rp7410 server to create a clustered environment.
"The system changes we have made have all been achieved without compromising our service."
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